One more entry then straight on till morning

I called my mother and I wanted to keep saying I love you I love you I love you and explain how infinitely much ai am so sad to have ever hurt her about anything at all. That would have brought up so much emotion though and I can’t just spill out uncensored the way I used to come up with nursery rhymes without a care in the world except thise were the rhymes I wanted to make. She was tired and had probably been sleeping and has to get up early so I didn’t know if there was space to talk but she was the calmest and gentlest I have ever heard her I think at least in forever. She said, I’m easy to talk to, you know, and no, a lot of times, she is not, but today she was, somehow, except for one almost scary moment when I mentioned that in EMDR I had a memory of the first time my father hit me and though she was still calm and nice she said she was going to go to sleep and I asked ehy and she said calmly because I was making her nervous.

I explained I didn’t want to get into it, just say something about it, and I asked her if she remembered this ‘chores’ list or whatever that we had on the cellar door in the hallway. It was not chores like in a bad way, I never had to do chores of any kind, but it was like, you do certain things, like brush your teeth and take a bath and get ready for bed, and you record it on this list, and points or something add up, and then if you reach a certain score you can either get to listen to a tape or read a story before bed. It was fun to make that decision and I don’t remember which one I usually chose. Then once a week if you were ‘good’ and did things on the list so you got points and crossed a magic threshold or something you got to do something fun like go to a movie. This thing on the door was kind of magical to me, I’m just starting to remember the feeling associated with it, and that a thing on the wall could do such things was such a cool concept I can’t even say. I feel this excited energy about it, an energy I haven’t felt in forever. This list was connected to something called Bright Music that was one of my favourite things but when I search for it online I can find no reference to it.

The songs were awesome: one about a tape recorder in your mind and ai don’t know it was the same song as the one about the little lie that grew. Then there were a series of books and spoken tapes associated with it as well with titles like generosity and service and… I just loved it all but I honestly did not get the concepts very well. I don’t think I understood generosity and my mother says service was the hardest one for her to get and a lot of these tapes didn’t make sense to her until she was much older.

She said she didn’t feel very mature when she had me. She was 21. Thinking of it that way, she was incredibly mature, in certain ways, and it is amazing she was only 21. Yeah, there were the things she did that hurt me so much, like things she did when she was 25, and there were the fights that hurt me and my never being able to explain what I needed to feel her love but… day to day, I am remembering now, somehow easier now that something big has healed, she was more mature than ai can imagine, if you take away the mistakes and just look at the day to day life and how she nurtured my curiosity and always always always let me ask questions about the world and answered them and when I think of like just coming home from school in Kindergarten, that might be around the time that this really painful stuff happened, and yet the day to day life and how she took care of me, how did she do that? She was so mature.

Oh, between pre-school and Kindergarten is when I fell in love with Lipton Noodle Soup so much my mother thought I was going to become it and that is one thing I so miss because it shouldn’t have to be but it’s made with chicken broth. Ringo Noodle Soup, too, instead of them being dhaped like I’s, O’s… and I dunked Club crackers in them and soaked them and used them as spoons and… hmmm…. once I had this thought while I was eating it that slipped my mind and I told myself that it was so important and like I’d never be the same if I couldn’t rmemeber it and I never did. Maybe it was the meaning of life. Maybe that’s why I’m so anxious now!

Yawn, I am starting to get tired, but she talked about the mother of a kid I went to pre-school with who maybe did the Bright Music thing too and this is a kid who was actually in the physics department with me in college. His mother told
my mother, I can tell you’re not like all these other mothers, I can tell by the wear on your jeans at the knees, you like to get down on the floor and play with your kid. And yeah, I mean, most mothers don’t do that, it just struck me… my mother was up for playing a lot and we tumbled a lot and had fun and being tickled was such a great feeling but when I started getting more traumatised and shielded aumstopped wanting it and Infeel like I hurt my mother because we both loved it but somehow I couldn’t anymore because things had happened and I couldn’t be tickled without feeling like my boundaries were being crossed or being afraid of something like that and yeah it makes me more sad than I can express and maybe I will tell her that. It is one of the ways I feel so guilty for how I changed but it is tragic because I didn’t reeeally change and tickles are still such an awesome thing at heart and I grieve not having that simple joy and the ways things were so simple back then, the affection, the things we played snd did and explored together and how she always had time for it all, though when it was withdrawn or trsuma happened and she closed down or got older and changed somehow it was awful awful awful.

Someday I hope we can heal enough that she can tickle me again. I hate that she was sad that I didn’t want to anymore and I’s give anything to take that back. And now I am crying again, I’m a mess. Dua Lipa wrote her first song, about her mother, right around the age I was when that trauma happened, like four, and I’ve been thinking maybe if I made an album it would be about her and making an album really does feel like the only way I could express anything real at all.

More tears. But yeah, um, that thing on the door, like, if you’re good you get a movie or some kind if treat as a reward! And the energy of it felt magical and… I hadn’t known what it meant to be ‘bad’ until *after I fell in love with this Brite Music stuff — OMG it is *Brite* Music, that’s why I couldn’t find it! And this thing on the wall. And that is where my father then, later said, you’re going to start being slapped and that is where I came to feel so ashamed and bad and broken and oh it was awful. Because I had so much fun being good with that system of rewards before I ever knew what it was to be bad and waaay back then I had no concept of being bad ir inadewuate and nust lived and just me and I forgot about that because I have been so wounded ever since the confusion of the first time I was hit… and now I feel like I wasted so much time and I hate it. I am so sad. and yet, grateful to be able to feel again, and yet so sad. To have my first initiation into being bad be explained to me right in front of those very cellar stairs, it was awful.

And why is my mother suddenly such a different person with me lately? I don’t get it. It is good but so strange. I asked her if she remembered that I used to love pasta with butter and I felt sad eating pasta with sauce because supper time was after dark at least in the winter and that made me feelmind of sad and heavy. I associated pasta with butter eith lunch and pasta with sauce with dinner. I finally started liking pasta with tomato sauce because I was attracted to the way Tigger ate it in Winnie the Pooh, with kind of a circle of pasta around the
middle of the plate, instead of having it all mixed up.

Anyway, I am going to see her tomorrow and borroe her car to get ready to leave here. Dang, this is a lot of feeling all at once and I might be scared of this happening to me except it is almost like my kother is in some kind of rhythm too, and as I change and heal, she changes the way she is with me too somehow but I know it’s not because of anything I am doing differently with her in concrete reality anyway. But maybe when something in you changes or you pray and your prayers get answered something in someone you love can change as well.

Maybe connection really is real and with a transformation in me comes a transformation elsewhere. It’s just that last time ai had a sense of everything being connected it was… really scary, and I had an experience that assured me that people or someone anyway was able to read my mind but I can’t really talk about it until I put it in context yet. Let’s just say there was someone that Inthought really hated me and followed me and was in a place with me twice and he was mind of scary from his coice but I didn’t know what he looked like. I had this strange idea that my mind was being read and it was sooo strange and I wanted to do an experiment to confirm it. I thought the thought, not meaning it at *all* but just wanting to see how the universe would respond to it becaause the universe around me was behaving so strangely… and I don’t remember his name so I’ll call him Z: “X, my DARLING!!!” And then somebody was immediately like, “Oooh we should have gotten X out of bed for this!” It was hard to believe in telepathy so I almost felt like they must have planted a chip in my brain or they could not have read my thoughts like
this: though if they did read my thoughts they couldn’t tell if what In was thinking was what I actually felt or if I just made it up to deceive anyone who might be spying on my mind. It sounds so strange but I just cannot figure out how to interpret any of this. I hate thst it happened because it messes with my mind. It’s good to finally get it out if me though. I don’t want to feel like needing occlumency lessons from Snape is a real thing. That sense of interconnectedness was terrifying. This more gentle kind is so much better.

It is like some kind of dance and all I know is watching Sinead sing Molly Malone is the first thing that has comforted me and made me somehow less afraid of death in such long time… I watched it and felt, of course interconnevtion is real, so maybe I don’t have to be somafraid of desth?

Anyway, it was a good conversation. So easy to long to share like that and be taken all wrong and be totally crushed but tonight she was open and I do not know why she has been so open but I’ll take it. Goodnight, adieu, to you, and you, and you…