(TO MY SIBLINGS ANNE, CATHERINE, AND DAVE : Don’t read this. It’s stuff about Mom. You won’t like it. )

Today was a therapy day, and today’s session brought together two things I had never put together before, and that means I have to blog this business out.

This isn’t the first time I have complained about my mother. I have done it at least twice before. It’s never easy for me because I practically worship my mother.

Like I have said previous times, the household I grew up in had a basic duality : Dad bad, Mom good. My father was an angry raving tyrant, and my mother was the passive but loving saint. Polarization was the game of the day. My father had a deep need to take his frustrations out on whoever was around, and that was usually us kids.

So we all feared and I think at least somewhat hated him. Life was so much better when he wasn’t around. My sister Anne and my brother David got the lion’s share (and then some) of the abuse, but we were all tense when he was around.

That meant, at least to me, that I clung to my mother, the Good Parent. And that worked… for a while.

That’s what came up in therapy today and what I wanted to talk about tonight. First by going back to work and leaving me with a babysitter, then by simply sliding deeper and deeper into her own depression, my mother emotionally abandoned me.

I feel like a traitor just for saying that. But it’s true.

For a while when I was in elementary school, I at least had my mother as (as they used to say) a Boy’s Best Friend. I knew that no matter what, after supper I could talk to my mother for a while, and get hugs. It didn’t entirely make up for all the abuse I took at school, but it helped a lot, and so for that time, I felt okay.

But gradually, she just… left. Became more zombie-like and withdrawn. She was there but not there, not emotionally. I would hug her, but I might as well have been hugging a bundle of sticks. She was in no way and in no sense hugging back. She didn’t return my affection. She endured it. To her, it was just another thing to get through as she numbly went through the motions of life.

I have talked about this before. But it didn’t occur to me till today just how absolutely awful that was. The emotional damage caused by having my mother freeze up on me before my eyes (and arms) has to be absolutely massive. That’s the kind of thing that shouldn’t ever happen to a kid.

She was my one friend during a time when I had none. Then… she wasn’t. She wasn’t anyone. She was a zombie. Her withdrawal from me confirmed that I really was unworthy of anything in life and the last thing that might have kept me from withdrawing deeply into my own mind was gone.

So in that way, I ended up doing exactly what she was doing : withdrawing. Like mother, like son.

In fact, I think there is a very solid possibility that I learned depression from her. She modeled it for me. And I internalized it. Perhaps if she had not gone cold on me, I would have had a better time dealing with reality instead of withdrawing from it. I would have found something worth staying connected for. I would have found me way out of the badness.

Instead, I fell deeper and deeper and deeper into my internal abyss, which grew bigger and stronger as I abandoned more and more of myself to it.

And yes, I know mental illness wasn’t exactly her decision. It’s not mine, either. But that’s not important. Why it happened is irrelevant, as are issues of blame or responsibility. None of that matters at all.

What matters is what it did to me and how much of my current issues can be tied to it. I have spent a lot of time blaming bullying, my father, family neglect, a school system that could not handle me, and all the rest for all my emotional problems, and I have made attempts to blame my mother but until now, I didn’t really grasp the full scope of the trauma.

What does it do to a growing boy when his mother abandons him while still being right there in front of him? When I talk about my depression, I use a lot of cold related metaphors. Ice palaces, my frozen heart, my soul being nothing but trackless tundra… next to water, the most frequent source of my imagery is coldness.

And now, I think I know where all that coldness came from, and why I ended up as the passive cold kind of depressive who is in no sense mentally healthy but seems so on the surface because no matter what, they keep going through the motions.

That’s what my mother did. She had been so warm and loving when I was a child in the 1970s, before she went back to work. And even after she went back to work, she was very sweet to me and would play guitar and sing with me, and read to me before I went to sleep, and give me back rubs to help me get to sleep.

But as the years wore in, that went away. The backyard garden became the extension on the house. The family grew more and more distant from one another. And my mother stopped being a source of soul sustaining sunshine and instead became a source of the kind of cold black void that has been devouring me for as long as I can remember.

You did this to me, Mom. Not deliberately, but still. You took me into the darkness with you when you went away, and I still haven’t found my way out, and I am 42 years old.

After you left, there was nobody for me. Nobody. No-one looking after me, nobody looking out for me, nobody to discipline me, nobody to prod me to go outside my comfort zone, nobody to teach me how to be safe. Nobody to do anything for me at all.

So I grew up extremely timid, because a child’s solution to the issue of how to be safe is to do nothing even slightly scary.

And Mom…. I’m still scared. And you are further away than ever.

Please don’t leave without me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.