You have never known what it is like to have privacy in the bathroom or in your bedroom, and she goes through your things regularly. She asks nosy questions, and snoops into your email/letters/diary/conversations.
When I was 13, my mother conducted a hugely expensive project of redesigning our apartment. As a result of this project, we ended up with a bathroom that had no lock on the inside and bedrooms with transparent glass in the doors. The bedroom where my sister and I slept was close to the entrance into the apartment. Anybody who walked towards the door (and we had crowds of guests all of the time) would see me lying in my bed on full display. Changing my clothes or underwear would always be a fraught task because there was no privacy anywhere. After I started living alone at the age of 27, I would only be able to dress and undress in the bathroom with the door locked.
Any attempt at autonomy on your part is strongly resisted. Normal rites of passage (learning to shave, wearing makeup, dating) are grudgingly allowed only if you insist, and you’re punished for your insistence (“Since you’re old enough to date, I think you’re old enough to pay for your own clothes!”) If you demand age-appropriate clothing, grooming, control over your own life, or rights, you are “difficult” and she ridicules your “independence.”
One of the greatest battles I had to wage was the battle to wear the top of my swimsuit on the beach. For some reason, it was hugely important to my mother that I go to the beach topless. For years, I begged her to allow me not to be topless in public but to no avail. As an argument in this debate, she would ask other people for their expert opinion.
“She doesn’t even have breasts,” she would say, pointing at my bare chest. “Look closely. Can you see breasts? Yes, I mean, it looks like they are growing but it’s not like they are big or anything. Can you see the swelling there? Does it look to you like her nipples are swollen? Come closer and take a look!”
When the people she tried to involve in the examination of my chest refused to participate, she would try to guilt me into not wearing the swimsuit top.
“You will feel so sorry about this when you grow up!” she would say in a tragic voice. “You will experience pangs of conscience forever! You have no idea how sorry you will be!”
I finally managed to win this battle. At that time, I was 12 and had already gotten my period. The period itself was a battlefield as well.
“Mom, I got my period,” I told my mother when I first had it. In the USSR, there were no tampons or hygienic pads on sale, so I needed my mother’s help to learn to manage the issue.
“Oh, of course, you haven’t!” she said. “You are not even 12 yet.”
“Yes, I have,” I insisted, growing desperate. “I promise it’s true.”
“I only had my period at 15,” she explained. “There is no way you got it so early.”
After 15 minutes of “Mom, I swear to you, I got my period”, my aunt interceded and informed us that a period can happen earlier than the age of 15.
“Well,” my mother commented. “Of course, everything about you just has to be weird. Why can’t you do one thing normally, I wonder? Now that’s it for you. Do you know that Jewish men thank God every day for not making them female? This is the reason why!”
It was obvious that I wasn’t going to get any help with handling menstruation, so I invented my own method. I will not go into any naturalistic details of this method here. Suffice it to say that it involved excruciating pain. At the age of 15, I traveled to England and finally bought a huge pack of tampons. My mother was extremely disturbed by the purchase. Once, we were standing in front of our building, and my mother saw a young doctor who lived two floors above us.
“Doctor!” she yelled. “My daughter has started using tampons! I’m worried! I’m afraid they will puncture her. . . you know! Please tell her not to use them!”
The poor doctor turned crimson. The neighbors who were sitting on the bench in front of the building perked up.
“Tampons are perfectly fine to use,” the doctor managed to squeeze out.
“They will not. . . I mean, will she remain intact?” my mother kept yelling. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to marry her off if she keeps using them!”
“They are fine to use,” the doctor mumbled, running away.
Clarissa's Blog 
It’s strange that the Rhodesian society didn’t have much in the way of female pain alleviation for menstruation. Well, not so strange perhaps as it was exceedingly right wing. But I was given asprin for very extreme menstrual pain — knife in the stomach kind of pain, that makes you want to throw up and you go hot and cold and want to die. And tampons were only deemed appropriate for married women, as was the pill, which could have alleviated my cramping. I think a significant amount of the ptsd I developed later, and why I still do not like going to doctors even now, has to do with this experience.
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We also had an entire state system set up to make everything that had to do with female reproductive system as painful and traumatic as possible. Plus, I had that trauma mirrored at home.
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Our system may have been roughly similar, but through cultivated negligence and contempt, rather than being so deliberate.
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I mean even the basic thing of not having a full bowel or being constipated a day before the menstruation starts would have been useful knowledge to me. Much later in life I learned that if I drank a Coke it would have sufficient diuretic effect to clean out my bowel so that the cramping did not seem so intense. This was basic trial and error, within one life time. But the knowledge I ought to have had was not made available to me earlier on — no household remedies as such, and no female knowledge from any grapevine.
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Same here! I keep reading about these female networks of knowledge and feel deeply envious and just robbed.
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Well it’s logical that they should exist and simply natural. After all, if I learned that trick with coke (and later with wine) then these are not difficult facts to stumble across.
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The problem is that when the feeling of deep shame attaches to the issue, one doesn’t even think of looking for information. If I’m told that this should involve suffering, it takes forever even to begin questioning that.
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One of the major things I experienced from my father was his extreme projection. He came in one day and began abusing me, accusing me of being “afraid of everything”. At that time, I was still optimistic about life although I had been set back significantly. I knew for sure that I was only the victim of a few people and was definitely not “afraid of everything”. Therefore, (and this was before I had read any of the literature about projection or knew what it was), I assumed that my father must be afraid of everything.
Also, on another occasion, he burst in when I was at the computer, in another room and began almost swaying back and forth whilst standing in the door way. He said I was the worst thing he had ever encountered and very disgusting. It seemed he had become a gargoyle and vomit was coming out of his mouth. But I also realized he was addressing me as if I were all-powerful, and as if I had all sorts of aspects of control over his life, but wouldn’t feel anything he said, because I was so big and he was so small. So then I knew that he was really yelling at his mother.
But actually, I began to feel those things after a while — that I was all powerful and afraid of everything.
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This image of oneself that one us being fed – the false self – is so hard to shed. I feel like I’m on the brink of shedding it but I need on last push.
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Is there a way to give myself one final kick in the butt?
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I’ve finally shed it. Actually it helps one’s resilience to be deemed all powerful, but it does not help one’s intelligibility if one has come to believe simultaneously, due to projections, that one is both all-powerful and “afraid of everything”. This in itself can look like narcissistic inconsistency, although It has very, very different origins from narcissism.
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One of the things my shrink recommended to me was talking to the kid I used to be and telling her all the stuff she needed to hear and to be true. Basically, apply one’s adult, rational mind to the situations one lived through as a child, and then tell the child that yes, this was fucked up and not ok, and whatever else comes to mind as useful. I’m finding this a very difficult exercise, so I can’t tell you yet if it worked for me, but I hope it helps you.
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Regarding tampons and virginity, my relatives believed that too. ( They wouldn’t shame me by shouting to anybody. )
And, “of course,” a woman isn’t believed in this scenario. Super-stupid, considering there are other kinds of (penetrative!) sex, except vaginal.
I prefer pads to tampons since I read that chances of Toxic Shock Syndrome and infections in general are higher with tampons.
“‘Generally speaking, it is accepted knowledge that leaving a tampon in for too long can cause toxic shock syndrome.”
If one shouldn’t leave in for “too long,” it’s a sign that optimally one wouldn’t leave at all.
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Pads or tampons – as long as a young girl is given all the options, tries them and makes her own choice, they are both fine. A problem arises when a parent wants to invade the child’s body through the control of her genital area. There is no possibility that the young woman in question will avoid serious problems in the area of sexuality.
Unfortunately, parents very easily breach a child’s, especially a young girl’s, sexual and genital privacy. And then we hear that 40% of women suffer from anorgasmy. Yes, what a huge surprise.
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Of course, this doesn’t mean that male anorgasmy doesn’t exist. It does and it’s not less common than female anorgasmy.
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I once met an old woman in a hospice who seemed like she shouldn’t be there …
Over a few weeks, I got to know about her situation — she’d been left in the hospice because her family couldn’t deal with her, despite having more than adequate means.
I wondered why she’d been left in the hospice until I noticed how easily she’d gaslight anyone she could influence.
This turned out to be the reason her family stuck her in the hospice in the first place — they quite literally could not afford to deal with her drama, but they could afford to stick her in a place where professionals could deal with her needs.
I took the advice of Eric Berne and Claude Steiner — charity really is a job for professionals, and I promptly left them to it …
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