by Wendy
My mother was addicted to rage. I could not see that as a child. Only now at fifty-three, am I truly able to step back and grasp a sense of the fear that dwelled within her.
Nothing but intense, immutable and raw fear can provoke such undeniable and untenable rage as that which overtook my mother usurped any possibility of experiencing safety and grounding through life and in the world.
Too many times I saw that rage directed at me, felt the heat of its fangs and flames touch upon my skin and arms, invade my psyche and soul.
My mind will never become totally free of the memories of the places it occupied within me. Nor do I want them to be.
I have worked to erase and eradicate myself of the negative thinking and self-perspectives carved into the terrain of my consciousness and left by the unremitting presence of her rage and rage-filled attacks, both physical and emotional.
And yet a major part of my healing process, I now realize, has involved retaining, holding on to the changes and evolution of soul, that painful interactions between and with my mother provoked and fueled.
I will never forget the intensity of anger that overtook my mother’s gaze when she was physically hitting me or verbally berating me.
She could not look at me when using corporal methods to punish me, hitting me with a belt of the half to 1-inch thick paddle students in wood-working class made for her.
When chastising me she looked me directly in the eye, stared me down.
I do not know what accounted for the difference.
The last month of her life, when she was dying, my mother retreated into herself, underwent what doctors first diagnosed as a stroke. Five days later and she demonstrating no response to their treatments, they succumbed to my suggestion that she had undergone a psychotic break.
No longer able to control the situation, her death and the hands into which she had fallen for care–mine, that of her daughter–she left life before it could abandoned her.
Her greatest fears had been realized, made manifest. My mother was dying of cancer and reality of her situation had taken its place in her psyche while she was with an oncologist on the first floor of a cancer treatment center located in a facility that one floor up housed a mental hospital.
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