Post by woeful in Mother, You and I Are Not Bernadette Mayer comments

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The sentiment of "Forgive me if this helps no one" is so poignant. Indeed, it really doesn't have to, to be allowed to exist in its own right, a testament to your own selves and growth and experiences, but it did too.

I'm glad I found this VN from your comment on Letty. Very well done on making this.

Though I've read it and all the letters now, I still have some trouble putting all my praise into words, other than to affirm the emotional impact on myself as a reader like other commenters here have stated, so I apologise if this comment is a bit barebones and clinical at the moment hehe.

But if it brought about such a Purged emotional state to read it, I can't imagine what it was like to Write it.

I found the frankness of the letters about every stage of the creative process, about your different parts' feelings on undertaking this, quite valuable too.

I think what I most want to articulate that struck me about this project is its stated goal, about love and the desire to give your mother the understanding that you feel she is owed. That the complete love is something you can still attain, even if you feel that it might be lacking. Something that can be found while working towards it. The "unpacking, imagining, dreaming, and memorialising" in the form of artistic efforts like this have this sense of magic or ritual to me. The drawing out of memories and the transformations they undergo through the artistic vision to make something that feels no less cathartic and truthful for being a Story but potentially even more cathartic and truthful, precisely because it is in your own words. That is a kind of alchemy, I think.

The metaphor here is definitely me projecting some of my own sensibilities, but I think I'll be thinking of this work and the letters for a long time because... it's made me realise how far I would still have to go myself to be able to reach a point of such clarity, strength, capacity for care and maturity myself someday.

I'm sure that could sound a little trite to hear, since I am sure it doesn't feel so "easy" in the writers' room, and life is never straightforward, nobody is truly obligated to forgive another, and different alters are absolutely entitled to have their own feelings on things... But most of my system refuses to even acknowledge my biological family as being their own too, so the fact that so many of you got involved in those letters addressed to her is something incredibly touching to me in a way that I fail to fully understand or describe.

Strange to say all this to a stranger, but it means a lot to me to see that there is someone else who knows that the love and longing is no weakness or aberration. It's just love and you wish the one it is for could receive it. I hope that "I" can know it better too.

bitekiosk20 hours ago(+1)

Oh wow! Thank you for reading and loving this, for finding it impactful and inspiring! And sorry for writing so much of it, lol. I hope you took a nice, pleasant break after reading Bernadette, lol.

I am really happy that you particularly resonated with my wish to understand and accept Mom. To be direct about it, she was never really afforded much patience or understanding from the rest of our family, and went so far as to teach me to hate her once they’d separated me from her. They treated her as a violent, unstable junkie, accepting zero responsibility for the roles they played in depriving her of the assistance she needed in order to heal.

And while I wasn’t really able to touch on a lot of her history, I did want to at least like, show her as unconditional a love and forgiveness as I could (as no one else would) while being direct about the burdens of enmeshment. She deserves that, even now, and she deserved it in life, too, but… I don’t think I could have even begun to work on something like this when she was still alive.

As regards the letters, and the sorta coordination of getting several parts involved, the nature of our system seems to be that a fair amount of us are generally “moving in the same direction”, so to speak, as regards her. Plus communication between those parts is fairly open, or at least tends to go through a central hub or something like maybe an unnamed general will? Still sussing things out.

I think what I’m trying to say is enough of us were on board with this project that it was going to happen, and most of us had something to say to Mom (even Au— who hated this project from day one and may not have ever directly interacted with her), that it was like “if you’re around, you gotta write a letter, that’s the rule”. Plus this is a culmination of most of a year of exploring our feelings about her on a daily basis, whether creatively or in therapy. So by then there was more cohesion and willingness to just make a big fucking thing like this.

We’re kicking around ideas of future projects about other family members and I expect those to be less collaborative (and less geared toward forgiveness), since those people moved in and out of our life more substantially and were decidedly less loving. Mom was a near-constant presence of her kinds of love, until she wasn’t.

Sorry, I feel like I’m kind of just rambling at this point. I deeply respect your appreciation for love and longing. I think if your goal is “clarity, strength, capacity for care and maturity”… it takes work but it can be done. You can do it.

Thank you again for reading our work! 🙏💖

woeful17 hours ago(+1)

Awwh thank you too and don't worry about rambling either, it's very insightful stuff to read.

It is awful the narratives adults can impose onto children without their understanding & use them as tools against one another yeah... It is powerful that you wanted to accomplish what you did then.

And successful reflection and communication is great too. :3 It was interesting reading how some of the letters described that sort of Headspace realm that different alters were travelling through and could find one another in even when someone got lost.

The ways dissociation operates can be quite intricate and alluring. We liked the perspective the alter who was a Princess offered in her letter because of that too. A lot of our ones feel like that, sharing a body with those whose origins feel more foreign to you yet it was sweet to see her willing contribution for that reason too. May she get fun balls and whatever else she enjoys forever

And the acknowledgement that even someone who hurt you is going through something similar, including her own moments of age regression, it's aaugh very real and with so many emotions intertwined to that. It's truly not fair that Coco doesn't have someone fully equipped to look after her. She shouldn't have had to be enmeshed into being a partner and carer herself at such a vulnerable age but to look at the Why is still very humanising too. Reminding me of certain themes and characters from famous visual novel Umineko.

One thing that's occurring to me now is how you described that the VN was perhaps negating the experience of neglect in writing, since there's a lot of time given to show the main relationships and not as much to the Loneliness itself. Though it's not something I'd make a point of critique either, since for a game jam about the toxic relationship itself it makes sense you'd want to feature that most.

The part about, "I don’t think I could have even begun to work on something like this when she was still alive." makes a lot of sense though hmm... Maybe we'll find ourselves more capable of having that shift in perspective as well whenever It happens.

Anyhow thank you so much for your reply, for sharing everything you have and your kind encouragement too! We'll look forward to what you explore in those future works then🙏

itch.io

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