We all have problems with our parents. I mean as humans we all fail, we all make big mistakes, we all do things we regret. We all have things we wish out parents would have done better, differently. We all want a do over with them on some level, and we all want to confront them about some hurt, and are desperate for an apology we will never get. We all are aching to be truly seen, full wholly seen and not rejected for it. That is what mothers are for ideally. This is what I have tried very hard to do for my daughter, I am sure on some levels I have failed, but I keep trying, to love her exactly how she is, without expectation. But honestly, who knows? Maybe she will be writing about me one day.
What I remember most about my mother, is needing her. Needing her comfort and her acceptance. I needed a soft place to be, and to be valued. Mostly what I needed from her was love. That is most importantly what I did not get. Because of this my development has been thwarted on many levels. I keep looking for love in the things that hurt me the most. I thought I had that figured out, but weirdly I keep finding myself in the same circumstances. I know that we keep finding the traumas that are the most comfortable to us, and that in and of itself is of great concern. But as I work through these things, I write them out. Only because writing makes allows me not to have to carry such a heavy and painful burden alone.
There is no first memory of her. I do not know if others have a first memory of their mothers, if it is just a patchwork of colors, smells, sounds. What I remember most is absence. Emptiness. Longing. For most parents, there is a particular cry that a child makes, one that communicates hurt and fear that makes us want to jump up and run to them. Not her though. Not her. She listened to my cries, watched my tears with a removed coldness, and observational stare. She walked away from me while I was in the most need, and she never looked back. But not once, no. Over and over again.
The slaps in the face, I remember them clearly. She would sit me on her bed and scream at me. Scream at my inability to do things “right”, for my grades, my behavior, my friends, my messy hair, my dirty feet. If I defended my self, or talked back the slap would come. Across my face, hard and sharp, her long nails leaving bloody lines, welts forming across my mouth and cheek. Sometimes the inside of my lip would get cut by my teeth, blood filling my mouth quietly. If I cried she would scream at me to “Get the hell out of my sight!” If I yelled out in surprise and shock she would scream at me “Shut Up!” I grew up around her displeasure, and walked as softly as I could so as not to upset her. No matter how I tried, I always would. My grades were not very good as I had a very difficult time concentrating, and I just could not understand much of what was happening or what was expected. But just the same I loved school, and most of my teachers were very kind to me. Having been a teacher myself I know why. They sensed me, and saw me and I mattered, just as I reached out to those in pain in my classes.
My clothes were dirty and worn, and she would always say we did not have money for clothes, but she always had a very full closet with very expensive items. Fur coats, rabbit fur sweaters, silk dresses, wool blazers, overstuffed in a closet that was not ever meant to hold so much. She dripped with jewelry, stones of every kind. You never asked about them because she would snarl at you about where she got them and scare you enough you stopped asking questions. Anytime she did not want to answer something, she made it feel like you were attacking her and would growl or yell at you through clenched teeth. I learned quickly to stay quiet.
Despite all this, I wanted her approval, I wanted to make her happy. It never mattered though because she would never be happy with me. One of the first things I remember being told is that I was a mistake. I was unwanted and told this many, many times. In fact it was joked about, how much I was not wanted, that I was nothing but a mistake. I often wished that I would have been aborted, as far back as I can remember knowing what abortion was, I wished that it had happened to me. I sometimes still do, even after all these years. It is something that has stuck in the core of my very being and no amount of antidepressants will ever pull it out.
The worst is yet to come, and it has established the direction my life has gone in.
She walked in. She knew. She watched him rape me and then turned on her heal and walked back out the door. She said nothing, my eye’s begged her for help, tears streaking down my cheeks, afraid to make a sound. She saw me looking at her, and she left. She walked away. She left me there with his drunken, heavy body on top of me. She left me with my insides burning and ripping, barely able to get a breath. The smell of beer and cigarettes full in my nostrils. My tiny body being torn apart for the hundredth time and she walked away. I was not worth saving. I was not worth caring about. I was not a person. I was not protected, or loved, or held, or comforted. I was left there, on the floor until he got off of and out of me. I turned on my side and gave up. I gave up ever mattering in that moment. I gave up being a person. I was 6 years old. I limped to the bathroom and tried to wash off the pain, the blood, turning the faucet on slow and quiet so as not to make noise. The cold water stung at first then numbed as it had so many times before. I was numb, like so many times before. I walked gingerly down the hall, and crawled on the foam mat that was my bed, stretched my sheet back over it and hid under the blanket with the blue and pink teddy bears. I wrapped my nightgown tight around my knees, thinking this would somehow protect me. But I learned that it would not, and she would not, and then that no one ever would.
And yet still….I needed her. No one helped plan my wedding, or went to graduations, or was there at the birth of my daughter. No birthday cards in over 30 years. Never a Christmas gift. Never a family gathering. Never at the hospital for the many, many surgeries. No baby shower or bridal shower. And of course one would think its a blessing, and on so many levels it is, but there is always this aching emptiness that there is no one there to replace her, and that I have been so alone for so many years. Missing out on all that is normal makes it so much harder to relate to others, and makes them mean so much more than they probably do. I don’t know, I can not tell.
I was betrayed by her so many times, the lies she told about me were especially difficult. Telling others I was a drug addict, that I was crazy, that I was a liar and a thief. She ruined relationships and got me fired from jobs with a well placed phone call. Why did she do this? Was I so broken and awful that she had to do all these things to kill the wrongness inside of me? Is this why I have run head long into situations that keep opening the same old wounds? Am I really so rotten that I deserved to be raped and beaten again and again and again?
Of course it is easy to say, “No, of course not!” You can quote all the therapists in the world, and take all the medications, and read all the books….but it is a stain and one that stays and colors everything. This is why I have done what I have done, and why I do what I do and there is no cure for any of it.
Words that must be heard 