I am so full of remorse, my Sun. I hurt you because i was hurting myself. Because of shame, frustration, anger at myself... For being lost as a mother, for repeatedly witnessing myself make mistakes in my position as your guardian and parent, and punishing myself twofold - for being naive and flawed, and for acting out on you when my naivety had direct consequences on you. Because i always saw the pain in your eyes when i released my fury aimlessly. And that just fueled my spiraling inward more and more. And then i got angry at you when you loved me, adored me infact, i felt it, you so deeply did and you so deeply wanted to save me with your unconditional love. I got angry because i knew i didn't deserve it. And in turn I just kept subconsciously pushing you even more to hate me by layering on more darkness.
I wanted to see how far i can go before you finally turned away,
And the entire time I prayed you would not stop loving me
I am so sorry.
Please be well and at peace always. Know i love you so deeply, that i so badly want to hold you and comfort the child in you. I want to be the mother you are worthy of, even proud of.
Please heal and overcome, rise my Sun. Knowing that i understand now and I'm not trying anymore to wash it away. I even hurt you recently by forcing my self-denial unto you as truth when you attempted to put it infront of me.
I have been so lost for so long
---
I deleted the previous messages because i realized i would possibly be doing more damage than good for you with my words, my expressions - especially during this current very critical and fragile time while you are healing and rising.
There will come a time for this message to reach you. It will be on your own terms and upon you inviting dialogue with me about our relationship and our experiences together as mother and child
Just be well, keep rising, be at peace. Please allow yourself to feel the sincere love and remorse that I feel for you every moment of evey moment.
---
Reflection
I realized this morning that i actually did, infact cause a huge amount of emotional trauma for Sy while he was growing up.
It came to me in a very vivid dream during the most active REM phase, early wee hours of dawn. I've been diving deep inside for the past days, really trying to focus on who i am, what i feel, what o want to and can convey through my artwork, and how I can most honestly and skillfully do it, without the usual forced feeling i have when i actively "try" to do anything. Point is to try NOT to try. I am indeed feeling a change inside of me, along with a lot of raw emotional pain. Suffering, actually. I've never felt so sick, physically, mentally and spiritually ill, as i do now. It's a lot to confront. I've been going about it the wrong way, from the surface - clinically - seeking answers in medicine and diagnosis and treatments. Nothing works. And that's because I'm not confronting myself honestly. There's so much emotional scarring in me, so much that I've choked down and tried to overcome without actually coming face to face with it.
In my dream, it was like an actual lived moment from our past together, my son's and mine, during his younger years, most of which took place in Budapest. Set in the large kitchen of our last apartment on Bem József utca. But the location is always fluid in my dreams, flickering and changing from one moment to the next, from one space to another and allover the place. The setting becomes like a shifting blurred hologram in the background - come to think of it, most details do that - faces, people, "time", shapes, even storylines.
Sy was around 7-8 years old in the moment (eventhough our actual residency in that particular apartment was later in his life, 11-12) and he had just woken in the morning and had come to me as he always did. The difference here in my dream was that there was a swirling of so-called "time" in regards to then and now, as eventhough Sy was a child here, for me it was current actual time, me as I am now, alone in Pécs, falling apart, crumbling. Everything around me a mess, a reflection of my current internal state. Garbage left out, food left out untouched and spoiling, dust, dirt, things not put away, just left strewn about... A manifestation of the very state i try to keep under control always, no matter how messed up I am - an obvious attempt to compensate for or, better put, to conceal the inner turmoil (oh how grave you are, Noémi). I always clean up after myself, telling myself "tomorrow is a new day - i must not let the toxins of today seep into the clean slate of tomorrow" - but they always resurface, nonetheless. So i just clean up again. Many times, infact, during the days.
Tangenting again, return to your story, Noémi. But isn't it all my story? Can't i twist around and loop in and out of parts? It all holds together, anyways, in the grand overarching theme of My Thoughts.
Sy is at the table, where i had left out some... Hmmm, the details here are odd and unlike anything i would have around any time.... Some danishes, some macarons (those preposterously expensive little french UFO shaped sweets with food colouring and millions of variations of flavourings - the symbolic epitome of falseness and grandioseness, luxury and capitalism, in my opion. Perhaps some dirt, or coffee grounds? as well - blurred details, but point is dirt, rotting. I recall busying myself in the kitchen as i usually do in the morning, trying to eradicate the traces of yesterday in a hasty scramble because i had failed to live up to my vow to "clean the slate" the night before.
My kid was poised arms splayed out on the tabletop (dark brown wood here, rough) pushing objects around fidgeting but chill, nonetheless. I asked him if he's hungry, i think, or maybe that came after i noticed him taking his second or third bite of the who-knows-how-many-days-old danish - that's when Maternal Error #1 occurred - "noooooooo! Fuck, shit, noooooooo, what are you dooooing???" i quickly slapped the rotting danish out of his hand and smacked the back of his head with the palm of my hand while yelling at him to spit that shit out into my other hand that i held open under his chin. Fucking overreaction, obviously. And i felt the guilt instantly, upon the words and actions coming out of me, even before i saw the awe, the sadness and fear in my son's eyes. So i scrambled to compensate -"you're hungry, are you hungry? Do you want me to make you oatmeal?" He quietly mmm-hmmmed back at me with fearful sad eyes. Or was it cheerful? He often surfed the evershifting tides of my emotions quite fluidly, as i had taught him to - probably a subconscious attempt on my side to prepare him to handle my massive instability... So i turned back around and continued to clean up from the night before, even more hastily now then before, knowing i had a task in line to then cook my son some oatmeal. But, as usual, I spent too much time trying to "clean the slate" before getting to the oatmeal and again, soon i found my son munching on the shriveled up, shrunken and browned macarons that by now looked about a billion years old, like an archaic relic practically.
Maternal Error #2, if not #3 or 4 or even 5 by now, given all the consequential layerings of micro-fuckups inbetween: again, another outburst and overreaction. Again, so harsh and frightening and ever so condemning for this innocent hungry little boy. And again, the spinning into self and self's darkness started. First anger, frustration, alarm, then self witnessing and embarrassment and regret, more consequential spiraling and lashing out - because i was beating myself and beating my child emotionally in the twisted process.
This is when it all became clear to my conscious self this morning, as i stirred from this vision deeply disturbed. I recalled this to be a "way" i had with my son not infrequently... And it became clear to me how much it hurt him, but i knew that already i knew every single time that i lost my shit on him that i was hurting him, that i was angry only at myself, and that i had allowed way to much liberty for my lack of self control. This is why i had the circle tattoo with 2 dot steps towards the third large dot in the center - after one of my biggest such unleashing episodes when we had returned to Toronto after this final year in Budapest, i started to try to manage the outbursts by drawing this symbol on the inside of my left forearm, to remind myself to take two deep breaths and center myself on the third when i felt rage coming on. Rage, yes rage is a good word for it. Raging wild mess of a wounded animal. Dare i say the ruins of years and years of tolerating and dealing with the same tune from my own mother. I must have been unconsciously mimicking her, for that is was i was familiar with, that was the blueprint i was given for reacting: overreacting.
But I'm not blaming, nor seeking to excuse myself. I raised myself with the very value, or vow, or whatever the appropriate word for that is that i can't seem to grab out of my vocabulary cloud storage in this moment -- that we all have a choice as children to our somehow abusive parents, that we can choose one of two paths: to repeat or to reject. I would always believe that those who chose to repeat were idle, too wounded, too lost, to ignorant to see how their parents had hurt them. And that those who chose to reject (thinking myself to be of this hierarchy) were more enlightened, more observant, stronger.
But now, as I look back at my years in my 46th measure of the otherwise immeasurable "time", i realize there is no distinction bet the two. That there is not really an active choice. Even if we empower ourselves to think we can overcome. You can't overcome without accepting. You cant overcome without forgiveness. Anger is not the path to overcoming. Rejection is a rejection of self. A rejection of truth. A rejection of critical analysis. It's purely reactionary, just as the unleashings, the episodes of harmful outbursts. The tantrums, for that is what they are: tantrums. Me, the little girl who just swallowed it all as a child and tried so hard to not lose my mother's love, me, the scared little girl who just wanted to avoid all that yelling and drama, to run away from it... Here i am now as an adult throwing those tantrums that i ought to have been throwing back then. And my mother's behaviour me, with us,my brother and I, was exactly the same: tantruming little Manyi, who just so badly wanted to be loved by her mother. It's what i always saw in Panni Mama when studying the photos of her. A coldness underneath her warmth. Anyu would never admit to any pain when i questioned her about her relationship with her mother. She always said they were happy. But she also never failed to point out that Gyurka, mt uncle, was by far Panni Mama's favourite. I will never cease to suspect that there was much more darkness to that relationship than what my mother chose to recall. We are all sick from a poison that seeps into us very early on in our lives.
Me, i learned to forgive my mother when i was taking care of her after dementia set in. She was at my mercy, and i was at hers - finally, the way she had intended it to be. All those years of me rejecting her and her attempts to control me with her money, with her guilt, with he mindgames.... They finally came to a point where i had no choice because she knew how merciful i was, i am. She knew my heart is pure, just like my son's heart. But i must brush all that negative insight aside, because it's not going to lead me anywhere good, as i learned along the way. I unleashed so much anger onto my mom while i was caring for her - i abused my position as a necessity to her , just as i had done with my son when he was little. But with my mom, i abused it knowingly. I wanted her to get it, to see what she had put me through. It was not right of me. With my son, however, i was lost. Simply lost. Not innocent, but lost. And it was perhaps only through the process of learning to have mercy on my mother that i elevated myself as a parent. But by then it was too late. The rejection had already set in. But look at this Noémi, you're making yourself the victim here. Pause. Its not about you being rejected - this is about your son being harmed, about him hurting, about him becoming deeply ill over the years because of your lack of self control.
I am not done analyzing this yet. This is phase one. But i now can acknowledge what i did to Sy over the years. He tried to tell me before he spun into that unreachable space. But i rejected it. I disqualified him. Even in my attempts to try to accept and acknowledge his claims about me being emotionally abusive throughout his childhood - for i actually took it to heart, but it destroyed me, so i guess my survival instinct set in again by miraging it all, by trying to focus only on the rosey pinks and rainbows and unicorns of our time shared as mother and son. But in the end i pushed Sy deeper. Deeper into confusion by forcing him to question his own lived perceptions. I'm an asshole. I was an asshole. There's no rejoicing in hazing of memories. It's all just a desperate attempt to avoid, rather than confront. But the avoidance turned out to be much more toxic than the pain of confrontation. Outright destructive. And my deepest regret, the most painful of pains, is knowing that my son had to lose his mind in order for me to see. Shame, shame, shame, Noémi. Shame.
