Every Exquisite Thing

Storm Watch

Safe As In My Mother's Womb

Heart of Coal

Oscar Wilde is quoted as saying, "Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic."

Since my mother's death, some of the absolute horrors I suffered as a child have emerged from my subconscious and body-mind, where they had been long held out of my sight until I could cope better with them.

I think if I had known all along what was done to me while she was still alive, I feel as though I would have flown to her home and killed her. Dead. Without remorse. In fact, with great satisfaction.

Thankfully, the realization of trauma was kept from my mind so I wouldn't have to spend my freedom restricted and incarcerated for murder. Cheers.

I've been piecing together my previously unknown genetic history with the help of a long-lost cousin my age who knows her way around ancestry research. And after many emails, going back and forth with her and my last remaining aunt, it has become crystal clear why my grandmother was as she was, my mother as she was, and me.

My maternal great-grandfather was a psychopath. My paternal grandfather was a violent psychotic, and both my mother and father, from their genetic make-up, were severely dysregulated and unwell mentally. This isn't hearsay or opinion; it's my reality.

Every person I descend from acted out in ways that make these facts known.

I learned two days ago how some mothers unconsciously starve their children of food to watch them diminish and ultimately disappear. They resent the child existing and for having any needs. There is no bonding between them. This was my every single day life until I left home at 17.

I have recalled that my mother took this to the next level multiple times by taking active action to have me disappear for good. My happy memory of her taking me to the woods to paint when I was six was recently fleshed out much more darkly, including how she set me down along the isolated creek to work while she was "just going downstream alone for a while." There, I was focused on painting something nice for a very long time. She'd driven so far away from home that I couldn't tell you where in California we had reached. It was so remote no one else was ever seen. She must have returned for me after dark, and we went home. Maybe she listened to me crying or singing to myself.

I'm confident now that she had intended all along to leave me there and to plead that I'd wandered off and gotten lost. She'd have relished the attention that would have given her, the poor grieving mother, except she wasn't. I'd have been gone, and her problems would have been over. Except they wouldn't have.

By the time I reached school age, I was so alarmingly thin from never being given food that the administration looked into it. They were told I was being fed, so they legally could do nothing further. I complained to my great-grandmother that my heart was "beating funny" (it wouldn't beat evenly and would have a pronounced unnatural gush sensation at times), and I was told that I was only imagining things.

I wet the bed everyday until I was 13. At age 7, while living with my great-grandmother, she hired a guy to install an electro-shock mattress pad under me that would supposedly jolt me awake if I wet it during the night, but it never did.

I coped with profound criminal neglect by going inward, entertaining myself, enduring the daily tumult, playing with kids on the street while unwashed, and having a TV for parenting, a much better option than the people around me were.

I quickly learned how to make these people laugh so they wouldn't kill me. I naturally developed the ability to immediately tell the threat level of anyone in front of me and what they wanted to hear (which was helpful later as a salesperson). I became the personality type that fawned over everyone to an unhealthy degree.

I worshipped people in my life who were better to me than my parents at showing me any affection, to the extent that I dismissed myself in the process.

My friend who knew me from ballet class said it was apparent something awful had happened to me in childhood based on how I behaved in class toward my teacher.

She asked me how I had survived the deprivation of my upbringing once I described it to her. I told her that instead of drinking and taking drugs, instead of a life of felonious crime and deadly substance addiction, life in prison, constant gambling, cutting, hurting, suicide, or the like, I instead. built. tiny. worlds.