Well, the sun is shining as it slowly sets, giving us all those gorgeous colors for free. I have had a productive (if a trifle expensive) day. I went to do some shopping on my own and it went fine, no panic, no worries. I have napped pleasantly, and I am beating the heat with my tried and true method of constant hydration. I have an experiment working in my robot boulanger^[1] and that always makes me feel more productive. All in all, I feel up. Confident, relaxed, focused, calm.

Time to tackle the rough stuff.

Here’s the thing. I love my mother. I love her more than I love anyone else in the universe, hands down, no contest, nolo contendre, period, end of story. I think about her a dozen times a day and I miss her very much. A great deal of what is good in me came directly from her, in my opinion. My kindness, my sensitivity, my love of animals, my love of books and learning and feeding my brain, my strong intellect, my strong moral core…. all of these come, in whole or in part, from my mother.

And growing up with an angry, unstable, unpredictable father meant growing up in a household where there was very clearly the Good Parent, which was my mother, and the Bad Parent, which was my father.

And just as I am beginning to see that maybe things were not quite as black and white concerning my father as I have grown accustomed to thinking (though he still has a lot to answer for), I am beginning to, quite reluctantly and painfully, realize that my mother, though I love her desperately and completely, was not the perfect Good Parent either.

It hurts to type those words, it hurts to even admit they are mine, but the truth must come out, and sometimes, recovery is a lot more like performing surgery on oneself than it is a long rest on a comfy couch while you talk about your problems.

For one thing, my mother was very weak and passive. She was the Good Parent, but she never lifted a finger to protect us from my father’s verbal tirades. She would just hang her head and cry while he took his rage out on my sister Anne or my brother David. This is an educated, professional woman who spent her days teaching hundreds of people, but she was too weak and cowed at home to speak up and protect us from our father’s abuse.

And I find that hard to forgive. She claims he abused her too, but the thing is, he didn’t really. Or if he did, he did it when they were in private. A truer statement would be that he did not have to abuse her because she was meek and submissive to him and he had us kids to take it out on.

And what happened when they were finally alone in the house, just the two of them, no kids around? He started taking it out on her, and only then does she want a divorce.

But that is old news. What I really want to dig into with my scalpel tonight is how emotionally distant she was through most of my childhood.

Actually, not just emotionally distant. Emotionally absent. She just wasn’t there. Looking back, I think she suffered from depression just like I do. Certainly, if I was very depressed, I would seem emotionally absent to all those around me. That is what happens when you withdraw from the world as a defense. You leave behind everyone who loves you. You abandon them.

And she abandoned me. Emotionally speaking.

No wonder I have such a profound inner chill and feeling of hopelessness. My mother, who had been quite warmly present in an earlier part of my childhood, went back to work (after all, I was not planned, and why change your plans for a kid you never wanted anyhow?), became depressed at nights, and became a zombie, a robot, someone just going through the motions of life.

Makes me feel like one of those rats who are raised to view a wire mesh covered in fake fur with a heater inside as their mother.

And you know, they do not grow up normal either.

And to compound the problem, I became just like here. I withdrew into myself, went through the motions of life and school and so on, and became passive and cold and withdrawn and sad myself.

So instead of feeling I had a right to what I needed in order to be happy and healthy, and therefore set off in pursuit of it, I just went through my childhood alone and lonely, doing what little was expected of me and not a whole lot else.

If I tried to engage my mother emotionally… well, I might as well have been talking to a block of ice. She did not even reject me, not even passively. It was just… nothing. No reaction. She was too deep in her own fortress of ice and snow to react at all. My desperate need probably never even reached her. I was not even a blip on her radar. The thermometer showed no change at all.

And if you did not notice, a lot of those things I credit her for giving to me are intellectual, not emotional. Emotionally speaking, she gave me her own shy, depressive nature without giving me the warmth or strength to deal with the world.

Throw in the sexual abuse by my Dad before I was even kindergarten age (which admittedly she knew nothing about) and the whole taking me out of university thing, and all that brutal bullying, and it is no wonder I am such a cracked little egg.

At least I am healthy enough to feel sorry for myself now.

Mom, you just plain were not there for me.