Memoir 2

Yesterday I explained my existential backdrop in Complex. 
So, childhood, mother-daughter dynamics. 
I was raised on a Saskatchewan prairie farm, open nature all around. 

Early memories from around age three: 

We always had at least one cat, and often kittens. I loved kittens. I would dress them in doll clothes and watch them play. They were just so much more fun to play with and hilarious and lovable and way less boring than dolls.  

My brother was born. La mere was constantly admiring his big blue eyes. (Everyone in my family had blue eyes, but for mine and hers. Ours were green.)
I felt betrayed and outcast and left out when the usurper was born. So, I ran away from home. I had a tricycle and I knew how to ride it. I rode it a mile away to my aunt's house where my slightly older cousins lived, walked in, and announced I was staying with them from now on. 
This arrangement that would have solved all my relationship problems with my mother did not last out the day. My mother was phoned and she drove over to pick me up along with the tricycle. I was not punished. She must have been in a good mood that day.
It's hard to describe how disappointed I was. 

We were in Weyburn, and she was in shopping mode, dragging me along everywhere while she blissed out, looking at stuff in stores. I got exhausted and needed to sleep. I chose the doorway of Woolworths store so that when my mom left she'd see me. 
She left me there and went to another store. 
I was only three. I did not know the city. It was not the farm. When I woke up I didn't know where she was. I cried. A nice lady came by, took me by the hand, and walked me to the Co-op where my mom was still shopping, groceries this time. 
It's hard to describe the depth of existential terror I felt, no matter how kind the rescue lady had been. 
I was haunted by a nightmare about me, walking that block, totally alone forever and sensing doom coming at me. It finally stopped, but only after I moved back here middle-aged and walked on that same street. Woolworths was long gone, a parking lot there instead. 

One more story from that time: the cat and her kittens lived under the step. There was an opening at the side. I was trying to coax the kittens out to play, when suddenly my mother was out there and telling me to go stand about 10 feet away. Which I did. And she grabbed a nearby rake and turned into this fierce hunter person with a grim focused face. She was after something under the step. I thought she was hurting kittens. But no, it turned out there was a big old rat under there and she finally impaled it with the rake and killed it. So proud of herself. 
She took the dead rat still on the rake, and me, and my baby brother, in the car, out to the field where my dad was cultivating or seeding or something, to show him her handiwork. 
It's hard to describe how horrifying all that was. 

The take-home point is that my feelings were never acknowledged or framed or explained to me or reflected back. They were simply ignored and we all pretended I didn't have any, that I was just as mute and un-alive as the dolls I never played with. I buried those feelings all by myself. Hard work for a three-year-old.
Here I am, age 75, digging them up now that she's finally gone as of February this year, and I finally feel existentially safe.