immediately,

on re-reading the previous, I am shocked and appalled by the language at the end. How quickly the parental voices step in to overwrite, edit and negate. I almost deleted it, edited it out; but why? Who am I protecting? If someone sees these words, someone who knows me, will they be shocked? Hurt? Repulsed?

And do I care? Because, if said person were involved enough in my life to have been privy to these feelings in the first place, I might never have had to have the feelings.

Does that make sense? In other words, if there'd ever been someone around who cared enough for me to talk at all about any of this stuff, it would never have accumulated into this giant, mooshed-together mountainous blob of stuff that's too big for anybody to deal with, let alone little old me with my tiny, rusty, bent-handled teaspoon. I do my best, but still.

It's about the layers, baby. First there's a layer of grief; then a layer of anger. Then a layer of sandstone - no, wait, that's shale, the oil-bearing strata. Never mind.

So then after the anger, there's another layer of grief, then a giggle, then something completely different. You see, they're all compressed there together, like growth rings, or maybe it really is like shale, where millions of years worth of layer upon layer upon infinite layer of organic debris is compressed, gradually, by its own weight (and the weight of hundreds of tons of rock on top of that) into this entirely new substance that is no longer the leaves, or any one thing - it's this gloopy, sticky, tarry, undifferentiated mass (for some reason I find myself thinking of that moment in Ghostbusters where Bill Murray is trying to shake some ectoplasm off his fingers and saying, "It slimed me," in a voice of complete and utter disgust).

The weight? My mother. Or, more accurately, her disregard for my feelings. I think it's that that translated into the 'lead' feeling - the sense that she was actually sitting on me, in some way, sitting on my feelings, blocking them by her very disregard. That her disinterest, in and of itself, was this sort of force that dammed the feelings up inside me (erg, just had 'talk to the hand' pop into my head, yuck, massive cultural disrespect meme, blech, yuck, get it off me).

It's this force that I've internalized, this resistance, this - blockage? Disrespect? Trying to find the right word. It's as if I have to pry her loose from me, shove her away, disconnect her, break her hold on my mind/body/psyche/spirit. I keep having the image of Sigourney Weaver in Aliens pop into my head, the parasite bursting out of her body cavity. The metaphor of the eggs being laid inside her body is not lost on me - the parent can lay the 'eggs', sow the seeds of discontent, by how they treat you.

This is crucial, understanding this almost Pavlovian mechanism by which we learn to relate to other humans: It is entirely unconscious, entirely unwilled. It is entirely situational and circumstantial; think of the child raised by wolves who thinks he's a wolf even though his arms a legs clearly differ from his wolf 'brothers and sisters'. The human mind is infinitely adaptable (which, of course, can be both a feature and a bug). The fact that we can adapt means that we often do adapt, even if it's not in our long-term best interests to do so. The organism simply responds to its environment the way it learned to over many millions of years of trial and error. The ultimate survival mechanism.