I am lying on my back and I want to be fed – I’m hungry.

As I’m only a baby I can’t ask using words, and as mum isn’t there attending to my needs, I have to attract her attention, telling her I’m hungry.  I cry.

She doesn’t want to hear me cry, she hates it when I cry, she doesn’t want to stop doing what she is doing every time I cry.  I am not the priority in her life.  And I am an inconvenience, a nuisance, a bother, something most times she wishes she’d rather not have to deal with.  Yet I can’t help being hungry.

She holds out as long as she can.  It takes time to get my bottle ready.  She doesn’t offer her breast to me – I don’t know why.  She doesn’t make it freely available to me so I can just reach for it whenever I need it.  She doesn’t want to be my mother.

When the bottle finally comes it’s not what I want.  I want her milk, I don’t want this yuk.  But what can I do – nothing – so I have to accept it, and gradually I accept it more, gradually I want it more – it is the only thing I get.

When I am hungry I want to eat, I want to suck on her breast, I want to feel close to her, feeling her lovingly giving herself to me in this way.  I want to feel she is there only for me, always for me, to help me coming into being.  I want her to give freely herself to me so I can take what I need when I need it.  And I want to be the one driving my own life.

When she is not there for me, when her breast is not freely available, then I feel bad, then I can’t meet my needs myself, then I have to cry trying to tell her that I’m not feeling good.  But she is deaf to what my crying is really saying, she doesn’t want to know, because the terrible truth is, she doesn’t want to know me.

When I want to eat and can’t do so, then I feel bad because I start to feel powerless, like I have no say in my life.  I am coming into being but I can’t make life be how I want it to be, my will is failing.  And this makes me feel like I’m dying, I’m losing myself, I’m fading away, I’m losing connection with reality; and I’m very scared, because, what will happen to me.  What will happen to me if no one loves me.  What will happen to me if my own mother doesn’t love me.

And I know this is how it’s going to be for the rest of my life.  She keeps me alive – only just.  I am not allowed to die, she can’t be seen as being a bad mother, an unloving mother, she has to keep up the front of being a kind, caring, always-there-for-her-child mother, but that doesn’t do me any good.

And as I grow up I believe and so manifest that life is not there readily available and freely offering everything to me.  I have even given up crying having to accept that I am always hungry.  I will grow up feeling powerless and unable to do anything about it.  I won’t be able to meet my own needs, I won’t be self-willed, self-determining; I will always be dependent on others hoping they look after me.  And I will learn to be grateful for the little bit I get, the little bit that comes my way.  It will never be exactly what I want, but ‘beggars can’t be chooses’ and that is how it was for me.  I had to be grateful that she did pay some attention to me, that she did finally feed me and did give me a bottle.

And I will grow up not being able to effectively get what I want, to live how I want to live, because I never experienced how to live this way when I was a baby.  I will grow up knowing that even if I did try to call out, did demand, did try to get what I want, that no one will listen, no one will care, no one will want to hear what I have to say.

I will grow up feeling very alone, unloved and very angry about my useless pathetic life – about my own uselessness and being so pathetic that I can’t make life be how I want it to be.