One more part that really stayed with me from Sickened by Julie Gregory.
“I now feel ready to try and talk to a therapist again. Most times I do not feel like a client, but an educator who pays to teach my therapist about MBP. I answer her questions? How did it slip past the doctors? Why didn’t anybody notice? Didn’t you have neighbors? Were you really sick?
But still, in our sessions, I cry from the guilt of betraying my mother, for not keeping the shroud on her secrets when I held them locked in such trust. And I feel terrible about my own secret. I have been writing, writing about what it feels like to be cut open while your mother’s tight, thin smile mouths, “Doctor’s orders, honey.” To be emptied and filled by your mother, just like the IV bag she’s arranged for you. And to believe you are genuinely ill because that is what everything in your world mirrors back to you.
My therapist explains that my mother was cannibalistic. That she wanted to ingest my living flesh, to tear chunks from my body. That the closest she could come to cannibalizing me was to lift me onto the serving platter for the men of the medical community to carve. The longer I hold guilt for betraying her, the more I will keep climbing on the platter all by myself.
And yet the hand that pushed me down was the hand that helped me up. The one who beat me was the only one to save me from being beaten. The one who wanted to kill me was the one who would kill her self if I didn’t offer myself under the knife. I was trained from the womb as an alibi for her innocence. She would snuff out my life if I went against her, even in thought. She brushed me this way as casually as you would slide a ling brush down a pair of slacks, to get all the grain running in the same direction.
I still told myself that it was okay, it really wasn’t that bad. A normal sacrifice for any child to make for her mother. Words programmed into me as my own. Tangled in her web, if a doctor couldn’t decipher what she did, how could I?
Until I turn thirty. Then I see her almost as clearly as if I was standing on a windswept sea cliff and she was looking up from the sand below. There is only one line that connects us, and it is wrapped around my waist; my hunger is tied to the most intimate, emotionally deep contact you can ever get: a mother’s touch. Anything less that where she took me feels like not enough.
And so it is for the people I bring into my life. My relationships, like the one I had with my mother, turn immediately intense, sometimes violently invasive. I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me. Ah, yes, let me count your cracks. Let’s see, one hundred, two…yes, you’ll do nicely. A cracked companion makes me look whole, gives me something outside myself to care for. When I’m with whole, healed people I feel my own cracks: the shatters, the insanities of dislocation in myself.
So I start over. When I ruin something or when someone vines around me, I move on. It is just another opportunity, another chance to interact with the outside world and not have it take me completely, utterly to the bone.” Julie Gregory
As much as her mother needed her sick, my mother needed me innocent. We are the exact opposites.
She was well and her mother needed her to be unwell.
I was molested and not okay, and my mother needed me to be okay to hold her marriage, her life, and her world together.
We both found out that what our mother’s needed had nothing to do with us, but rather we were the vehicles used to get her where she wanted to be.
Perhaps we know what our unveiling will do to our mothers, we are wrecking purposefully her illusion, and we are no longer caring enough to sacrifice ourselves for their insanity.
We know we are shattering their dreams to a million pieces… yet their dreams go on; someone takes our place to be the keeper of their illusions.
