Hitting Bottom

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When I was in my mid-thirties, I was showing the man I was dating at the time memorabilia that I had brought to Los Angeles from New York City, where I had been raised. Included in the mix were a pair of thirty-five-year-old hospital bracelets: one about the size of my wrist, the other so tiny that I could barely fit two fingers in it. Yellowed with age, I could just make out the matching identifying info “Girl Baccala”. I knew that the tiny bracelet was from when I was born. Odd thing was, I’d never consciously made the connection to the adult-sized bracelet. “That one was for your mother.” he said matter-of-factly. I burst into tears, overwhelmed with a sense of loss, even though my mother was still very much alive, and we kept in touch. The sense of loss was for the maternal bonding she had failed to establish with me once we left the hospital together as mother and daughter, and for a childhood deprived of the physical and emotional safety and nurturing needed for an infant to develop into independent adulting.

You see throughout my infancy my mother dissociated from me. Instead of maintaining fairly consistent physical and/or visual contact with me, she routinely left me in my crib in another room of our basement apartment for hours on end, following an extreme interpretation of the cry-it-out method that entered our culture after my great-grandmother lost four children in two days during a plague in Sicily. More on this in my short story “Rose the Jew”. As a general rule, my mother tended to me only if it was time for my bottle (Breast feeding is for sissies.) or if I needed a change of diapers. Instead of coming to me and hugging me when I cried for her in distress, she turned up the television or radio to drown me out. To soothe her own crippling anxiety, my mother chose a habit that she’d picked up as a teen to rebel against her own negligent mother. Ironically it’s one that provides oral stimulation similar to sucking on mother’s nipple: smoking cigarettes. 

Since my mother had been subjected to crib abandonment herself, I suspect that my distress was a trigger for her. Likely the more that I cried from the other room, the more that I dredged up her own dreadful experience of being ignored when distressed and crying for comfort. Instead of realizing that she had the power to change the outcome— and heal herself in the process— she blocked me out, never stopping to think about the devastating damage she was causing to my developing brain and nervous system. Infants and toddlers are not designed to be separated from their mothers for extended periods and then ignored when they cry out in distress, as anyone who’s spent time watching our chimp cousins can attest. I understand that primary caregivers who are busy as heck need to put baby down sometimes. The last thing I want to do is chastise mothers juggling work and motherhood. If anything I hope that my story drives home the point that as a civilized society we have an obligation to provide caregivers with the emotional and tangible resources to fulfill their responsibilities to their dependents: nurturing them through adolescence and beyond.

Also, I understand that the weaning process includes self-soothing training. However, it is critical to the development of the infant that the process be done gradually and at the right stages of development. Otherwise it completely backfires and the infant grows up to be yet another angst-ridden human unable to self-soothe in a healthy way, ergo susceptible to a whole host of unhealthy ways to cope: cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, dominating and exploiting other humans from afar, just to name a few.

When I managed to escape my crib and crawl across two rooms to be with my mother, she promptly returned me to my crib, eventually confining me in it with a carriage strap. As a result, my resting mode became one of existential dread as I was separated from my lifeline, confined in an unnatural environment, alone and helpless. As far as my little infant brain could tell, I’d been left for dead. 

My mother’s rejection and maltreatment of me thwarted my emotional development beyond words. For starters, my relationship with my mother was fubar, make that FUBAR. Without my mother physically and emotionally bonding with me or perceiving me as a lovable, valuable, investible extension of herself, I was little more than a burden to her, especially in a patriarchal culture that reduces females to a lower tribal status straight out of the gate, so to speak. I touch on my mother’s lack of empathy in Pee & Circumstance. Without my mother’s protection I was an easy target for males desperate to prove their manliness by controlling tribal resources, females included. By the time I entered first grade I had been subjected to emotional, spiritual and physical abuse. As I grew, not only would my mother condone my abuse at the hands of damaged aggro members of our tribe, double-victimizing me for their inability to control their rage and aggression, on more than one occasion she actually aided in the abuse. When I was a fifteen, my mother helped lock me out of the house and then mocked me as I attempted to get back in, triggering my crib trauma by separating herself from me in my state of distress and responding callously to my appeal to her humanity. This type of abuse and worse would continue throughout my adolescence and beyond, until I could afford to move out in my twenties. 

I was burdened with a deep-rooted misperception that I was inherently repulsive, ugly at my core. I carried a visceral sense of self-loathing that was compounded by the abuse by those around me that I describe above. Scapegoating exists because aggro humans often excel at “making a killing”. Desperate enablers admire this trait so much that they allow aggros to show off their predatory prowess by abusing their victims with impunity. Damaged humans in general need someone to dump their ugly on. In my teen years I developed intense anger toward my mother for failing to nurture and protect me. One of my biggest regrets is being verbally abusive to her then. I had yet to understand the complexity of the situation, or how my mother had been a pawn to the patriarchy and a victim of crib trauma herself.

Also burdened with a deep-rooted sense of futility and neediness, I was susceptible to abuse by anyone who held power over me, especially males. The archaic gender roles and repeated teachings throughout my childhood that a rage-prone, über-manly-man entity rules the universe and is righteously above criticism, conditioned me for easy exploitation by manipulative, callous males driven by an insatiable need to dominate. I tended to shrink around forceful, adversarial, intimidating energy, especially in enclosed environments in which survival is at stake, such as office environments. Throughout my career, I’ve found that way more often than not corporate cultures are woefully lacking in protective, nurturing energy. Attempting to obtain resources while removed from Nature triggered both the distressed mindset of a helpless infant in a basement apartment, and the submissive position I was expected to maintain in my tribe’s house of worship, where decorated males run the show from an elevated platform while the rest of us sit or kneel down below, repeating what we are told or vocalizing only in agreement until we were rewarded for our submissiveness with a taste of food and drink, followed by permission to leave. In my desperate, reparative quest for mother’s love, I was even more responsive to herd mentality than the average child. Expressing my disagreements with my tribe’s book of misogynistic fairy tales would’ve left me ostracized and removed from tribal resources. Already considered lowly because of my gender and lineage (born to the daughter of our tribal matriarch, not the prized son) I had been brainwashed to equate challenging the status quo with putting my very existence at stake with food insecurity and expulsion. Who wants to end up worse than Eve: expelled from Eden ALONE? 

Despite being an excellent student with an IQ in the top two percentile, I struggled to initiate and complete even relatively simple tasks in non-academic environments, due to crippling performance anxiety and claustrophobia from my crib trauma. My first experience solving a problem shattered my whole perception of myself navigating my immediate surroundings. Initiating and successfully completing my part of the single most critical task of my life: connecting with and appealing to mother to share her resources with me, resulted in solitary confinement separated from food, Nature and my lifeline. I deeply and subconsciously associated conceiving and implementing a plan to reach a goal, especially under pressure, with courting death. I had a hyperactive response to stimuli, and difficulty discerning what stimuli around me was safe and necessary, and what could be ignored, aka sensory disinhibition.

As I grew into a young woman, my mother viewed me as competition. Instead of being proud of my abilities and achievements, she was threatened by them. Likewise by my independent streak and critical thinking. It’s as though she could only tolerate me if I were perfectly aligned with her worldview and unable to leave. No longer able to strap me in the crib, she now resorted to emotional manipulation such as guilt. When I decided to relocate across the country for post-graduate studies, she boycotted the family send-off from the airport and spoke derisively about the top university I was attending. This was her very un-evolved way of saying that she didn’t want me to leave. That’s the most heart-wrenching thing about damaged people in our lives, isn’t it? They are incapable of treating us well even though they desperately want us to stick around. 

It wasn’t until I enlisted the gentle and informed guidance of a licensed psychotherapist that I was able to begin the healing process. It’s taken over a dozen years of regular dialectical behavior therapy sessions just to be here now, writing about among other things, my mother’s maltreatment of me and how it affected me. I needed to clearly, fully, and deeply understand that it was unnatural and wrong, and that my successful attempt as an infant to connect with my mother face-to-face IRL should’ve resulted in the reward of comfort, security, and adoration, as Nature intended.   

I needed to explore the vast array of emotional issues and cultural forces that drove my mother to suppress her Gaia-given maternal instinct toward her own daughter who, of all of her children, physically resembled her the most. My mother was very much a product of her environment, severely compromised after being subjected to crib abandonment as an infant, and then raised in a toxic, patriarchal culture that idolizes male rage and tyranny. After three generations of damaged mothers dissociating from their infant children in distress, the vital nurturing component of our culture had been decimated. Enter callous capitalistic and cultural influences. Thousands of humans alive and long dead, near and far, regularly influenced my mother’s behavior as they reduced her to worshipper, or viewer, or consumer. They exploited the sense of trust she felt because either they manipulated her when she was just a child, or she felt as though they were in her living room with her. They used sophisticated means with sizable resources to get into her head and influence her behavior. Infants who are subjected to crib abandonment are susceptible to “indiscriminate friendliness” with all of the naïveté the condition implies. Yet not one human in all of this was incentivized to guide my mother back to her innate maternal state of caring for her young. No one helped her understand that she had the power to make a positive impact on my life, and that it was her priority and responsibility to do just that. The system was not set-up for that.  

The tobacco farmer in Kentucky, for example, was too busy providing for his own family the only way he knew how. I can’t begrudge him for that. It is the cannibalistic and co-dependent paradigm of greed-driven extreme capitalism, and the breakdown of community, that failed us both, and a cult that exploited my mother’s emotional issues. As a human without deep pockets in my diapers, I was collateral damage. My mother had been deliberately blinded to her own intrinsic power, including the fact that she could make a powerful, long-lasting positive impact on the precious little human that she had carried inside of her for nine months. All she had to do was pull herself away from frivolous distractions and make her breasts available to her infant daughter. This act didn’t even require pure altruism as physical contact between a mother and child is a symbiotic pleasure, providing a natural high for both of them. It would’ve been a much healthier and productive choice for her than cigarettes or being a passive observer to fictional worlds on a screen in her living room. By the time I was born, our cult had roughly eleven thousand hours of my mother’s undivided attention in ceremonial gatherings at our house of worship, not to mention at informal tribal gatherings. Why was it that at no point did she learn that birthing a healthy, intelligent daughter was a miracle of nature and cause for celebration and reverence, and that her daughter was a valuable asset as a stand-alone, not only as means to attract males who would subscribe to cult teachings and with whom she would birth at least one prized male?

Only through taking a deep dive into such influencing factors was I able to forgive my mother for her cruelty and neglect. Her mental health was dealt a dreadful blow during her own infancy, and then her brain was hijacked by other factors way before I was born. Humans who operated remotely, who never witnessed how their efforts affected her daily behavior or enabled her to ignore her infant were granted access to her intimate space via electronics and technology. My mother dissociated from the most beautiful, precious part of herself: the phenomenal power of a mother’s love for her child, and the power of nurturing energy in general, including its capacity to heal the broken inner-child of one’s own psyche. Through dehumanizing me, my mother dehumanized herself. 

Being in the presence of a mother and infant daughter disturbed her. My mother once slammed the door on the face of a neighbor who’d brought her infant daughter over for the first time. Decades later she responded in a similarly anti-social way toward a relative who popped in with her infant daughter. Ok, maybe they could’ve called first (This was long before texting.) but still.

Forgiveness has made space for perspective and gratitude. The problem that my mother and I faced is timeless and universal. Had I been born in China when it was a one-child nation, for example, there’s a good chance my mother would’ve completely abandoned me like so many desperate, disenfranchised Chinese mothers did with their infant daughters when they felt that their own survival hinged on raising a son. Had I been born in a region where female genital mutilation is practiced… Let’s just say I’m lucky to be alive with my entire vagina intact. I’m grateful that I possessed the tenacity and whatever else it took to survive such a precarious infancy, childhood and adolescence with Nature’s intended nurturer and protector incapacitated and dissociated from me. That is no small feat, especially in NYC during one of its most dangerous eras. 

The bond between mother and her children, like that of Gaia and us humans, is a sacred one that should be treated as such. Unnatural interference from desperate, damaged and depraved dominators whose co-dependent parasitic existence is contingent on exploiting their fellow humans’ weaknesses is driving humans to dehumanize one another, dehumanizing the entire species in the process. We need as many people as possible to be emotionally healthy and properly socialized. Those who have been damaged by trauma, especially during their early development, owe it to themselves, their fellow humans to look inward and do the work involved in healing themselves, getting back in touch with their empathy, and reconnecting to Nature. The future of humanity and the Planet depends on it. MB

Thank you Attachment Parenting International for sharing my story with your subscribers.