Phantom Limb

by Lucinda Berry

I’d never seen Mother cry. Did she practice her cries in the mirror in the same way I’d seen her practice smiles?

It was simply that neither of us felt a need to connect with a mother on an intimate level. The desire might have been there if we’d gotten taken away from Mother earlier, but we’d had to squelch our desires and impulses for maternal love for so long, they no longer existed.

I didn’t know when it happened or how old we were when we gave up trying to connect with Mother.

“When children are young, there are critical periods of development where important tasks take place. One of the biggest tasks is the attachment to a primary caregiver. As psychologists, we know this is one of the most important things to happen during the first five years of life. Sometimes when it doesn’t occur, children grow up unable to form attachments with other people, or they form what we call disorganized attachment.

because you experienced such horrific abuse, it damaged your ability to form a reciprocal attachment to a maternal figure.

She’d been saying she wanted to die since we were nine and trying to kill herself since we were thirteen. Maybe it was time to give her what she’d always wanted.

The world still existed and had continued moving. There was a part of me that thought the world was on hold, but time hadn’t stopped while I was in the hospital. Time hadn’t waited for me to catch up. It had kept going, and it was going to keep moving forward whether I wanted it to or not.