I am fucking fed up with this.
I said precisely that. I even decorated it with a swift exit and wide flung door. Leaving you behind - frightened guilty angry - facing those two witches without my protection and the umbrella of my mothering. I'm sure they were kind to you. I'm pretty sure one of them will have looked on with careful, studied, practised sympathy, a tilt of her messy head and a murmured "Mmmmm". The other will have smiled uncomfortably and tried to jolly you along. The better of the two. The least hated. The warmer, more human nightmare - faced every week with resignation and fear and false stoicism.
I abandoned you for a moment - when you needed me most. All my protestations over these last few months to you - said to encourage you and embolden you: it's ok to feel, it's ok to express yourself angrilly, it's ok to be whatever you need to be - you're safe, you're ok, you've been good and polite and needing approval for far too long. It's destroying you. Let your emotions out. All that I have said. To help and heal you. All that encouragement to just be. So you did it. You were petulant and snippy to the doctor. And me? In my fury and frustration and desperation and fear, I shouted and told you you were being rude and I walked out. I despise myself for that. For many things besides that, obviously, but right now, I have the crashing realisation hit me every few minutes that I let you down. I am the most dreadful, thoughtless, lying, duplicitous, vile excuse for a mother.
So. Things are no better then. At least, that's what the scales say. How can this have happened? When you'd been weighed and you walked into the room where I waited, I couldn't tell whether it was a gain or a loss. I know by now that either of those will frighten you and make you feel despair. You GAIN weight and the anorexia berates you and kicks your fragile confidence with big boots - mean snippets of wordy punishment piercing your thoughts and blocking out rationality, sense, normality, knowledge and truth. You LOSE weight and your mind must imagine hospitals, force-feeding, loss of control, power, autonomy, freedom, meaning and sense, home and me. A backwards step means having to claw your way back with oh-so-casually added food (that dreaded "negotiation" between them and you, between them and us, between me and you - trying to be patient while you reject suggestion after suggestion only to be worn down and beaten into acceptance) and days stretching out miserably with every moment a battle until you acclimatise. Swelling belly (only in your mind; it's concave really, my tiny darling), stuffed gullet, gorged body, sickening greed and powerlessness. I know. I see it in your eyes and those ever-shrinking shoulders - tensing and turning from me.
You lost. A kilo. The most ever. I was dumbstruck. Furious. Terrified. Oh, the bleakness of all this.
I wish I could drug you. Put you into a deep sleep and pour food into you while you slumbered. However long it takes. I'd make wonderful food, pour over cook books and nutrition books and I'd create perfect food to heal you. Blend it into liquid and tube-feed you. So then I could be a proper mother. I'd be making you better. It'd all be down to me and you wouldn't have to deal with the agony that is getting over this. This horrible ugly struggle. Your little body would grow and your bones would melt back into your flesh and your corners would round out and your figure would come back and you'd be soft and healthy and normal and you wouldn't have had to battle and sacrifice. I'd awaken you when the time was right and you'd say "Have I been asleep? What time is it? I'm hungry". And I'd have to run to the loo to cry with joy and relief. And I'd tell you rehearsed lies - "Everything's fine. You're fine. Here's a lovely supper for you, darling - your favourite." And you'd wolf it down and smile and we'd go out somewhere lovely and you'd be all bouncy and silly and lighthearted and I'd have to keep swallowing hard to stop from howling. And I'd magically hand you your life back. All mended and wonderful and a little bit boring.
Where is your freedom? Where are your choices? Where is your blossoming adulthood and the exciting trepidation it should be greeted with? I HATE this. You're my baby again and I would rather you emigrated to Australia and lived a happy life away from me and I only ever saw you over a webcam than this. Can you believe that? That I can say that and mean it with my whole anguished heart? I do. I would sacrifice anything to rid us of this. I would kill him. I want to kill him so much. I dream of stabbing him or kidnapping him and putting him in a cage and torturing him for years. I fantasise wildly of ways to ruin him. Destroy him and all who love him. I dream of castrating him and stuffing it down his throat and taping his mouth shut and laughing while he dies in front of me. Of impaling him on a spike and watching the blood run out of him. I'm impotently enraged that I can't do this for you and for me and for every other girl who ever encounters him. Wicked, wicked man. I bet his life is ok. I wish ours was.
I am so sad. My eyes ache with crying every day. My heart breaks and mends and breaks and mends. I'm so tired. I wish I had a god. Such terrible loneliness.
A YEAR TODAY. My whole self is hurting. You didn't tell me until this afternoon. I wonder if you expected me to just know. I'm so miserably sorry I didn't. I feel utterly wretched for you. Such a bleak anniversary - one that will cloud your days, your eyes, your heart for ever more.
I wish my love was enough. I am trying so hard to love you better. I'll never give up.
4 comments:
Good morning
I read your blog update last night and found it incredibly emotional. To read the most heartfelt and honest feelings of anyone is hard, but when they are the words of someone you know (and even not that well) even harder. I held my breath throughout with sheer emotion.
Your honesty, your feelings, your love. Your feelings of being a mother, Bec, you are a wonderful mother (I told you this when I saw you last), certainly not the words you described yourself to be. Your love for Grace is second to none. You could not love her more than you do and continue to do.
I feel very humbled that you allowed me to read your blog. I have read each word and sentence repeatedly, for me to have, and be more understanding of what you go through. I hope that this journey will come to an end for you both soon. What was it you told me months ago? Baby steps.
I wanted to write to you last night, but could not find the right words and this has taken me a while to write this morning and hope that I have found the right words.
Take good care Bec. As ever, thinking of you both.
Love
Nicky
xx
Hi Bec - just moving the comments I made the night you wrote this to where they belong. xx
My immediate response:
Oh, my love. I've just read tonight's blog. And cried. For all the awful things you feel, but most of all for it being a year today. I haven't got words for that. I'm not even going to try and come up with something consoling - I don't think I should. It deserves tears and pain and fury for this year at least. All I can say is I feel for you and I love you (both) - Grace has become very dear to me - and I'm so sorry you're going through this.
I'm going to write a bit more about the rest of what you said, but I just wanted to send you that before you went to bed tonight.
Hold on - it's very nearly not today anymore. xxx
And what I wrote a bit later:
I said I'd write back to your blog a bit more... I know you write it as therapy for yourself, not to invite comment. (You must tell me if you'd rather I went back to just reading.) But when I hear your 'voice' in pain, I can't help wanting to reply.
Your mistake... I remember doing something a bit similar - though I know nothing can be a true comparison to a mother's feelings about their child - but still, it hurt like no other sort of regret. I'm so sorry you're feeling that. I hope you're able to feel more peaceful over it soon. You've carried so much - carried her - all on your own for months and months now, and even fuelled by the wonders of mother-love, you're human. Hearing her not co-operate with the doctor who's trying to help her must have been terrifying. One moment (however unfortunately timed) of going down under the weight of the fear does not make you a bad mother. One moment versus months of setting aside every want of your own and pouring yourself out for her, and years before that of care and thought and love. You want Grace to be kind to herself over her mistakes, and you deserve just as much compassion.
And perhaps it won't have negated all your encouragement to her to express herself - I really doubt it would. Maybe it could even be a thing you both learn from - a bit of mutual honesty that brings you closer? When you and I argue and then make up and admit our faults and talk about it and I cry and we reassure each other, I feel especially close to you. We are our naked, imperfect selves in front of each other. It doesn't take away how much the argument hurt, but something good still comes out of it. I hope that can happen with this.
You say you wish you had a God. I wish it too. I wish I could infuse some of my faith into you. It's that that makes me look forward to a time when things won't always be like this. Makes me picture me at 40 and you at 50-whatever (we always said we'd still know each other when I'm 40!) and one of us will say, 'Remember that awful time when Grace was ill? And now she's just got her PhD/had her first child/got engaged.' I don't mean to be flippant - I just want to tell you about the picture I'm holding on to for you on the days that you can't.
Speaking of faith, I've taken to going to Mass sometimes in the mornings. Sounds a bit strange, I know - of all places, why go to a Catholic church to pray for you and Grace? But since I've started working where I do, I've become quite attached to Mass. With all the things I disagree with the church about, I get the one that most people struggle with - as a good pagan girl who believes in sacred rocks, I can quite easily believe that the bread and wine become something different; the embodiment of pure goodness and love. So I get up while the sky's still grey and go and join with the devout old ladies, do the Catholic hokey-cokey with all the standing and kneeling, and receive communion. My affirmation that sacredness and goodness is within my body. And within yours. And within Grace's.
And now it's LATE - my goodness - I had a long phone call and then I got into typing and I must stop thinking of more things I want to say and go. to. bed. One last thing - I'm thinking of our changed plans for this weekend... I know it's unlikely but I just need to cover this possibility for my peace of mind. If you ever need me (rather than thinking it would be nice to see me), tell me and I will come. If there are no trains or buses, I can drive. If I hear the words 'I need you', I promise my answer will be 'I'm on my way'.
So, good night and good morning, as you'll be reading this Friday AM. Sending big love for the day. xxx
And something I want to add now:
(In)justice
Yes, Grace is a rape victim. Over time as she heals, hopefully she will come to see herself more as a rape survivor. She will be those things for the rest of her life and have to integrate them into her identity. And it is wrong, wrong, wrong that she has to, or that any woman has to.
But the bastard who hurt her. He will be a rapist for the rest of his life. And he will have to bear that evil as part of his being. Either he will have to live with so little consciousness, so little awareness as not to suffer for it, that neither will he be able to know true love or intimacy or growth of his spirit or deep joy or anything that makes us fully human. A small, ugly, meaningless life. Or he will reach a point of enlightenment where he realises what he's done, and then he will be in such pain that he'll want to die. Whichever, he's condemned himself. He has not got away free from this.
Is that enough punishment? It doesn't feel like it to me. Not when it's possible that he could go through life in superficially happy ignorance and never know what he's missing. And it certainly has none of the visceral satisfaction of holding a knife to his balls and seeing the terror in his eyes.
But still, I would rather have Grace's tortured, tattered, innocent, beautiful soul than his vilely corrupted one. Because hers can mend. We must know so many survivors between us. I just tried to count then, and realised that almost all the women I've known closely enough to talk about it are survivors of rape or abuse. I'm one of the few that isn't. (What an awful comment on our world.) But they are proof that it doesn't have to cloud the rest of their life. That there can come a time when you don't think of it every day or even every week or month. What's the phrase? - 'strong at the broken places'. She will be that, one day, and join my dear, brave friends as beacons of wholeness and overcoming.
Love always, M.
Post a Comment