Do-Over, or, The Dark Place

by Charity and Rachel

We are in that dark place again.

We are overwhelmed with anger. Every moment of every day feels like a constant struggle to keep the anger at bay.

The main object of our anger is our mother's inability to give us formative nurturing. As we were growing up, we never asked for what we needed, because we believed she should automatically know and automatically be perfect at meeting those needs.

When she wasn't, we wanted our life to be a "do-over." Erase the problematic life from history; it never happened. Do it over again and get it right. We never got a "do-over." All we got is further trauma that we weren't equipped to handle, because we weren't nurtured in the first place.

Why did we even think our mother could or should be perfect? Our trauma started during our gestation, when we absorbed all of our mother's anxiety and her somatized reactions to her past. Our grandmother, may she rot in hell, always expected perfection (by way of obedience in particular) from our mother. While our mother thought that she could get away from this by marrying and moving out of the house, our grandmother continued to insert herself and her bullying opinions into our parents' everyday life. How could we expect anything less than perfection of ourselves and our mother, when we saw that nothing less than perfection in our mother was acceptable to our grandmother?

We will never get a "do-over." We hate being alive. For the sake of our nieces, we endure it. But we want so much to end it all. Yesterday.