chica mia, mija querida

Just wunnering. . . .

I have had a particular tough day today.  I was in an old gmail email account that I don't really use anymore. For years, I used it solely for emai listservs. I stopped using it for actual email that I check daily when I moved to CA twelve years ago. Over the years, I would toggle over to check on a few list servs I watch but I have migrated any listservs I want to follow, and they are fewer and further between these days (email lists are getting old fashioned!) to my main email account.

So I am in this email account I opened around 2000, back when you had to have an invite to have a gmail account -- that long ago! -- and suddenly I see a couple emails sent from my daughter in 2012 that I had never seen.

I read them. Get this. She wrote that she loves me and she knows it hurts me that she shuns me (my language here) but she's working on connecting with me but would I please respect her privacy.

Sure, Katie Joy, I'll respect your privacy just as soon as you tell me why you shun me, for over 17 years. YOu made your cruel decision when you were still a child. In Steiner's model of human development, you aren't a fully adult human until around 28. And its been long time since you were 28 so you slash my heart every single day for a choice you made as a child.  And you talk to your dad, who, according to Hennepin County Child Protection, a child therapist specializing in sexual abuse, the Minneapolis Police, the Omaha Police and a MD in MN who examined you, incested you but I am the one you shun.   I still have the Hennepin County Child Protection report and later reports when Hennepin County appointed a guardian ad litem for Katie and ordered a full family study by Hennepin County psychologists. So I am not slandering anyone. I am referencing legal government documentation.

I think you have blocked out your memories of what he did. Paul, that therapist you saw for a few years, told me child predators count on the memory playing tricks. He told me he believed your dad was actually planting his evil onto you by suggesting I made it up. Say, do you remember when your dad suggested it was one of your male cousins, as if you didn't know it was your dad.

Is that why you shun me, because your father incested you and you have lied to yourself into believing I planted such ideas?  If that is your truth, write and tell me. And I will let go. I won't let go without you telling me why you have come close to destroying my life.  No, you have not come close. Your decision to shun me has destroyed me.  I am in emotional agony all the time, tearing up, crying for no apparent reason.

I had just finished a masters, I was launching a new career that I loved and then you shunned me and I fell apart.  I am like a baby bird fallen out of the next, all broken and unable to heal myself.

The thing about one of your August 2012 emails that I only just read this week:  it was my birthday week but instead of happy birthday you coldly threatened me with a restraining order you could not get in IL since I am, um, in California, far far away.  If you want to really have no contact or not hear from me, you really ought to stop making legal threats like calling the cops to have me arrested when someone who works in your former work building let me in -- I could have found him if the cops had come. I didn't care about the cops. Chicago police was very unlikely to show up for hours, if at all, and they would not have arrested me. I waited until you called the cops on me, and I was behaving calmly, because I wanted to see if you would actually call the cops on me when you were the only one screaming and hysterical. I was not the one acting crazy.  And then to read your restraining order threat i those August emails -- its just so cold and completely inconsistent with you statement that you love me, that you are sorry your shunning hurts me, that you are working (It had been ten years as of 2012 and now its been 16 years. . . ). . .

My mom had lots of sayings that she tended to trot out at the wrong moments, sneering at me and her other children when we were hurt and seeking her comfort, something my mom never offered. One of her sayings, one I musta heard her say, to me or others, a bajillion times was 'you get more flies with honey than you do with vinegar".

Making threats that reference the legal system, to your mother, is the way an ungrateful, unloving daughter behaves. You could have said you didn't want contact without threatening me.

so the other day, reading those 2012 emails (and how the heck did I ever miss them and it is so puzzling to me that I suddenly found them. . . I think I archived them but did not read them in 2012 for they were still bolded in my email box, the old one I haven't used regularly since 2006.. . but how would you know?)  I know you don't like me sending you notes and leaving voice messages but my behavior is not sick. I am acting like a mother who gave everything she had to give to her only child and that child shuns me.  I have been polite.

I did leave a couple wild and angry voice messages after I found your 2012 legal threats and the "I know this hurts you and I love you".  If you cannot treat me as if you love me, don't say you love me. And please, for your sake and mine, don't ever threaten me with legal shit. It is so cold. It's a hella lot like, um, your cruel father, the one our marriage counselor said had no threshold of decency. Looks like maybe your threshold of decency is also nonexistent.

Tell me why. Tell me why.

Oh, and slander?  Truth is the only defense to slander. If I am reciting Hennepin /county /child Protection documentation, that is my truth.

WTF did I do?  I've been thinking a bit about Rob Jack. He was a good kid and I liked him, and I imagine I would have liked him no matter what. ?But I really liked him because he said to you, in front of me, more than once, that it hurt him to hear you constantly put me down, to constantly complain about me when he never saw or heard me doing anything awful. Like you and he would spend time with me and he would think I was a perfectly good person but when you were alone with him, you'd denigrate me in such ugly terms. No wonder Rob broke up with you, for you showed him how unkind you could be.  Sure I have flaws, all humans do, but being cruel and lacking a threshold of decency is not one of my flaws.