Conjoined With My Mother

Needing to Disconnect

1997

My stomach, in a hard knot, will not move. No it says, I’ve had enough of this madness, and from this day forward I will move no more. My stomach is rebelling and will not participate anymore. It is too much madness, too insane, the slow, silent path towards self destruction.

I cannot stand it; she cannot stand it; both of us have had enough. My mother loved me too much in ways; she loved me so much she wanted to be me. She wanted us to be one and the same; connected. The thing she loved so much about me is that it in a way, I was just like her.

Quick, witty, analytical, mathematical, thinking, calculating, reading, consuming; wanting always to do more and be more. We were so much alike, the two of us; in ways it was a perfect union. Everyone else was insanely jealous of this shared alliance; no one else possessed the qualities that my mother loved. It was only me she loved; I was her chosen one.

But my mother was insane, and she didn’t truly possess an identity of her own. So when I came along and turned out to be just like her, she tried to fuse us into one. She tried to consume me, to take the identity she could see in me, and ingest it as her own. It didn’t work, of course; and her attempts turned into a miserable failure.

For one thing, she almost destroyed me, and for the other, she turned me against her and all of us against each other. It was such a mess, my family; so much ability and so much pathology all wrapped into one package.

So my insides are now on strike. They will not move, will not budge, and I am unbearably miserable. My insides are forcing me to recognize the truth I have fought knowing for decades.

I have such a strong and persistent sense of there being more to me than what I am now aware of — more ability, more talent, more knowledge, more memory — I keep having a strong, strong sense that there is more to me.

I think of my grandparents’ house and neighborhood, and I think of the story I wrote about traveling to Denver to see them when I was small, literally living for the times I was with them.

Maybe it was only when I was with them that I could find this other part of myself and allow it to surface a bit. It seems that my mother and I were like conjoined twins, joined together in one part of our brains. And the fact of that connection kept me from moving freely.

I want to know this hidden part of myself and need to know it; for in it lies the key to my survival. But exposing this part of myself is as life-threatening to me as a surgical separation at the brain would be.

I must do it, though, and I will do it; in fact, the separation has already begun. And what I am going to find in this process is the truth I have been searching for over the past 25 years. It must be a powerful force to have needed to be concealed for so long, and to have spent so many years looking for.

I eagerly await its release.