The Inner Sanctum... by PolarB

Hey there bloggers!

My mind is still thinking about a lot of things and surprisingly enough thoughts of my birth mother came to mind and I thought I would write about her. I've never really said anything about her on here because I don’t talk about her much nor for that fact rarely do I think about her anymore. She has never really been an active part of my life. But I thought I'd talk a little about her.

My birth mother was very tiny and petite built, she’s maybe four foot, if that and she has long straight black hair down to her butt. She wears children’s clothes because she is so small and has to sit on pillows and tape blocks of wood to the gas and brake pedals of her car in order to drive. She would be around 57 years old right now. My father was two years older than her. Both of my birth parents dropped out of high school and got married way too young. I was born a year later to my mother whom was 16 years old at the time. I was always told that my mother most likely got married just to get away from her adoptive parents. It was said that she had quite a wild streak in her and in knowing what I do about her; I would guess that to be accurate. My maternal grandmother was adopted by a family at an early age and when she became pregnant by the full blooded Cherokee that took off that nobody knows anything about, my birth mother was born. She was adopted by the same people who adopted her birth mother, which then, her birth mother became her sister. So in essence, my maternal grandmother was also my aunt…..Confusing huh… yeah confuses me too, no wonder my family of origin is so screwed up….and that’s just my birth mother’s side of the family… my father’s side is a whole another issue, but it seems to be the cycle and the history of my family of origin. No wonder I left them all and did my own thing and created my own family.

Anyway, I was born to my mother when she was 16 and apparently taking care of a newborn baby and a husband was not my mother’s cup of tea and she made a decision to leave when I was six months old. This began my history of being moved around from home to home, as my father could not take care of me by his self. He ended up enlisting in the Army for several years when I was two. He was only 18 when I was born, so he was still quite young too. He was always in my life though no matter where I was, unlike my mother.

After my mother left us, she got a job working in various bars as a stripper/dancer and she continued in that profession until I was in my late teens. She divorced my father and soon married her 2nd husband when I was two years old. He was an extremely abusive man and I heard horror stories about some of the things he did and I believe every one of them. My mother tried to take me back for a while when I was two, and I have a memory of being in my playpen and watching Steve chase my mother around the kitchen table with a butcher knife. I remember crying and being scared because of all the screaming and commotion. My mother would leave me with him when she would go to the bar to work at night. He didn’t take care of me of course and one time he just took off and left me screaming and crying in my crib all night long and a neighbor came in and rescued me, so me staying with my mother did not last very long and I was sent back to live with my paternal grandmother. I am glad that my mother had the sense at least to not keep me with Steve or there could have been worse consequences in the long run. She became pregnant with my brother soon after and history repeated itself once again and she took off after six months once she had him. My brother was sent off to Maine to live with his paternal grandmother and my mother divorced Steve. I heard the last straw was him raping her and throwing her out of a moving vehicle. There’s no doubt she made the right decision leaving him.

Next there was John, who became my mother’s third husband. At least he seemed to be a decent guy, a little weenie-fied, but overall a nice guy. My mother would stick with him because she could boss him around and do whatever she damn well pleased. This suited her more and I am pretty sure she is still married to him. I used to go on occasional weekend visits with my mother and spent most of the time playing card games with John. He had a stupid kind of a laugh that kind of reminded me of a donkey hee-hawing while trying to catch his breath…cracked me up, but he was okay. He taught me to play solitaire and he spent a lot of time alone because my mother was always working at the bar at nights and then she would sleep all day until mid afternoon. On my weekend visits, I would sleep in a sleeping bag on the living room floor and entertain myself by playing cards or watching TV very quietly. I would have to stay totally quiet as to not to disturb her when she was sleeping. She did not liked to be disturbed from her beauty sleep. She was never a cook, so if we ate anything, she would take me out to a restaurant. I really did not enjoy being with her or spending any time with her to be real honest.

She really just did not have the skills to be a mother. Some women just are not cut out to be motherly types, they don’t have that nurturing gene or instinct that makes them maternal towards their children. She did the best she could with what she had. My mother tried to tell me all about the facts of life when I was five years old. She even went as far as to get out a sanitary napkin and show me how it was worn and told me all about how women bleed. That kind of scared me more than anything and I did not have a clue at that age what the hell she was talking about nor did I care. She would show me her sexy dance moves and tell me that it really turned men on. Again who the fuck cares? I was five and could not grasp what she was trying to explain to me. My mother was never one to hug or kiss me. She didn’t seem to want to touch me. When she would say goodbye at the end of the visit, she would stand away from me to give me a quick peck on the lips.

My mother was the biggest flirt I have ever known in my life. I don’t have an issue with women flirting, however, if it is your own mother and she is literally throwing herself at any man she sees, that is a whole another story…You put a man in the room with her and she will work it for all she’s worth, which I had a hard time understanding. She didn’t have a problem hugging them and she would have to be touching them in some way and she would throw her head back and laugh and joke around with them, but she had an aversion to hugging and touching me. That hurt. Maybe it came from being a stripper and that was how she earned her praise or her worth and her tips, not really sure, but her flirtation with men everywhere we went was a major source of embarrassment for me. It didn’t matter if they were white, black, yellow, green or purple…she went after them all…And the fact that she liked to use me to get even more attention disgusted me. She would say things like-“This is my daughter, can you believe that my body bore a child and still looks this good?” As I got older and grew bigger than her, it would change to- “Can you believe that big thing came out of my little ole body?” There’s one thing I can say for her, she was certainly very self centered. It was all about her and the attention had to be on her at all times.

When I got to be 9 years old, I simply refused to go on overnight visits with her anymore. I got scared once because I had heard a noise and thought somebody was trying to break in the house, so I went to wake her up. She told me that I was being a big baby and to go sit on the couch until she was done sleeping and to not disturb her again. I called my grandmother and told her I wanted to come home and my mother screamed at me for calling her. She told me that she only got to see me a few times a year and all I wanted to do was leave and go back to my grandma. She didn’t understand I was scared and needed to feel safe. She refused to take me home and went back to bed. I had to wait until late in the evening to be taken home and all the while she drove me back she was berating me because I was going to go home and most likely make her look bad or so she said... So after that I refused to go on any overnight weekend visits with her ever again. If she wanted to see me for the holidays, she would take me on visits with her side of the family and I was okay with that because I got to play with my cousins and get to know them a little more but I was never comfortable around my mother in one on one situations. She used to tell me that when I grew up and she got old that I could take care of her. I used to think to myself, now why on earth would I take care of you when you have never in your life taken care of me. As I became a teenager, I saw less and less of her, by my own choice. I just refused to stand by and watch her continue to throw herself at men and then have to listen to her complain how this one or that one had tried to take advantage of her or had tried to rape her.

Considering what I was going through with my father and the others who abused me, I had no desire to be around her or have her in my life. Her choices in life and her actions never made sense to me. I spent a lot of my teenage years angry at her and in part blamed her for the sexual abuse going on in my life. My way of thinking was it should have been her. That’s who my father really wanted. He stalked her…Hell, I had even been with him on several occasions as he stalked her and followed her around. We would sometimes sit for hours in his car watching her house and him waiting to get a glimpse of her. He wanted her but he took his frustrations out on me. He told me I was just like her. Told me I had to have sex because I was oversexed just like her…No…. I was not nothing like her nor did I ever want to be anything remotely close to her. I hated her for a long time because of who she was and because she was not what a mother was supposed to be and she did nothing to protect me or take care of me. And that was okay at the time, because it was safe to hate her.

As I became an adult, and started to heal my abusive past, I grew to understand her more. I didn’t blame her anymore for what my father did to me…he was responsible for his actions. I was able to put into perspective what she was responsible for and I realized that she probably had experienced a lot of the same things I did growing up. I have no doubt in my mind that she was sexually abused growing up, I also know she was searching for acceptance and love all her life. The sad thing is, I don’t think she has ever been able to find it…She did not choose the healthiest ways to search for those things. But that is her journey and her path that she chose to walk, not mine…

When I was 17 and finally broke free from my father’s clutches, I took off and moved to another city and ended up staying with someone from my mother’s side of the family for a while. My mother found out about it and wanted to come visit me. She did and of course it was the same and the day ended badly and I told her I didn’t want to see her again. So you know what she does? She contacts my father and calls me and tells me they are both coming up to see me because he needs to tell me something. I about crapped my pants because for all the efforts I had made to get away from that son of a bitch, she was going to hand deliver him right to my door! Well needless to say, I took off and was on the run again trying to find a safe place. I found out later that she wanted him to come up there to talk to me to tell me that she was indeed a good person and that I should be ashamed of myself for treating my mother that way…. Again… nothing new… the woman thinks the world revolves around her. It’s always all about her and how she is the victim and how everybody is doing things to hurt her… she takes no responsibility for any of her actions ever.

We connected a few more times as I was in my early thirties. A lot of time had passed and I thought maybe things had changed and just maybe she had changed too. I contacted her and we made plans to go to lunch and talk. I thought maybe we could become friends but I was nervous about seeing her and did not know really what to expect. I walked into the place we were meeting, I spotted her and walked up to her and gave her a hug. The very first thing she said to me was- “Don’t I look good after all these years?” Not –Hi, how have you been… it’s good to see you….Nope…it was still all about her…her self centeredness smacked me right in the face. Inside my heart sank…no, she had not changed one bit. Lunch seemed to drag on for eternity and it was excruciating. I couldn’t wait for it to be over. In the short time we were together, she managed to get in several put downs. She said to the waitress- “Can you believe I gave birth to her?” pointing to me. It embarrassed me and I think the waitress too. She told me she expected me to have a bunch of kids hanging off of me by now…She told me if I would lose some weight that I might be a good looking girl… she wanted to hear all about the man in my life and was disappointed when I said I was single…I didn’t tell her about my relationship with Lovey…it was none of her business.
As soon as lunch was over she gave me the standard little peck on the lips as she tried to keep her body as far away from me as possible and then she drove off in her car. I got in my car and broke down and cried, partly because I was so relieved to be out of her presence and partly because my expectations had been totally unrealistic and I was hurt once again. I mentally beat myself up for putting myself through that and thinking how stupid I was to think that things would have changed.

My mother started writing me letters and wanted to continue a relationship. I did not want to see her again so I told her I would write to her but that I couldn’t see her. She wrote some big letter to me berating me that I was hurting her and that this had always been my problem that I didn’t communicate with her and that I was the one responsible all these years for us not having a relationship because Lord knows she had done everything she could to be a mother to me.. When I read that, I had to fucking laugh. This woman was so fucking delusional and self centered. I wrote her back and I told her that having a relationship with her hurt me too much and that I just couldn’t do it and I was sorry if she couldn’t understand that.

It was about this time that she gave me contact information to get in touch with my brother. She said he wanted to talk to me. So I thought okay…I’ll bite… I knew nothing about him and I thought it might be nice, so I called him and we talked a few times on the phone. He told me that our mother had rarely been in contact with him and he described a lot of the same types of things I was feeling. We seemed to have a lot in common, he was abused by his father, that wasn’t a surprise considering how Steve was. He outright asked me why I never got married. I was honest and told him because I was already in a long term relationship with Lovey and the laws did not allow us to be married. He said that was cool. We agreed to start writing and planned to exchange pictures and get to basically know one another. Well, I sent my letter with pictures and a lot of information, but I never got anything from him. I called him and he started lying saying he had sent it and some things didn’t make sense that he was saying and it caused a red flag to be raised in my mind…

Time went on, and eventually my mother wrote me another long drawn out letter pretty much making comments on the information I had told my brother, including my relationship with Lovey. That really pissed me off and I wrote her back and said okay, if you are going to manipulate me and use my brother to get information, then I want to get the truth out in the open. So I laid it all out on the line and asked her specific questions and said I wanted some honest answers about why she left me and I asked her a bunch of other things about her marriages and our relationship and about my brother. She wrote me back with the same old song and dance and the letter was filled with lies. I knew some of the answers to the questions I had asked and knew she was being untruthful.

That was a real eye opener for me because from that moment on, I knew she was never ever going to be who I needed her to be…Hell, she couldn’t even be honest with me and for her to try to manipulate me and use my brother to manipulate me…I had to ask myself a question. If she was a stranger and started working at the same company I worked at or became a neighbor, would she be someone that I would choose to become friends with? The answer was a resounding NO WAY! So then I ask myself another question- Why did I continue to set myself up to be hurt and lied to in hopes that she was ever going to be the mother I needed. The answer became clear to me. I was worth more than that …pure and simple…I did not deserve to be treated like that or used like that. I did not want her in my life period.

If the relationship hurts more than it helps…it’s time to let it go.

Realizing that was pivotal in my healing and it was a vital piece in being able to understand my relationship with my birth mother. I had been setting myself up for so many years wishing and hoping that my relationship was going to be something that it could not ever be. She was always going to be exactly who she was… and I was going to be who I was. I simply refused to allow myself to be hurt anymore. I mattered more than that. It was such a hard and long lesson, but I finally got it.

The last I heard, I learned that she finally gave up being a stripper. She is now embracing her Native American culture and she dances in Powwows now. I am pleased at that. Funny that without knowing that, I have taken a similar road… So I guess in that respect we are a bit alike. I also learned that she changed her name and seems to be coming to terms a bit with her past and she seems to want to distance herself from her stripper life. Sounds as if there may be some transformation happening in her life and for that I can honestly say that I am happy for her. Maybe she will finally be able to find the love and the acceptance she has always been searching for.

I wish her nothing but peace in her life and although I will never let her back into my life, I do want her to be happy and content in hers. After many years and tears, I am finally at peace with her and have let all the hurt and anger go. And of course you all know that my lifelong dream for a mother has been fulfilled by my wonderful Mama Bear who is everything I ever looked for and needed in a mother. I thank the Great Spirit above for bringing her into my life everyday.

Peace & Blessings,
PolarB ;)