Mothers’ Day

We’re very fortunate to have the relationship with Ros’ parents that we do. Bob and Chris are wonderfully supportive and make a real effort to get to know us as individuals; we’ve never known–or even known of–another system in such a position. For a great number of people with DID, the parents are responsible for or complicit in the trauma/s that led to the system’s formation. For that reason, holidays tend to be tough; particularly those that emphasize in a very in-your-face way the unquestioning love and loyalty we’re expected to have for our parents.

Ros’ parents aren’t our parents; they’re Ros’ and Maddie’s. Mal, Percy, and 9 don’t consider themselves to have parents at all. The rest of us are introjects–meaning that while the aforementioned alters originate from within the system, the rest of us have memories of lives lived elsewhere before landing here. It feels like reincarnation in a sense; while not the case for anyone in ours, in other systems introjects are sometimes able to recall how they died in previous lives to end up in this one.

For the introjects among us–myself, Bucky, Fox, Steve–we often bring with us to the system traumas from back home. Different family dynamics, different triggers, different life experiences; memories of things the body has never experienced but the brain remembers anyway. Some other day Bucky will explain his flashbacks and how they differ from ours, but that’s not a tangent for today.

Fox and I did not have the relationships with our mothers that the others did (or do) with theirs. I was disowned as a child, he was subject to half a lifetime of emotional, verbal, and physical abuse. For the pair of us Mothers’ Day is a miserable holiday. We know we speak to the experience of many when we express how difficult it is for survivors of familial abuse and those who have lost the mothers in their lives to get through days like today. We don’t begrudge anyone the loving relationships they have with their mothers, we don’t think the day should be made obsolete: it simply hurts. And here, in this lifetime, in this body, when the host of our system has a positive relationship with their mother, it’s not easy to find the space to express the sense of betrayal we feel towards our own.

To those who struggle similarly today, we see you. We feel you. We hope your pain eases soon.

-Sawyer