Day 80 Dead Letter to my mom (beware...strong language)

It’s been a week since I’ve written.  I feel I’ve hit a blank wall.  Also I’m fighting something as I slept for 20 hours straight Sunday through Monday.  Then another 12 hours Monday night.  I’d say that’s a good nap time.

That’s it.  That’s all I have.  I missed my therapy yesterday due to sleeping.  Rats.  That’s one on my highlights during the week.  I could write my Dear Mom dead letter.  That would drop jaws.  I’ve thought about dropping that in here as a public service that you too can write dead letters.  It’s a good way to move mountains out of your head and set the off down the road.

Mom-

This is a letter from you son, your son, a real human being that you birthed and threw out into the world.  I say threw out because you were sick, emotionally unstable, narcissistic, angry, cruel and flat out mean.  Your cruelty matched your intelligence which was unlimited.

As an adult you had the power, the ability to make judgments, choices.  You chose horribly and I hate you for that.  I’m convinced your torture of me started in the hospital when I was born.  What I know is that I was hyper-hyper active and rocked actively every night at bed time.  It was just my wiring and you took it upon yourself to hold me responsible and accountable for that.  I was a baby with no ability to know anything!  Let alone right from wrong.  That was the start of my lifelong endurance of your wrath and emotional deconstruction.

You destroyed on purpose whatever twisted purpose that was any positive relationship with my brothers.  Especially with Mike.  I was not allowed to go into his room, hang out with him, and not even sit next to him at dinner.  You just watched and didn’t care at all.  It was too much for you.  There was rarely a moment where you didn’t let us know how miserable, sad, crappy your life was because of us.  Nice.

None of my needs, emotional, creative, privacy, intimate, etc. were met.  Not in a healthy way.  Your punishments were never equal to the crime.  Your bullshit maniacal reliance with weapons (especially the coffee cord) was unbelievably cruel.  Fucking mean and cruel.  What the fuck were you thinking?  What the fuck did you have children for when you actively hated every day of it?  We had to bear your pain when all we fucking wanted was someone to feed us, nurture us, like us, be friendly to us, encourage family spirit.  Anything other than what you prevailed on us.

I fucking hated you.  The one emotion you unfailingly grew in me.  I always felt guilty for your pain.  You recognized that weakness and exploited it with glee. I had to rub lotion on your fucking fat naked body when I was a preteen.  In front of my brothers too.  Never talked to me about sex, sexuality or intimacy.  Just rubbing your gross fat horrible body.  What the hell was that about?  What what what were you thinking?

Whenever I brought a girl home you had to say something so unacceptably humiliating and embarrassing.  I was just a target for your evil and penetrating caustic wit.  You took away all privacy from me.  You never encouraged me to feel independent.  Because of our military movement we didn’t have the luxury of an extended family.  Other than dad’s parents, everyone was alive.  Of course you consistently trashed them as drunks, bastards or fuck ups and never encouraged any type of contact.  The rare, very rare times that any of them would show up you would terrorize them or completely be a fucking bitch and they would never come back.  Thanks for that too.

The vacuum created by Dad’s Air Force commitment made our reality with you even worse.  Yes it was that bad but you managed to make it worse.

Some thoughts – when you were out of control (which was often) you would literally run me down and whip the shit out of me with that fucking coffee cord.  Unbelievably mean and twisted.  Was there a lesson in that you were trying to affect?  Did you think in any lucid moment you may have had that there may have been a saner way of presenting it?

I remembered being really sick in the 9^th grade and you wouldn’t take me to the doctor. I walked whatever distance it was to the hospital.  On the way back home I collapsed on the sidewalk because it turned out I had the worst case of mononucleosis the doctors had ever seen.  A neighbor driving by saw me and gathered me up and brought me home. Crazy fucking cunt.

Later that year we had a moment.  Actually I had a moment of clarity.  I fully realized with full power that you were flat out crazy.  We yelled and I spit that out.  So that ended with Dad finding a place for me to live for several months and you said not one word to me.  That lasted months.  I can remember the day I wanted you to talk to me. Your fat shitty body was lying in bed (no doubt another one of your sicknesses that laid you up).  Dad was in the room, “at ease” like it was a military tribunal.  I was on my knees sobbing for you to talk to me.  What the glorious fuck all to the hell was going on? Why did something like that have to happen?  Why did Dad just stand there like a mute dumbass and allow shit like that to happen?  What planet were you guys from?  How could you treat a human, your child like that?

Restrictions, beatings, humiliations, retarded disciplinary games.  Lies upon lies.  Your backstabbing to everyone you talked to.  In your head somewhere you imagined you were doing something noble.  But to what end?  Did you have a family because it was the thing to do?  It went south for you after your first child from your 1^st marriage.  Why the fuck didn’t you stop then?  You were not stupid.  Yet you just kept spitting us out and the torture never ceased.  You had no right to be a mother to me.  None.  Not at all. I tried suicide at 13 and you didn’t even notice.  Fuck you.

Even after the divorce from your 1^st husband and losing custody of your daughters you just refused to pay attention what the universe was screaming at you.

The collection of cells that mistakenly kept dividing should have collated into a cancer but it was you.  In a fucked up twist of bizarre reality you managed to created tumors and called them your kids.

So what I’m left with is no clear definition of love, of what it feels like to just have a friendship with my brothers and sisters, son that doesn’t feel awkward, stilted, completely comfortable, trusting or vaguely weird.  That chunk was cut out of me.  Some may say you can’t miss what you’ve never had; in this life of mine, that is not the truth.  I’ve missed so much.

I want to end this because I want all the malignancy of being related to you vanquished.  If all my memories of you were burned out of me I would not miss one second of that loss.  Not one fucking fucked up insane, twisted, confusing, retarded, radioactive, painful, depressing, suicidal second of you.  Sorry you were sick but fuck it.  You could have tried and you just gave up and showered your fury, anger, crazy, hate, sarcasm, guilt, control issues, bullet riddled spunk and shit all over us.  And you know what the universally sad funny thing about all of this sadness is?  As an adult you mysteriously, conveniently had no memory of ever putting a finger on any of us.  You never bothered to acknowledge any of this.  No apology, no guilt, nothing.

Your last years in Bellingham, fucking Bellingham, the whole town loved you.  You volunteered at the Church of the Street to help feed and clothe the homeless.  You made unbelievably beautiful quilts. Irony?  Is there any irony here?  You gave up something of value to anybody that was not from your own body.  In a colossally twisted way it is funny how it ended.  I reached a place of complete apathy for you and managed to treat you as a human being.  I wish that those few molecules of hope and freedom will someday blossom into a universe of love and peace.  And the dust of your presence be blown up, blown away so your evil, cruelty, and narcissism never never touch the life in me again.

Your son,
Chris

Yeah so I wrote this with pen and paper and was pretty upset and feeling turbulent at the time.  It is kind of choppy but it was intensely personal.  I have to say that it was very cathartic in the work I am doing, was doing and it was a tool to help push me along the way that I feel about my life now.  Yeah I wrote this about 11 months ago so I’ve come a far way.  It would be interesting to see what a letter to her now would encompass but I’m not interested.  I have a bus full of kids (inside my head) that require all my attention now and Mother is the last person we need to deal with.  I’m sorry she’s dead in a way, but mostly not.  We all suffer our sicknesses in different ways and manifest it’s detritus in different ways too.  My mom chose not to address what was so obvious and just took it out on us. 

I’m proud to say that I broke that legacy and the only problems my son has are the normal problems all adults have.  He doesn’t have scarring from his parents to move through before he gets to move through normal living.  Thank you angels.

1.       I’m grateful that I’m able to share this letter in hopes of someone else hoping to find a tool for the same reason.

2.       I’m grateful for the mother I had to help me see life as I see it today.

3.       I’m grateful that I had the uncommon sense not to do to my son what was done so freely to me.