my mother *still* resents

my need for anybody but her.

her need to be the center of somebody's universe - anybody's universe - was so great that it became a vortex that tried to suck me in, tried to consume me.

Any time I tried to express a need of my own, tried to escape, tried to be independent, autonomous - she resented it. Became angry.

By her lights I was selfish and inconsiderate for ever needing anything that didn't benefit her in some way, reflect back on her. Like my achievements with music - it was something she'd always wanted for herself, so when I made some inroads, she fed off that heady wind of success like a crack addict inhaling a snootful (not that I know anything about *that*, just the image that first came to mind.)

She abandoned me when I showed any interest in others; to this day, when I ask about my father, when I asked if she'd make copies of photos she had of him and me together (you know, he died over 20 years ago, and I have almost nothing left of him - much was stolen when I got robbed 10 years ago, and all I have left is a mechanical pencil he used in college, plus somewhere a set of compasses that I used for a little bit myself in my architectural drafting classes)

...she got angry and upset that I wanted the photos because it wasn't about her. Fuck. Like they're competing, long after he's dead, after she's never once, in 20 fucking years asked me how I am, how I feel, how it affected me to have my father die when I was so young. All she can think of is that I'm not asking for pictures of her.

Well, yeah, mom - does it occur to you that dad is dead, that pictures are all I have left of him? Whereas you, you're right here in front of me. Though you might as well not be for all the communication we have.

Her need is so great, and she doesn't see my needs at all.

My needs come to her as a - what - an offense. A crime. As if I am somehow hurting her by needing something that she can't give. As if I am intentionally inflicting mental anguish on her by needing anything at all of my very own, anything at all that has nothing to do with her.

She set me up with a room of my own; she set me up to have the kind of privacy she never experienced growing up in a one-room cinder-block house with two parents and two younger brothers.

She resented me when I shut her out - when I took advantage of all that highly-vaunted secrecy and privacy to actually have some space of my own.

So even though she made the actual, tangible effort, she was never able to make the mental leap that recognized that my experience was different from hers.

She never seemed to be able to grasp that we were not one and the same person - that I was and am a separate being, a separate human with totally separate feelings, needs and desires from her.

Maybe that's where this saying (and behavior?) of 'It's not all about you' comes from - those of us who think it's 'all about us' grew up with parents (or at least one parent) who acted exactly this way.

In other words, the parent could not see us as separate. They constantly blurred, or ignored entirely, the line between 'me' and 'she', such that there was no line. There was no boundary, no border, no separation.

****
Now, after all this time, I think she finally doesn't care any more. Or, she does what all children of alcoholics do: Blocks it from her mind. Pretends it never happened. See no evil, speak no evil, whatever. Denial and dissociation are techniques I *should* have learned from her as a cradle language. Or maybe I did, it's just that now I choose them consciously as ways to deal with old emotions until the right conditions are available for me to finally cope with things the way I actually need to.