this one hurts me to re-read

I loved growing up in ----.  We had sand in our flip-flops and santa annas broiling through the rippling yellow palm fronds.  Random salty charcoal smells were common. But most of us barely ever went to the beach.  The surfers were pulled in, a few kids missed first period all the time because our high school was a few blocks from a little pocket of good surf.  We could see the ocean by standing on one of the corners of the yard, didn’t even have to leave campus.  The school was in a fancy location because of this, so the houses were beautifully manicured and comfortably spaced single family residences stepping down the --- Street from the majestic Mt ----- look this up.  When I try to remember the name of the place I see my mom saying it.  Not hear her say it, see her say it. 

She loved this area.  She worked up here at a hospital nearby. She used to work at a different site that was a few minutes closer to our home, but she transferred to the site in the fancy neighborhood when I was young, a few years before high school.  I remember being real young, 5th or 6th grade, and doing all this testing.  I did an IQ test and never got the results, and they did all this emotional testing, oh wait, that was in jr high when I was 13 and had gotten caught cutting myself and sort of had a breakdown and locked myself in my room drawing on the walls (I had somehow already put up paper all over the walls, breakdown had been building for a while) over a full weekend not able to put a single sentence into a calm tone.  It was the strangest time.  I think they called it a psychotic break after testing.  That was at standley junior high, I think.  I remember being in some medium grade and running out of advanced classes to take.  Somehow that meant that they could request that the school district allow me to go to a different school, one that had better services for someone like me.  Huh, is the gifted and talented program part of disability services?  Oh is that why there were so many more people in that program in the fancy school area, because lots of people had access to the testers necessary to do that stuff.  So.  Whoa I just got hit with a tsunami wave of dissociating-feeling tired.  It is gonna feel good to sleep.  I am gonna look up that mountain and then sleep… 

Mount ---.  ---. Spanish for solitude, commonly refers to our lady of solitude.  There is something deeply visceral about my memories of my mother.  It is so strange, like I remember the feel of her body from the inside, but as I knew her as an older person.  Like our bodies are linked in that way.  So, I guess a feeling for your mother is like something that comes from your body as much as your brain. And my body is deeply hurting. And I feel deeply hurt by her, every day.  How could she think that I could lie to her, she was my best friend and favorite travelling partner for quite a while, heck I was the 2nd person made of her, how could she think I could lie to her about something like that?  something about the person she chose to love and make me and my sister with.  Something about the ugly violence of your daughter being sexually assaulted.  How little she must think I think of her, to think that I could have a reason to put her through that kind of pain if it didn’t happen.  It is like she is unwilling to see how much it hurts me too to put her through the hurt of this knowledge.  Maybe her ability to bond was also damaged by something.  Maybe depression?  I know that grandma got depressed once after mom was born, maybe post-partum?  Who knows. But I never realized this side of why my relationship with my mom hurts, or why it hurts so so bad that she thinks I lie to her.  She must know that I am not lying. Which means that she knows that the person she is staying married to sexually assaulted her daughter, me, for years.  How does a person justify that?  by making that daughter dead to her I guess.  So really I just helped her out.

I wrote that on 2/21.  More from the 'tell me about your mother' vault.  I'm worried about writing that, it would be nice to not have to have conversations with my family about this right now.  I don't feel like a very good person about this but have gone sort of more protective of myself than I was last year.  If my mother was terminally ill, I don't know if I would go see her.  I don't know that either of us would get more peace from seeing each other than we have found by creating an end point and then not communicating.  Well, probably not communicating.  I did keep receiving 'private number' phone calls until I complained to my sister about it.  so this note is saying, sure hope my family doesn't see this.  Or, I dunno, maybe this is a gesture of not worrying what conversations they wanna have with me. I guess I just wanted to say that I deeply feel the understanding that these are people, these are the people with whom I share genetics and experiences and familial culture, I have deep love and empathy for them, and that includes my mom.  But, remember, not my dad anymore, because he broke those bonds with me.  So I understand what pain I am inflicting on the rest of the family by being honest about what I experienced, and continue to experience.  I actually haven't been scared that much in that weird fear clinging to you like BO in the last 2 days, things have been really good for that.  I have still been real tired and had to lie down a few times during the day, but otherwise have been up and doing things.  Am starting to think about work, or at least about the phone calls and paperwork and taxes and dishes that I need to do to not be fined or lose health insurance or get sick.