The Inglourious Return
I guess I haven't needed this much, recently. I always used my Live journal as a sort of a...I guess like a diary, to write down my thoughts, record events, just get things out of my head that I didn't want there. Writing out my thoughts on paper has not appealed to me since I was very little, and writing them down in a text editing program has never really jibed with me either. Putting it out there, online? This works for me.
I've been pretty happy lately. I guess that's why I haevn't writting anything up here...it is kind of a catch-all for my more troubling or exciting thoughts that I just can't share with anyone IRL, and I guess I just haven't been bothered with those lately.
Until last night.
I had a nightmare, It wasn't exactly scary, but it was...upsetting. Troubling. It's been on my mind all day.
The setting was in a house...in my dream I understood that it was my mother's house, although it is not a house I have ever lived in or grew up with...so I don't know where this house came from.
Anyway, I was visiting home at my mothers house. I was laying on the bed in my bedroom, when my mother called up the stairs for my sisters and I to hide. Both my sisters were watching T.V. in Janines bedroom, which was adjacent to mine. Mom came up the stairs shouting that he's coming he's coming and we should get out of sight.
Without explaining it, I knoew with that dream-prescience that she was talking about a psychiatrist, and some support fellows. Mom had managed to get into some kind of weird situation somehow that warranted a home visit by a psychiatrist, who wanted to ask her questions, and ask questions of anytone else in the house. He was also going to do a cursory search of the house, to ...I don't know...make sure mom wasn't hiding anything like...drugs? I am not really sure. Anyway, mom wanted us to hide, so that he wouldn't ask us any questions about her.
My sisters both hid under the bed, but I was so fat I wouldn't fit. So the next couple of minutes were spent trying to find a hiding place that I wouldn't a) be found or b) if I WERE found, that it didn't LOOK like I was hiding so he wouldn't realize that there might be others hiding around the house, and start looking for my sisters.
This man did not represent a threat to my sisters or myself. In this dream, we were all adults, Lauren and I were both just visiting mom's house. We were only hiding to protect our mother.
note: This makes more sense given the following information: When I was rather young, say about 8? My mother forced me to go to therapy. Well, when I started talking to the therapist I also talked about the abuse and dysfunction that was going on in my home, and the therapist made us all, the whole family, come in for therapy as well. My mother was so angry that I would talk about how my father would hit my sister, she took me aside and told me that "there are SOME things you just DON'T TALK ABOUT."
I decided to hide in the empty clothes closet in my room. No sooner had I gotten in there than the Psychiatrist and the 3 or 4 others of his entourage entered the room, and I thought to myself, angrily, "Why am I doing this? Why am I hiding to protect her? I have nothing to hide." and just as he opened the closet I came out through the other door....and then I quasi-woke up.
I was still in a state of dreaming, but now my concious mind had more control over what was going on. I shook the guy's hand, introduced myself, and told him we should all retire to the living room, where we could talk. Mom looked stricken, but also like she was trying to hide that.
It gets a little bumpy here. I know at some point I shouted for my sisters to come out of hiding, but the next moment everyone was in my mother's living room, seated comfortably, with my mom in the center spot, the seat of attention, like it was an intervention.
Instead of answering quesitons about my mother, I started to freely speak about her, and some things that happened while I grew up, and how she has continued to hurt me as an adult.
I couldn't completely wake up from this, but I don't think I wanted to.
While I talked to my mother in the dream, I re-lived some terrible memories. Memeroies that are real, but...things I had forgotten about. Things I wish I hadn't remembered.
I told her about the time she was making cinnamon chicken. I really dislike cinammon chicken...I remember one time she was making a pan of it, the chicken breasts were all arranged in the pyrex dish, and all that was left to do was to top them with cinammon and put it in the oven. I walked into the kitchen right at this time, saw what mom was making, and explained to her that I didn't like it, and could she leave the cinammon off one of the chicken breasts for me?
And she said No.
And I have no idea why.
I told her...I told her AND the psychiatrist, what it was like growing up with her. Especially while I was a teenager. I could never talk with my mother, she wouldn't allow me to get close to her.
I remembered that I had created a fake persona that I had to show my parents...because any time I showed them how I was really feeling mom would mock me about it.
I remembered sitting in my bedroom, feeling like a terrible person for meta-lying. I told my mother really terrible lies. Lies that I knew she would see right through, and KNOW I was lying, but wouldn't call me on it, because the way I worded things also told her the "truth" I wanted her to guess. I did this so that she wouldn't know how good of a liar I was. And that way she wouldn't think too hard when I lied to get something I really wanted.
As a child, I had learned early on that my parents don't always reward truthfulness. And it was much easier to get what I wanted by lying to them, giving them a reason to believe me that they wanted to hear, and would believe. That last part is the most important.
I also told mom about the time that, even though I had screwed up, I decided to tell dad the truth. And he yelled at me because he thought I was lying. I remember he said that I had to be lying, because my reasoning was so stupid. So I told him a lie he would believe. The lie worked, and I avoided punishment because dad thought I had told the truth.
In my quasi-dream, she looked smug. Because I had implicated my father in something that she hadn't known about prior to my dream-confession. I believe that this is also the reaction she would have to such information in real life.
So I told her...mostly I told the psychiatrist at this point...about when I was on tennis team. Girls high school tennis season is in October and November, a couple of very chilly months. I remember how I had to rely on mom to come pick me up after games. We lived about 20 minutes west of my high school (which she worked at), and no one else on the team lived in that direction. I didn't get an allowance, so I couldn't take the city bus home. I was completely at my mother's whim as far as getting home. I was always the last one there. I hated sitting alone, in the cold. At this point, I also only ate one meal each day, which was dinner. So I was also starving. She always made me wait. A couple times I tried calling her from other people's cell phones while I was still on the bus coming back home from other schools. I wanted to call her when we were only about 10 minutes away from the school, so that if she left right away I would still have time to change and come out to the front to meet her and she wouldn't have to wait for me. It never worked. She always instructed me to call her once I was ready to leave instead. This was back in the day when every cell phone minute was a precious commodity, and I imagine kids were told by their parents not to let their friends use their cell phones, so every time I asked it created an uncomfortable situation.
Since I didn't have a cell phone, I usually had to use a pay phone to call her. The only pay phones available were at the front of the school, while the changing rooms were close to the side of the campus, so I had to walk away from everyone there to contact her, and ask her to please come get me. A couple of times I was so broke I had to call her collect, just to get in touch with her. And I knew she would never accept the charges, so I had to give her the whole message in that little space of time where you're supposed to say your name.
It often took her 40 minutes or an hour to come get me. Always longer than it should take a reasonable person to throw on sweats and jump in the car. Sometimes the sun had already set while I was waiting for her, and I couldn't do my homework anymore because there wasn't enough light. I often tried to work on my homework while I waited for her.
And then I woke up fully, and started crying.
Why would she do these things?
They seem so little, so trivial, now that I write them out (I think that is the point of me writing them out), but it is still terrible behaviour, and not at all the way you would expect a mother to treat her child.
And more than anything, I wished that dream was real, so I could ask her why she treated me like that. Obviously, there are plenty of other stories like this in the same vein, but these were the memories roused by this dream in particular.
And then I wished I had never had that dream, and that these memories had stayed buried, so I wouldn't have to add them to the collection of bad memories featuring my mother.
Now, I have to deal with these memories, inspect them every which way, and try to suss out meaning from them.