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June 27, 2004
What I Remember.
About fifteen years or so ago I had several regression hypnosis sessions. The hypnotherapist regressed me back to my first memory, about four months or so in utero. My first memory was a feeling: fear. That word describes much of my mother's existence and my own. Good old twist at the gut, oh-my-god-what-is-around-the-next-corner, fight or flight fear.
Shortly after that appointment I asked my mother what she had felt while she was pregnant with me. She said that she was afraid her entire pregnancy. There was a family at church that had a baby with hydrocephalus. She was afraid that I was going to be born with some horrible birth defect. Granted, this was the era of the Thalidomide baby, but I think her fear went deeper and wider than just that. I think that fear permeated every room in my mother's being. Fear and anger. Fear and loathing.
My mother was born in 1938. Wrong girl-child in the wrong era. She was the middle child: older sister, younger brother. Older sister never caused any problems. Younger brother was the golden child. My mother, out there in her own universe, caused a myriad of problems and was several shades shy of golden. She had ADHD. She was a tom-boy. She just didn’t fit, and it pissed her and everyone else off. While she was in first-grade she was diagnosed with dyslexia. We’re just beginning to understand these burdens my mother carried: social and perceptual dysfunction, not being feminine, high energy, easily bored. Sometimes I don’t think that she every placed a foot in the right spot.
...in process...
Posted by swift at June 27, 2004 3:29 AM