Day 11 It's so painful.

After my brother died my Mother did not want to be a Mother any more. She resented having to take care of her 4 and 6 year old daughters. She distanced herself from us. We were too much trouble. We were a bother. She stayed distant the rest of our lives. We were never "good enough" to be pulled in closer.

That little 4 year old girl has a lot more wailing, crying, and sobbing to do before the pain will completely let go.

 

The wailing and crying is a pretty standard reaction on the part of an 'abandoned' child. However, I'd be willing to wager that beneath that feeling of being ignored lies a huge reservoir of rage repressed into the unconscious. I know that Steve O. observes how abandonment and separation are the common denominators in a lot of people with TMS symptoms. Doing the SEP I know I time traveled back to my early childhood (around 4 years old) and noticed that I had a lot of temper tantrums when my mother went back to work in downtown San Francisco and left me with a baby sitter. I realize now that those tantrums were the result of just how enraged I was about my mother leaving me alone with a stranger. Your mother's distance following the death of your brother must have functioned in much the same way as my mother's going to work and leaving me alone. Such things really highlight the timeless world the unconscious mind operates in.

 

Being abandoned as a child was very hard on my best friend.
His mother was so controlling that his father joined Chenault's Flying Tigers
to fight the Japanese before the U.S. got into World War II. My pal was left
with a mother who smothered him. Most of his life, my friend suffered severe
back pains he thought were caused by high school football injuries, but now
I have journaled I believe he suffered from TMS, perhaps from feeling abandoned
by his father when he was 10 or 11 years old.
My friend's wife had similar feelings of being abandoned by her mother when she was a little girl.
I won't tell you more about that, but her TMS showed up in later life.

I feel guilt from not being able to look after my mother for longer than two years when she had
an apartment near me. My sister had earlier tried, but our brother never tried at all. I loved my mother,
but need to get rid of the guilt. She was just impossible to please. What did it for me
was, she asked me to get her some groceries during a Chicago blizzard and when I
came back with them she complained that I had gotten her a can of sourkraut she
asked for, but then said she wanted it with caraway seeds. I don't remember her asking for
that kind of kraut. Kind of hard to please, wouldn't you say?

 

Sandy,

This is so heartbreaking to read, but what runs through my mind as I read this is not that your mother didn't love you. I believe that we all do the very best we can with what we have in any given moment of time. What I do see possibly is a mother who was completely and utterly heartbroken...a mother who couldn't deal with the loss of a child and so pulled back emotionally so as to not let herself get close enough again to be hurt in the event that anything happened to either you or your sister. I know that it doesn't matter to the little girl inside whether that is what her reality was or not. You cannot erase how you feel. Just wanted to remind you that even though you never felt it, you have always been "good enough".

Valerie

 

All of you, thanks for your input. MorComm, Yes, I have that reservoir of rage. You are so right. My last wailing I tired to yell and scream out all the rage and pain. I remember when I was a little girl staying at my Grandmothers when my brother was dying. The train tracks were very close by. When the train would go by I would run outside screaming my lungs out. I think I knew then what was coming.

There were such ambivalent feelings about my brother. All his crying then us being sent away. Did we cause his death? We were all relieved when he died such relief and guilt.

I feel guilt, too, when I can not be their to be an advocate for my parents or take care of them.

Yes, Valerie, she had unbearable pain. She did decide she could never go through pain of that magnitude again.

I moved them to this city 3 years ago. I had to move them, figure out where, when and what to move. Sell their home and rental property. Find dozens of Doctors for the 2 of them. Figure out their health care, and all their legal and financial issues. It was mind boggling what I was dealing with. The pelvic pain came on 2 years ago with Interstitial Cystitis. I was in excruciating pain but still was in their apartment everyday taking care of numerous details. I never told them. Finally the pain got so bad I had to tell because I was getting to the point that I couldn't function.

I copied an article about Interstitial Cystitis which talked about how devastating it was. My Father read it. He said "well, it looks like your going to be peeing all the time" then he left the room. Mother read the article. She laid it down and changed the topic. Talk about rage. After all I had done for them I was still "not good enough" for them to care about.

I went back the next day. I blew my stack at my Mother. Of course, I did not "get" all this like I do now. My Father has a pimple on his butt and I have him into see the Doctor in 24 hours. I embarrassed my Mother because this happened in the dining room at the retirement center. She kept patting my hand saying let's go back to the apartment to talk. I left wanting to never see them again. My Mother sent an email feeling great remorse.

I am going to get better. I know this. Thanks everyone for caring and understanding. Onward and Forward.