Content warning: some of these may be distressful for people to read. You’ve been warned.

· being held down on the toilet as a small child, as I was screaming, to the point that my mother dug her nails into my skin and left marks where she had done so (marks that stayed after she was done and had to heal)

· her turning the television set off in the living room by ripping the cables from the wall, grounding me from going outside, turning the lights off in the kitchen, and crying in her bedroom to the point that she was screaming because I continued to struggle with the conventional grip of a pencil and continued to use “rock grip”… I eventually did learn how to write correctly, but a lot of that took longer than it should because of the trauma of this, and my mom’s over-enthusiastic one or two attempts to get me to learn to write normally

· telling me to my face while I was a child that I was the reason she wanted no more children

· always being told that I was bad, or how bad I was, when all of it was age-appropriate behavior

· never, not even once, being told how good my behavior was at any point in time, even when I tried

· not being interacted with beyond what she had to do with me, making it clear that she did not actually want a child and wanted to do no more than the bare minimum parenting while she kept the house clean

· not being shown affection as a child at any point that I could remember

When I say that I am extremely interested in, and motivated by, forgetting about my mother, I mean it.