First Child

Small.
Hiding.
Don't leave me.

What about me?

I hate you-in-me
Cut, cut it out, cut it out of me, cut it out of me now,
cut it out of me right now.

Bleeding:
Wound
Woman
Whole
Life-and-death.

Flowers
Hope.

I wrote that poem, and the one the below, on July 25, 1, at a Healing Theatre workshop entitled "Your Mother and You." One of the exercises in the workshop was to take off items of clothing that represented our mothers, and say what characteristics of our mothers we were discarding.

At the workshop, I came to see more clearly ways in which I was not able to separate from my mother. But I have also had to face integrating the things inside me that are identified with my mother. I think, somehow, I have to separate from my mother and integrate her at the same time. I'm not saying this is true for everyone, but in writing this page, I am trying to better define how it is true for me. At that same workshop, I made a picture of the overall healing process which you can find here: spiral.

Second Child:

Is she gone?
What was she doing here?
I thought...
I don't know what I thought.

She is so big I can't breathe
There is no air left for me
Her body makes mine breathe.

Give me space
Someone hold me loosely
hold me up while I make a new skeleton.

I can't cut her out without dying
Don't look in the mirror
I cannot hate her without hating myself.

How to go forward
without leaving her-in-me behind?

In the first three stanzas of this poem, I write about lingering fear, about sexual abuse and about healing. But what I want to examine further here are the issues raised in the last two stanzas. I want to write about what it means to look in the mirror and see my abuser. Over-and-over again, I have started to reach my anger, started to express anger at my mother and my grandmother for abusing me, only to have my anger turn back against myself. Partly that is an old pattern of turning my anger against myself. In addition, I think that the anger turns back because there is so much of my mother and my grandmother in me. I wonder if that identification is a particular problem for people abused by close relatives of the same sex and even more so for women abused by their mothers.

Partly my identification with my mother is a result of the abuse. A key part of the experience of sexual abuse was not having boundaries, as the second stanza describes. I believe that during the abuse I had the sense not only that my body belonged to my mother instead of to me, but also that what I felt were her feelings, not my own feelings. I sought the sexual abuse rather than trying to avoid it because it was the only way I knew to get my mother to meet my need to be held and loved and also because becoming one with her was a powerful high. I don't know whether to describe it as being able to go back into the womb, or whether to describe it as a feeling of power, because if I was her I was big and powerful instead of being the small scared child I left behind.

For my mother, I think there was a kind of identification going on as well. Perhaps it wasn't me that my mother was trying to hold, but herself as a child. I was reading a book that includes a philosophical discussion of gay sex (The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity, by Daniel Mendelsohn), and I had a flash of recognition when I got to a part where the author talks about falling through the partner back into the self.