Cave

In this blog, I'm trying to be detached and clinical on the one hand and honest and truthful on the other. 
Detached from emotional overreaction. From over-emotional reaction. 
Clinical. Just the facts ma'am. 
Honest about events. 
Truthful about my extrapolations. 

This blog is my process and that's all it is. It's my self-therapy. It's not great literature or anything. 

I think that early life experience is pivotal. For back-up, I bring you Robert Sapolsky, who knows more about primates, including human ones, than most do probably, teaches Human Behavioral Biology in California, and knows a lot about genes and point mutations and insertions and deletions and receptors and exons and introns and promoters and transcription factors and epigenesis and all the molecular stuff and how to explain it engagingly so that even those of us way off in the back row can get it. 

When I hear him talk about oxytocin or the oxytocin receptor or genes involved in that and environmental interaction with the genome via all the little in-between steps, my ears perk up. (Also estrogen lately, because of this breast cancer.) 

Anyway, if there was anything permanent that resulted from being physically abused in childhood by my mother and having to adapt fast because survival seemed at stake, maybe it was some sort of oxytocin deficiency. Maybe the promoter protein got jostled and the receptor was too loose and oxytocin molecule couldn't land. Maybe the neurons that make oxytocin didn't grow in properly. Who knows? I'm learning about possibilities at levels over which I had no control and still don't and never will.
(I can see why Robert Sapolsky called his latest book "Determined.")

I have two reasons for thinking this could be an actual possibility, even though I have no way to find out and it doesn't really matter anyway.
I like it as a plausible story. An hypothesis. 

1. I never wanted to pair-bond for very long. 

2. All my life I felt, bodily, toward my mother, the way the south pole of a magnet would feel, coming into proximity with the south pole of another magnet. If magnets could feel.  Interoceptively.  

I do not want anyone to think I hated my mother. I didn't.
I did not feel attracted.
I felt repulsed. 
Even though I also, at the same time, still felt attached, the way children do.
For survival. Two bar magnets tied together. 

Having to therefore embody a contradiction.
Somehow. 
And you just adapt. The brain closes off feeling it, because contradictions feel noxious.
And just like that, it's buried.
With enough agency to resurrect itself later, of course.
And in the meantime, a psychosocial chasm comes into existence. And widens over time. 

I think, biologically, I adapted successfully to her actions toward preverbal small me. You know, for the most part. Over time. 
It isn't very often any more I feel discomfort with the large maternal-affection-shaped hole I was left with by her, or may have inherited epigenetically from generations of women on my specific mitochondrial lineage, through her (I don't know. To be determined.).  
She's gone now, and I feel like I can finally relax, feel safe, and go see what's there. Like exploring a cave.  

I think a lot of us have some personal version of that cave, that space inside, maybe for other reasons.
I also think that the female half of the human race has some work it could do on itself to help things balance better for us as a species, as humans, as neotenous apes.
So we can all live together without killing each other and the planet. That would be nice. Right?
How? I don't know. Being more kind to each other? Maternally? Plus all the other ways we interact?