+Check Pages at TOP for My Mother’s Writings

The page tabs above SHOULD connect to all my mother’s writings.  If they don’t, just drop me a comment below and I will see why not!!  Thanks for stopping by!

PLEASE keep in mind as you read these writings that my mother was seriously mentally ill, and although never diagnosed, showed symptoms of bi-polar, Borderline Personality Disorder and psychosis.  She was extremely abusive to me as a mother, and emotionally volatile and unstable.  My concern is about how outsiders can identify severe infant-child abusers so as to intervene on the behalf of children, because most readers would be hard pressed to actually FIND my mother’s mental illness in her writings — and this cunning ability to mask and disguise her madness and her meanness was a big part of the very illness itself.

Advertisement

+LINKS TO MY MOTHER’S 1945 DIARY AND MY INTRO TO IT

Both of the following pages are now published online:  MY INTRODUCTION TO MY MOTHER’S 1945 DIARY, is placed on Stop the Storm, connected to my story of leaving home.

I placed it here because while my mother’s own writings as they are contained in MY MOTHER’S 1945 DIARY belong at Take Care of Mothers because they are her words of her own life that did not relate to my life as a child until I reached my own teen and young adult years as her daughter.

My introduction describes how my mother found ways of letting me know prior to my leaving home what her own young adulthood was like for her – as she contrasted it very clearly to my own experience of being a teen and young adult — as her daughter.  Believe me, unlike her, I had no fun at all.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

+JUST A LINK TO TODAY’S STOP THE STORM POST

I began the page I wrote today (published under My Childhood Stories) in response to a reader’s post on my mother’s letters that I transcribed yesterday.  My writing rapidly led me in the direction of beginning to understand that I am both a witness abuse survivor of my own abuse at the same time I am a survivor of the abuse itself.  I am beginning to understand that these were two separate and different experiences that I had, NEARLY but not exactly at the same time, as I lived in one body, and that each affected me in different ways.   Like two different rivers feeding into one, both experiences are linked in differing ways to dissociation.

Today’s writing pathway also led into the subject of the gift of having the ability to wonder (or not ) and into a clear infant abuse memory that came to me shortly after I wrote the letter disowning my mother.

This entire writing is an important contribution to my growing understanding of a new ‘real reality’ that is separate and different from the reality that was built into my body-brain-mind during 18 years of abuse by my mother.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

+MY NEWEST PERSONAL STORY – THE FIRE ANTS

My own story of The Fire Ants, which relates to my mother’s June 17, 1957 letter that I transcribed today, has been placed in the section on My Childhood Stories.  It describes my growing reality as it differs from my mother’s version of the event she describes in her letter to my father, one which was added to her abuse litany of me and brought up in the midst of many beatings over the years of my childhood.

These whole 1957 letters I transcribed today (060909) are in files in a temporary location, but can be seen after they are filed in their permanent location.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

+WHY MY MOTHER IS BEING BANISHED TO HERE

Read today’s new post at Stop the Storm:

“I am going to divide and conquer, all right.  She ruled my life during all of my formative years, yet she could never completely rule me.  This is a war of wills as I continue to empower myself to rule my own body-brain-mind and soul.  She trampled where she had no business being.  She trampled on me, she trampled me.  But she did not conquer me and I aim to prove it.

“March on, oh wounded ones, march on!”

I am in fact reclaiming the soil of my own selfdom!  When I am done cleaning my own house, my mother will not be in it.”

++++++++++++++++++++++++

+PLEASE BEAR WITH ME – IMPROVEMENTS ON THE WAY

I am going to try to improve the workings of the Stop the Storm main blog by moving the more technical information on the brain over to this site.  Please bear with me through these changes!  Thanks, Linda

Couples – After the Baby is Born

Take care of your relationship!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20090429/hl_hsn/healthtipafterbabyisborn

Help Prevent Child Abuse

http://www.preventchildabuseny.org/promisesforparents.shtml

Prevent Child Abuse New York Blog

Promises for Parents Posted: 28 Apr 2009 01:25 PM PDT Even though Child Abuse Prevention Month is coming to a close, many people are still looking for ways to take action against child abuse. Promises for Parents is an easy way to make your community a more supportive place for kids and families. Promises for Parents is a pledge campaign that does not solicit money.  Instead it asks individuals to do something tangible to help, support or ease the job of parents.  This helps us work on primary prevention of child abuse and neglect, so things don’t get out of control, and children are kept safe promising to do something helpful for a parent. How does it work?  It’s simple.  Individuals complete pledge cards promising to do something helpful for a parent. Some ideas to create a campaign are: Make presentations explaining the campaign and collecting pledge cards wherever community members are gathered. Utilize events to collect promises such as setting up a display at events targeted to families. Involve local businesses; arrange for your promise information be printed on restaurant placements or pizza boxes. Enlist corporations as partners. Create a reward for those who make a promise and keep it, such as a button! Ask everyone to join in continuing prevention efforts by joining your local child abuse task force or coalition efforts and activities, or publicize how others can get involved; conduct a membership campaign! Below are examples of Promises that have been pledged. From Parents to Parents: Offer rides for children whose parents have infants or sick children. Organize a weekly get-together with other parents to talk, while the kids play. Offer a parenting class at your next PTA meeting. When you see a stressed parent at the supermarket, smile and acknowledge by saying “it’s tough” and comment how well they are doing. From Friends, Neighbors, and Relatives to Parents: Volunteer to baby-sit or run an errand for a parent, free of charge; your incentive – you get to play with the kids. Bake something for the family next door. Say something positive about a child to a parent. Donate your used clothes and toys to be used by another family. Take a meal to a family with a newborn. Volunteer as a big brother to help out kids and allow parents some free time! From the Community to Parents: Set-up a toy corner in the store so parents can browse easily. Call your students’ parents to tell them about their children’s successes. Keep crayons and paper in a drawer for fidgety children while Parents fill out forms. Have brochures on positive parenting available in the MD’s office where work. From Parents to Themselves: Ask for help when you’re tired. Hire a babysitter to go out with your spouse or friend. Join a gym to get into shape or walk with other parents a few nights a week. More information about Promises for Parents here.

OUR FIRST MOTHER

My sister sent me this link today, and it reminds me to mention first thing that our first mother was and still is what most importantly sustains us.  We never leave her womb from our conception to our death.

FROM:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19wwln-lede-t.html?_r=1

“Wilson emphasizes the spiritual and moral benefits of an attachment to nature, warning that we “descend farther from heaven’s air if we forget how much the natural world means to us.” But there are more tangible benefits as well. Many studies show that even a limited dose of nature, like a chance to look at the outside world through a window, is good for your health. Hospitalized patients heal more quickly; prisoners get sick less often. Being in the wild re­duces stress; spending time with a pet enhances the lives of everyone from autistic children to Alzheimer’s patients. The author Richard Louv argues that modern children suffer from “nature-deficit disorder” because they have been shut out from the physical and psychic benefits of unstructured physical contact with the natural world.”

++

We must not forget to love her and all her life forms that are our relatives on this small spinning globe.

TAKE CARE OF MOTHERS

In the end the final and greatest belief that I have, and the greatest area of focus for my work, would be to reintroduce into public awareness something our species has ALWAYS known.  To the degree that we lose sight today of what still needs to be the greatest focus for our species, taking care of mothers, our species will decline.

Over the millions of years that we have been evolving and enduring, we have beat out probably at least 17 other hominid species.  Climatic changes, being in the right place at the right time, perhaps (some would say) the assistance of destiny all played a part.

But in the end I believe that why we have our amazing mental abilities, our ability to use words, to continue to develop tools, technologies included, is because as a species we always FIRST took care of mothers.

In a world of increasing billions of people we can lose sight of this fact.  But when it comes to the individual quality of life for our species’ members, having mothers that have the resources to take care of us still really means the difference between life and death, even if that happens mostly on a mental and psychological level.

It is, to me, the surest sign that any society is being stressed to nearly its capacity when infants are not receiving the kind of mothering care, essentially during pregnancy and an infant’s first 2 years of life, that our species has prepared us throughout evolution to receive.  The topic gets hot and bothered, with lots of controversy, but nature knows what is best and always has.  At the point humans did the mothering to near perfection, nature allowed us to go on an improvise for ourselves.  This happened because we reached a point as a species where we could make improvements on what nature could provide for us.

At the point that we begin to make choices that are more detrimental for us than what nature has provided for other species, we will have to become accountable for our wrong choices and mistakes.  I think we are at, or are very nearly at, that point.

When I consider the horrific abuse I received daily for 18 years, I can trace the genesis of it back to my mother’s childhood.  She was born to a ‘professional’ woman of means who had her masters in 1918 and probably NEVER wanted children.  A nanny raised my mother from birth thanks in part to the availability of bottles for feeding.  My mother was not mothered.  She did not have her developmental needs met, she was not protected, and in the end the adjustments she had to make activated mental illness genes that I don’t believe would have ever bothered her if her first 5 years had been right.

She should probably never have had children, either.  Once she did, there was nobody there to take care of her as she mothered.  Intervention did not happen.  Abuse, terrible abuse, was the consequence.

As a society we can first of all overcome our social taboos against realizing that infants have very specific needs and sometimes these needs are not met and that infant, if it survives, will suffer from corresponding detriments for the rest of their lives.  Infants ARE abused.  Our minds do not want to consider this possibility, and we do not want to think that we are ‘accidentally’ participating in this crime.

Ignorance, denial and wishful thinking are not going to solve the problem.  We need forums for considering the facts, the problems and the solutions.  Because of our newly implemented technologies we are now able to extend the forces of our mind out into a big, broad world.  And in this process we can help make positive changes, no matter what we are doing that brings in our paychecks.