My Mother

My mother died on July the 16th of 2016. That is a fact and I can deal on one level or another with simple facts. They have no more power over me than any other fact in my life. Like the fact that the walls of my home are solid. I can see this very simply by looking out the window and seeing that the wind is blowing very hard outside but I am protected by my walls.

What I can't deal with is when the facts illicit emotions. I am unprepared for the strain of feeling emotions. The people around me tend to forget that, emotionally, I am only 5 years old. Five year old emotions locked in a 55 year old body. I have a lot of knowledge concerning all sorts of subjects, but I lack the wisdom that is supposed to come with age to use it properly. It is like I am reading a book about doing home repairs but the pictures in the book do not match what I am seeing in my home.

At the time of her death I relied totally on my mother to get me through literally everything. I am not just talking about the material things like a roof over my head and food in my kitchen, but she told me how to act and react to the world. I had a person that came into my home and bathed me and cleaned up for me. When forced to deal with the world on my own I would run away to my apartment and wait for my mother to make things right. Because I had her to make the world safe for me I didn't grow up.

When she died I was so lost and alone that I became the only thing I could to protect myself. I became rage. I lashed out at anything or anyone that tried to change my world. All rational thought was banished from my mind and I was on the attack 24/7. I wanted everything to be like it had been, but most of all I wanted my mom to come back. I didn't understand that she could not come back from death. Why not I had done it so many times, so if she truly loved me she should be able to do that, right? So I waited for her to come back and during that time of waiting I lost everything. I lost my home and my cat. I had and was nothing.

Well not quite nothing because I had Google to keep me company. I started listening to the suggestions from the map program about taking pictures of where I was. During January through March of 2017 I wandered blindly around the city taking pictures and uploading them to Google maps. For a time while I was homeless I gladly allowed Google to replace what I had lost. I would take my pictures and upload them. I would even be given rewards for each picture in the form of points towards the local guide program. I didn't have a place to sleep or food to eat but I had my pictures. I slowly began to forget that I had been anything else. In my mind I had always been out there just taking my pictures and uploading them. I wasn't happy, but I was content.

This lasted until the third time I was beaten in the park where I lived. I was in serious need of repair and had to clue how to get that accomplished. I knew that I could not trust people because the world had shown me that. Both feet were broken and I could not walk on them without extreme pain. That morning a man saw me trying to get up and offered to help me. I lashed out at him with a diatribe of hateful words that had worked for me in the past to keep humans away from me, but he persisted. I do not know who he was only that he was an APD officer and that he could take me someplace to get the repairs I needed. Something inside me broke when he asked about my family and at that moment I felt destroyed. I remembered everything I had lost, but largest in my mind was that my mother was dead. I decided, at that moment, that I would give this nameless man my trust, because my mother had trusted a man like him before and not been hurt for that trust.

I still have massive problems dealing with emotions. Through various means I have been informed that even if I can't recall every traumatic event from my past, on some level my mind does remember and reacts to outside stimulus telling my body what it must do to stay safe. No matter how many times I am told that death is permanent, I still refuse to believe that it is final. I have survived death so many times that I feel anyone should be able to. What I do know is that my mother didn't survive her death and now she is gone from my world.

I wrote this on the second anniversary of her death.

Mother's Day

July the 16th is when I celebrate Mother's Day. That is the day my mother died. I was not allowed to be part of her life during the last six months of her life. She was my mother and my advocate. She helped me to navigate through the world because I was lost. I didn't even remember that she was my mother all the time. I just knew that this nice lady would come over and take me places. She always believed in me and made the world safe for me. The level of cruelty involved in the decision that I should not be allowed to see her is astronomical. She was literally all I had.