It's coming up on 10 months since I took action towards recovery. Since I admitted that I am an addict. In that time, I have come to look at my childhood through a very different lens. I took the angelic spotlight off of my mother and have chosen to see the ugly parts.
To preface, I think she tried. I think she was broken, though. She had a terribly abusive father and cold mother. She had her dreams torn away from her over and over. She was lonely and raising three kids in absolute poverty. She had moments where she tried to go above and beyond. She'd surprise us with a Disney VHS (that was big news back then). She led girl scout troops and boy scout troops. She'd work until midnight and still remember to put Easter baskets together. She took in my aunt and cousins when they were destitute (a really fun summer!). She took us to Chuck E. Cheese on a whim once. But there was always anger behind the things she did.
She neglected us. She hit us. She shamed us. She blamed us. She had nervous breakdowns and tantrums in front of us. We were dumb. We were lazy. We were feral. She had zero respect for us. And I still don't get any.
Today, when I visit my mother, she walks away from me mid sentence. Straight up leaves the room. Even when I think she's listening, I know she's not hearing me because she never retains any information I pass along. If I put a rule in place, she breaks it to "be nice" to my kids. I understand that grandparents get this sort of freedom. But it's way more than candy before dinner or staying up an hour past bedtime. She tells me that Justin and I need to be responsible and independent, but then guilt trips me when I say no to something. For example, we both were excited to garden this year. She doubled her garden plot (which I'm genuinely happy about, her garden does very well). My garden was a bust. We discovered that the yard floods and everything I planted during 3 different attempts all washed away. Anyway, she grew a large plot of corn. When it was ready to harvest, she suddenly told me that I needed to come pick it because she grew it "for my family". Since we moved, the drive to my mother's is longer and I had zero gas money, but she added that 'I did it for you' whimper and so I felt compelled to find time in our schedule to spend the day in Butler. To be fair, Evelyn got a kick out of picking corn and my mother did slip a $20 in my purse when I wasn't looking. Gabriel did nothing but stay inside and play video games (another issue I have with my mother). I guess my beef with the situation as that she tried to manipulate and guilt me instead of just asking us to come hang out.
The other side of our interactions these days is that my mother is always willing to give me things. She always has a little cash or a piece of furniture for me. I guess she has her own journey and her way of dealing with our horrible past is to give me things. She has never turned down a request. But I'm at the point where I want to heal things and confront things, not just numb them with material things. She is very giving when it comes to my kids as well. She drowns them in gifts at birthdays and Christmas. Everyone tells me to be grateful, but it's hard when I know the complicated web of hurt and guilt that these motions are made from.
Our household vocab word for the week is DICHOTOMY. It's something divided into two parts wherein the parts are polar opposites or conflicting. For me, my mother is a dichotomy.
Side 1 is that I love her and understand that she was angry and alone and sleep deprived and hungry for like 95% of my childhood. She'd been beaten often as a child without any warning and I understand that it takes 2 generations for something like that to leave a family. It's what she had been taught to do and so she beat us. I don't always think she wanted to. She stopped at some point, maybe because we'd gotten older.
Side 2 is that regardless of the cause, I was shamed, guilted, beaten, and crushed into the ground. I was told to do things that were way beyond my scope of understanding and maturity. I never should have been made to sleep in the back of a station wagon in a scary parking lot. I never should have been shamed for falling asleep while going to school and working at 14. I never should have been ridiculed by my own mother. I was left with sitters who hurt me, belittled me, isolated me, and taunted me. I should never have been left in charge while my mom went out to the bar. I had a million warning signs of severe trauma and clinical depression but was never treated nor was any of it even recognized. I was neglected and alone when I should have been cared for.
We lived with a boyfriend of my mother's for a while, Billy. Things were bad. I didn't know it then, I guess I normalized it, but looking back, a majority of the trauma I can remember happened there.
He's the boyfriend who laughed and threw away the father's day card I made for him at school. I remember that I was a horribly behaved child after we moved out. I remember binging after we moved out. I remember being latch-key kids after we moved out. We were alone when we woke up and I almost always missed the bus. I remember the vice principal taking me into his office and telling me all the horrible things that would happen to me if I was late again. I internalized all of it. I was bad. I was lazy. He never bothered to ask if anything was wrong. I never told him I was alone in the mornings and all of my clothing was covered in cat fur, cat piss, and there were fleas in my bed. I never told him that I didn't brush my teeth or hair in the mornings, only put it in a pony tail because there was no one around that taught me to care about my appearance. No one taught me how to use a pad or a tampon. No one taught me how to style my hair or put on makeup. My gym teacher told me about deodorant, so there was that. The vice principal never knew that when I did miss the bus, that I had to walk all the way back home, call my mother at work, wait for her to get home, and then have her drive me in (berating me the entire drive).
No one knew that when we got home, the house was empty then too. I would head straight for the fridge. Make 2-3 plates in a row. Mom was gone on the weekends, too. I would spend all day in my nightgown, eating and watching tv. There were times when my mom would take Jon and Karen out to do things, but leave me. I was either too old for the event or the boyfriend didn't like me or there wasn't room in the car. Whatever. Once, after she left, I remember having what my therapist now describes as a classic anxiety attack. I was about 10 or 11. I remember suddenly sweating and being dizzy. I laid on the floor in the living room, feeling the walls moving in. My tongue swelled up and I cried and cried. I was alone. I begged her to take me anywhere when she got home. I tried to explain what was happening to me. She brushed it off.
I remember my mother having meltdowns and memory loss from the stress of single parenthood. While living with Billy, my mother rented out the house she actually owned. It was a shack of a place. The tenant complained that the pipes were freezing in the bathroom. She couldn't afford to have anyone come work on it, so she bought straw and spend an hour outside packing it into the crawlspace and building up the wall outside with this hay. When she came back to the car, her hands were so sore and frozen that she couldn't move her fingers. Her fingertips were blue and she was crying. She had a full blown meltdown and I had to tell her to calm down. I warmed her hands up and told her we could go home and get a hot bath and curl up on the couch. I was maybe 8.
We never had decent clothes. Everything was a hand-me-down from cousins and stained beyond recognition. Everything was sweatpants and t-shirts. I never got glasses when I needed them. Charlotte bought me a pair when I was sent away for the summer. I remember suddenly being able to see the tile in the restaurant floor and could see my grandmother's face while sitting across from her. I had those glasses for 4 years. They were held together with a twist tie by the time I got another pair. They didn't work anymore, either. I had to sit in front of the class and push them up against my eyes to read the board. We never got vaccinations, we never got cold medicine or Tylenol. I had bursitis (swelling and fluid around torn cartilage) in my knee that went undiagnosed for half a year, until my gym teacher demanded to know what was going on with me. I had torn it slipping on ice because I had 3 year old sneakers and my glasses didn't work.
Today, a school official would have called CYS. Today, I would have been removed from my mother's care and put in a home. I might have been further molested. I might have had a dog and a pool. Instead, no one cared. No one helped. And I was more damaged every single day.
Now, my mother worked a lot and I get that we were poor and these things were just want a single mom in the 80s and 90s did... but that meant that I was alone with my younger siblings nearly 24/7. We had half a dozen sitters over the years, but they never lasted long and honestly they were all terrible. We were bullied, cornered, hit, threatened, and things were always horrible. When we werent' with a terrible sitter, we were alone. I binge ate, as far back as I can remember. I would tally every single item of food in the house and start to eat them all, one by one.
We were beat with a belt and called 'monsters' because the house was always messy. But you know, she never once showed us how to clean up. She left us alone and then complained that the house wasn't clean.
More recently, in the years that I've known Justin, I became a person who forgave my mother everything. I sought her approval constantly. I defended every thing that came out of her mouth and every action she took to help or hinder us. I jumped when she said so. I did everything, went everywhere she told me to. Until this past year.
And now, things are wretched. She undermines me, constantly with the children. I say no soda, she buys it. I say "Gabriel is grounded from his Xbox for the summer." she buys him a brand new one. I don't talk to my brother for six years, tell the story of our estrangement for six years, tell her that Gabriel is not to see my brother for six years.... and then she allows him to write Jon a letter. And gives the man who threatened to kill Justin our home address. When I push it with her, she hands the conversation over to Karen and pretends not to know anything about Jon and I not speaking for years.
That sent me over the edge. I have been binge eating for a week solid. I started my period 10 days early over it. I cut all my hair off. I really don't know if I can see her for the holidays this year. She's so non-confrontational that she'll probably just have Karen tell me they're spending Thanksgiving with Laura and Patsy, instead. She's probably working for the day of our Solstice party. And I'm so angry that I'm okay with it.
