When I went to California to attend university, there was no extra money for anything. I worked two jobs to go to school full-time and washed my hair with laundry soap because I couldn't afford shampoo, ate in the restaurant where I worked and wore my clothes till they shredded from old age.

Halfway through my freshman year my mother told me my step-father had died from a massive heart attack. I loved him very much and I cried myself to sleep every night, but I could not afford to go back to Connecticut for his funeral and she knew it.

But after her death, I discovered that she lied to me. He did not die until my senior year in college. It was just her pattern of trying to keep me from having strong affective ties to anyone but her, a lifelong pattern that I managed to escape by going as far away to college as I could get and not fall into the Pacific Ocean.

After she died in 2001, I went through her papers and records and there were letters from my father addressed to me that she never mailed. He had asked if I was angry at him, why didn't I write back? My heart broke all over again. He died thinking I didn't love him, didn't care. If only I had known I would have been in touch, come hell or high water.

I checked the SSDI and indeed he died in 1961, seven months before I finished school. Not a word from my mother about it, of course. She was very successful in isolating me from everyone I loved and cared for all those years (friends and family both). I just can't forgive her, though I've tried.

I'm hoping that writing this and clicking "Save Entry" will help me send it off into the electronic ether and I can move on emotionally. What is done, is done, and all the regrets and pain in the universe can't change it.