Door stop

 I was a gymnast for many many years, I suffered injuries as all gymnast experience at some point in their sport.

I have fallen off a balance beam and broken my ankle, I have broken my little finger grabbing the uneven parallel bars wrong.

And for years, I thought I had broken my rib (the one just under my collar bone) doing gymnastics as well.  I couldn't remember what I did to cause the break, but obviously I broke it.   Years later, I had a X-ray tech ask me how I broke that bone, as it is thicker and stands out on my chest...I replied "doing gymnastics"...

Which now I know was an ignorant lie.  

For the past several nights I have had very disturbing dreams about that rib...but then I would wake up and the dream would fade away....

This morning at 3 am, the dream came back, and I woke up, and the memory of exactly how that rib got broken came flooding back.....

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A very little girl, preschool age (?) came through the front door of her house.  That door always stays open in the day with a hard round shape door stop to place at the base of the door so it wouldn't shut.   

She shut the door behind her....The mother said, open that door back up, I want it open, not shut.  So the little girl, opened the door and walked away....BUT she forgot to push the door stop against it to keep it from shutting....

Her little brother was crawling on the floor and hit his head on the door and started crying....the mom scooped him up and noticed he hit his head on the door, because it was part way shut....not propped open all the way....

This enraged the mother.....she screamed at the little girl to come into the living room...she did.

The mother put the baby brother in his high chair, and picked up the hard solid object on the floor, the door stop and said:

"look at this, where does this go?????" "because of your carelessness your brother hurt himself because the door was not open all the way..."  

She was so upset, the mother, "what do I have to do to get you to put this against the door?"  "do you enjoy hurting your brother?"

Then she threw the door stop at the little girl, and it hit her on the upper chest knocking her to the ground....

The object broke the little girls rib, knocked the breath out of her, but there was no blood, so according to the mother, she was fine...

"get your butt off that floor and go to your room, I don't even want to look at you"...so the little girl, got up and went to her room...she grabbed her pillow and held it close to her chest, thinking it would help with the pain, she was having trouble breathing and she hurt so much.....but the mother never came to check on her...just left her there, with a broken rib, a small little girl....the little girl wore clothes that hid the bruise and swelling on her chest...

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- That memory was taken away from me....and replaced with the lie of the injury doing gymnastics....I do not know which alter took that memory and put the "imagined" memory in my head....

For whatever reason, the alter gave me that memory back....it is now replaying in my head as if it were happening now....I can feel the strike of the door stop against my chest, I can feel that pain....I can remember how hard it was for me to catch a breath....

I guess I need to feel that pain, the physical and the emotional, so I can work through it...trauma therapy, I guess.

But, it makes me more sad than anything, not angry, just fucking sad....sad for the little girl who was so abused and not allowed to be a kid....

I am angry that I cannot confront my mother with this...she has dementia and would not remember the incident or me for that matter....so I, once again, am being denied any accountability, or apology for that incident.   

I want to scream and rage...but that will do no fucking good....

so,  again, this memory is a reminder on how much my mother hated me...

S