Face to Face with the Strangest Part of Myself, Part III

To understand everything it means to me that this old woman feels like my mother you have to know something about my relationship with my mother -- more, much more, than I have room to talk about here.  In fact, I wrote an entire memoir about that relationship – it’s called Awake in the Dream House and it’s available on Amazon as a kindle book.  Here it’ll have to be enough just to say that I was terrified of my mother when I was a kid although I didn’t understand exactly why, and when I got older – since I’ve been in therapy with Alison, the therapist who introduced me to EMDR and with whom I still do EMDR once a month – I came to realize that my mother probably had borderline personality disorder, although they didn’t even know about BPD as a diagnosis when I was a kid.  There’s a book called Understanding the Borderline Mother in which the author breaks down borderline mothers into four types based on archetypes from fairy tales, and one of those archetypes, the one that seems to fit my mother, is the Witch.  (I feel like inserting an exclamation point in the text here to indicate how amazing it is to me the way all these things fit together, as if life is some enormous magical metaphorical puzzle and all we need to do is see the pieces and how they fit together is to understand it that way.) 

Anyway, when I was a little girl I was terrified of my mother, and I had recurring dreams about witches, not literal witches with black hats and broomsticks, but abstract invisible witches made of energy, terror, thought.  In the dreams I knew there was a witch hiding somewhere – in the room at the top of the stairs, beside our neighbor’s house, behind a tree -- and eventually she would jump out and frighten me out of my wits and I’d wake up. I couldn’t see my mother at all; I had no sense of her as a real person in the real world.  I barely even remember what she looked like now because when I saw her when I was a kid all I saw was my own fear, all I saw was that witch made of energy, of my own terror and thought.  She died in 1981 when I was in my twenties, before I really got to know her, and I still don’t have much sense of who she was or even what she looked like.  But when I was sitting there in my EMDR trance, conjuring up that old lady who was burned as a witch in some other century, whose thoughts and feelings somehow got inside me – when I conjured her up I felt the energy, the essence, the ways of talking and laughing and being, of my mother.

I have no idea what to make of any of this, but here’s what I guess I sort of think:  I think that somewhere, in some other century, a woman was brought to trial and burned as a witch, as many women in the Middle Ages through the 18^th century were:  English, German, French, Swiss, Danish, even some American women, ordinary, maybe just a little bit strange, a little bit too spiritual according to the customs of the day women.   That witch-trying, dehumanizing, burning must’ve created a enormous conflagration of emotional energy in the women who were branded and burned as witches:  raw wretched blubbering terror, deep wracking sadness, unbearable feelings of loss.  Somehow those emotions got woven into my own emotional energy – perhaps because I was one of those women in some past life, perhaps by some other incomprehensible contrivance that has to do with the zeitgeist, the collective unconscious, or who knows what.  For whatever reason, in some dim distant impossible way I’ve been feeling that poor old burned witch’s emotions without knowing it, and those emotions have been coming up when I come in contact with certain circumstances – i.e., getting medical tests that could determine that my life will be, as I see it through my distorted-by-witch-trauma inner eyes, ripped away from me, et cetera.  That all kind of makes sense to me.  The part that makes even less sense is the part about my mother.

My mother was a witch to me when I was a little girl, that much I know.  She acted like the authorities I’m so afraid of now – the angry judges, the terrifying doctors – or at least I perceived her that way and not without reason.  With the encouragement of my father and under the influence of my own fear, I dehumanized her; I didn’t see her as a real person, to the degree that I saw her at all I only saw a witch; I feared her and avoided her, I would have gotten rid of her if I could.   She was the witch and I was the witch burner, I was her victim and she was mine and on and on, in some weird spiritual double helix.

So here’s the other thing I kind of think:  Maybe my mother and I split that witch energy.  She got some of it, and I got some of it.  Maybe there was a particular real-life past-life witch that lived sometime in the previous centuries and it was her witch energy or maybe it was just some general witch energy floating around in the atmosphere.  Maybe my mother is inside me as I was inside of her and we’ve shared or even traded that witch energy, that archetypal witch story, that old witch herself  -- back and forth between us.  Maybe life – who we are, where we come from, how we’re related to each other -- is a lot more complicated than any of us could ever possibly suspect.  Who knows?  All I know is that when I do EMDR some old lady wants to come to the surface and that old lady feels like my mother but she’s not exactly my mother and that old lady’s fears are keeping me from getting a mammogram.  I do believe all that, although I’m well aware that it would be a stretch for many people.  It’s all very interesting to me and also seems kind of crazy, and I cannot believe that I’m writing this and posting it on the internet for anyone to read, potential boyfriends, publishers, academic employers, clients, all those people out in the world that I want to impress.  But here goes nothing.