If It's Hysterical, Part 2

I know, of course, most of what happened during my childhood.  There were parts of my story, large parts, that for years I didn’t remember, but during the last fifteen years I’ve sifted through my memories as few people will ever explore theirs, not only by doing EMDR but also by writing a memoir.  I know that my mother was mentally ill, that after I was born she probably had postpartum depression and maybe postpartum psychosis, the same illness that caused Andrea Yates to drown all five of her kids in a bathtub in 2001.  I’ve also come to believe that my mother had borderline personality disorder.  (Neither postpartum psychosis nor BPD had been discovered by psychiatrists during the era when my mother was being hospitalized and diagnosed.)

What I knew more than anything, when I was a kid, was that I was terrified of my mother.  I was as afraid of her as you would be of a murderer tying you up in your bedroom, of a snarling tiger leaping at you in the jungle, more afraid of her than many people will probably ever be of anything.  I was so afraid of her I lived with a foster family down the road, by my own choice and against the wishes of practically everyone.  It’s taken me a long, long time and a lot of EMDR to figure out why I was so afraid of my mother, even longer to allow myself to get to, to feel and release through EMDR, the old, stale, dormant and sometimes active terror that has been trapped inside me for all these years.    

Some parts of my story I’ve pieced together over the years with the help of my therapist and my father and sister. (My mother’s been dead since 1981.)  I’ve learned that my parents almost got divorced when I was about five.  They had a long painful custody battle, and my sister, who’s two years older than I am, remembers someone from the Massachusetts Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children coming to our foster family’s house during that time – my sister lived with the foster family too when my mother was hospitalized and later when the divorce proceedings were going on.  The investigator asked my sister questions about my mother and father, and we knew – I knew too, I guess, although I was only five – that my sister’s answers would help determine whether we would end up belonging to our father or be given to our mother. 

As soon as I learned that my boyfriend was going to be officially investigated as the result of a complaint from an angry, blaming person, the tone of whose earlier emails to my partner had already reminded me on some visceral level of the particular tenor of my mother’s illness, I began to feel that old, absolutely unmanageable terror rising up in me.  I knew that the fear was linked to the stuff of my childhood, that it might’ve had something to do with my parents custody battle when I was five and who knows what else, but it wasn’t until I got to the EMDR that I actually felt, and more than that, could actually do something about, the connection between the present and past events.