A billion things to write about

I had a blog. I planned it for several months before starting it. I even bought the domain. It was supposed to center on work-life and be a public platform on which I'd develop my thought leadership.

And then I burnt out. Or something like that. I call it 'I was fatigued', because I wasn't and am not burnt out. My brain functions alright (maybe not equally as rapidly as before I began my two-week sick leave, but it hasn't been impaired cognitively), I sleep alright, I am looking forward to going back to work to some extent (I hate that qualificator due to its overuse in my BA classes by eighteen-year-olds too young to discuss the inevitability of WWI. But I digress).

What fatigued me, though, was the sudden and unexpected influx of memories of childhood traumas caused by or related to my mother. Given that my sister (younger of course, my mother's pet) knows the address of my other blog, I cannot speak too freely about anything related my upbringing. I have published just one post on that blog, the purpose of which was just to get me started, and already my sister had relayed one line from it to my mother, who promptly asked me why I had written such a thing (something along the lines of 'I was expected to get straight As,' which apparently was a heinous and blasphemous thing to say. Albeit true, not that my mother could ever concede).

As a teenager, I read a novel by Delphine de Vigan called Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit, loosely translated to 'Nothing can stand against the night.' It's a novel about her mother, and on the back cover, a critic had written that de Vigan succeeds in what so many other try and fail, the most difficult of subjects to write of: one's own mother. I often think about this. Why is a mother such a sacred being? Or is it, across all cultures? I hear in some African tribes babies and kids travel from hut to hut, are nursed by whoever is lactating, and become a part of the village ('it takes a village'). I don't know if 'mother' is still as revered a character in these settings, or perhaps even more so, but the Christian depiction of the sacred mother naturally and easily comes from Virgin Mary (as does this ridiculous concept of immaculate conception and millennia of sexual perversion and female suffering. But I digress), and so all mothers in the Christendom are by default sacred.

During one English class in secondary school we were throwing out words that we felt sounded beautiful. After, we discussed why: whether it was simply the sound of the words themselves, or the connotation they held. Our teacher noted towards the end that 'mother' is often mentioned because that evokes beautiful things; no one in our class had uttered it. I remember thinking that I'd love for 'mother' to be a beautiful word to me, but it wasn't. And I think that now that my mind is bein inundated by sore memories of past, I must write about them.

Why a billion things? I cannot confine myself to one topic or theme only. Work-life interests me and contains a multitude of topics to write about, but I cannot reorient myself to it before I start on this topic, the topic being my mother. I hope to move on or intermittently switch onto other themes, so that this truly is a billion things. The name came to me as I sighed on why I couldn't get my other blog going; there's just a billion things to talk about...

Why a public blog? I don't trust that my employer doesn't have access to my private word documents, I don't want to use email (the mere thought is ghastly), I love writing in hand but rarely do because I know that once I start I go on for ages and still don't manage to get it all out; and I suppose I like the idea of putting it all out there. Anonymously, yes, for I don't seek out to hurt my family, but I should love for someone to find this blog and find comfort or at least an ounce of solace in knowing they're not alone.

So, a list of traumatic moments:

• My mother would refer to me as 'Voldemort' to my sister when we were younger. When I asked about it as an adult, my mother laughed it off, saying that it was the only way she could make my younger sister understand why I was in such a foul mood.
• I would say that with our two-year age difference, if I was capable of being that horrible, then my sister should have at least had the mental maturity to understand that without thinking of me as a murderous monster trying to kill Harry Potter.
• One time when I was seven and terribly shy, I was invited to a birthday party by a girl in another class. I didn't know anyone in her class so I didn't give the invite to my mother so that she wouldn't make me go. I must have told her about the invite on the day, after the party, because I remember her screaming the word 'hermit' behind my closed door in the evening, when I was trying to sleep. I was held by my father, but I was terrified. I didn't know what a hermit was, but it sounded bad enough shouted at me from behind a closed door, from the mouth of my furious mother.
• Now, as I think about this later, I realize my mother was angry because she was embarrassed. She probably worried that the girl's parents thought poorly of her for not RSVPing, which may well have been true. But how I would have handled it, how I would have wanted for her to handle it, would be to sit the child down, say that it's all okay and that of course you don't have to go to a birthday party if you don't want to and that you would never be forced to against your will. And that you should always feel comfortable telling your parents anything. And then talk about why I didn't want to go, understand that I was just so incredibly shy that I was nearly paralyzed by fear, and then work on that.
• My family usually spent a week or two in South Europe during the summer. I loved the days, we'd swim in the pool and the ocean and eat ice cream. The evenings were usually full of anxiety for me, since I was very little. My parents got quite drunk each night and especially those summers when I still didn't speak any English (not my first language), I was scared because I worried no other adult around me could help me. So I often pleaded with my parents that we leave the restaurant and go back to the hotel, on occasion suggesting they stay in the hotel bar if need be. My mother would usually get angry with me for trying to control her and the family, and once she shouted this at me: 'Don't turn your sister into a neurotic like you!' Again, a word I did not know and that scared me all the more.
• Speaking of control, I recall several instances where my mother has blamed me for trying to control her. It could be about eating, drinking, holiday plans, switching lights off at a hotel, anything. This led me to overcorrect to the opposite direction, to where I never made any decisions, kept double-checking everyone else's decisions ten times over, was afraid to suggest any activities or restaurants to friends for fear of them thinking I am bossy, and also feeling a terrible sense of culpability in whether the activity or restaurant suggested by me was good. 
• I will admit I was a bossy little girl up to school age. Then shyness kicked in, and as I wrote that out, I realized that I don't know why that happened. Or, I was shy even before school, and maybe it's more of a getting-to-know things situation than a case of incapacitating shyness. In any case, my 'bossiness' was really a cry for some rules and boundaries, some sense of security. My parents drank a lot, I referred to it as alcoholism which they refused on the account of 'we don't miss work,' so that was the end of that conversation, each time I tried to revive it. The drinking was preceded and/or followed by fighting, and a few times a year by mother threw my father out. My father kept an apartment on the side for fourteen years of my life as a safe space so my mother could throw him out. I don't think that's normal. So what this was, was that my father had bought his apartment as a bachelor, then the eventual family lived in it for two years when I was little, and after we moved out, he never rented it out or sold it. My mother's excuse was variably what a) she had so many great memories from there; b) there was so much stuff in there that it would be a hassle to clean it up; c) that one day we would have to temporarily move out from our actual home for a few months while the plumbing is renewed.
• b) and c) are true and happened, c four years after my father had passed so we kept the apartment on the side for eighteen years, paying a monthly maintenance fee of at least a couple hundred euros, amounting to some 43,000 euros in total (minimum; I am convinced the cost is notably higher than that). If that money had instead been invested in stocks or simply held onto, we could have easily rented out an apartment for the three months that we needed to evacuate our home. But it's a moot point since c) was never really a true reason.