Bad = Real, Good = Illusion? (TW)

Hi Mike and Johnny-Jack,

Thank you both for writing. I appreciate the support that both of you are showing.

This morning (or was it last night? ), I told Allegra that I had mixed feelings about her speaking on behalf of Deborah and me. On one hand, she's the most functional of all of us and is best at dealing with the outside. On the other hand, she's 17 years old, and she should be able to be 17 without having to do all of this caretaking.

It also occurred to me that Deborah probably holds the bulk of our suicidal feelings, as well as collateral damage from abuse our mother experienced at the hands of our grandmother. Our mother was a master at somatizing feelings so that she didn't have to face them. She married at 21 to get out of her parents' house, and four months later she was pregnant with us.

None of this solved her problems, of course, and to make things worse, our grandmother constantly interfered in our parents' early married life--criticizing my father for spending three cents too much on a bottle of vinegar. Hiring an interior decorator to furnish their apartment, and choosing (or telling the decorator to choose) mid-century furniture when my mother preferred colonial.

Things like this--so many things like this--Deborah and I have stored in the body from our infancy and earlier. I hold emotional memories from gestation onward, and Deborah holds what our mother was already holding in her body from before this. Rachel holds anger: Our anger at our mother, our anger at our grandmother, our mother's anger at our grandmother....and probably our grandmother's anger. It's a terrible way to live.

This is a lot to deal with. We have to pace ourselves.

Charity and others