An Ode to My Abusive Mother on Mother’s Day
(Please note that there are some descriptions of physical, emotional, mental, and sexual child abuse here. If that is a triggering topic for you, please read with caution and practice self-care after reading.)
Oh, mother.
It’s been two years since I cut you out of my life.
In these years, I’ve learned so much more about myself, others, and life than I could ever expect.
Cutting you off wasn’t easy. It was not a decision I made lightly. I tried for years to get you to hear me, to hear that you needed help, to offer you that help on a silver platter.
For a long time, I thought I had failed you by failing to help you. The amazing things that I have been able to do without you in my life, the peace I feel in my body and mind, the fact that I love myself now?
It was all worth it.
When I was little, I thought you were the coolest. Every kid thinks that of their parents.
When you started beating me, that somehow only intensified.
I wish that I didn’t have such a good memory of the past. I wish that your ‘efforts’ in potty training me didn’t still leave their mark in my difficulties to use the bathroom.
When my sister was born, you had post-partum depression. Your mother treated you like shit for it. I was in charge at three and a half of trying to get you up and eating.
I was in charge of trying to keep you alive.
You should’ve had a support system. You should have gotten help.
Things went so downhill from there.
You were mildly abusive and far too attached to me as a child, but it got increasingly worse when I got sick.
You latched on to me for fear of losing me. I get it. But it got creepy.
I had a unique ability to see that this was unhealthy. I tried to get you to give equal attention to my sister, but that only resulted in you treated her negatively. She began acting out as any toddler would to get any attention, even that negative and harmful kind.
You began to take your anger out on her, beating her and whipping her with belts. Neither of us can stand belts to this day. The sounds of the buckle take me right back to hiding in the next room over crying uncontrollably as you locked the door and beat her.
You deny that any of this ever happened. When several people in a family remember it, you don’t get to gaslight us.
When I was a teenager, you would still walk around the house naked.
We still slept in the same bed.
That alone is child abuse.
But then you depended on me for everything.
You told me several times of how you were about to commit suicide but thought of me, that my existence was the only thing keeping you alive.
I wish you knew how scary that was, how much pressure you put on your child.
Depending on me for so much, parentifying me… this is covert incest and its own form of sexual abuse.
Talking to me about your sex life and encouraging me to have tons of sex, and then chastising me was just another form.
You pulled me out of school to ‘homeschool’ me, which really just consisted of spending a few months pretending like you could teach me… and then me learning on my own subjects I wanted to study because you got tired of playing teacher after work.
You taught my sister nothing.
You kept us home for years while I begged to go back to school. I wanted to learn. I wanted real teachers. It took your mother having an accident for you to give in.
When I went back in eighth grade, I felt like Bobby Boucher because there were things you ‘taught’ me that were completely wrong.
When I had to make the decision to stop graduate school, I was incredibly depressed.
I needed you to be my friend, to tell me it was okay.
Instead of being supportive, you told me to give up and that you would help me file for disability. I was clearly bad enough off, according to you, that I would automatically qualify.
That wasn’t helpful.
You called me a few weeks later in December and I was having a wine cooler at 4 pm. It was one of a pack of 30 I had bought over the summer and hadn’t finished.
You accused me of being an alcoholic, of self-medicating.
You hadn’t seen me in months.
I stopped talking to you.
When I was thirteen, we competed for the same man.
That was not my choice, but you seemed to have blinders on. Your boyfriend assaulted me while the three of us slept in the same bed, just after the two of you had sex next to me.
When I told you about it, you questioned that it was real.
The mother who always said to tell her when something had happened like this, the mother who always said she would believe us no matter what due to her own sexual abuse, this woman denied that her boyfriend tried to fuck her daughter.
You kept dating him.
You tried to make us spend time together until my sister saw him try to kiss me when we stayed at his house as his friend’s family… while his wife was there.
It took someone else seeing it for you to agree to allow me to stay away.
You kept fucking him.
As the years went on, I tried to plead with you to stop bringing Balkar up.
You refused.
You triggered me at least once a week by talking about him, by trying to apologize when I was in college several years after the fact.
You even had the balls to bring him up the day my niece was born. Instead of driving home ecstatic at the birth of my new best friend, I was left to drive home thinking of him.
I really hadn’t talked to you in seven months due to the alcoholism claim and, instead of being focused on happiness, you brought pain. Each time I passed a semi-truck like the one he drove on the way home, I threw up in my mouth.
When I was in high school, you had a major miscarriage and almost died.
I watched you cross over and fight to come back, bleeding out in a bathtub.
Since then, you tried to find seemingly easy ways to exacerbate your medical issues without getting care for them. You wanted us to worry about you, but you did nothing about these issues until things got hairy.
I can’t even keep track of how many interventions my sister and I had to stage over medical shit from high school on.
I asked you 2.5 million times to not bring up religion or politics, issues we vehemently disagreed on. I told you that this made it difficult to talk to you. You stayed true to Faux News instead of your family.
I cried as I asked you to make changes the final time because I knew that this was the end. I knew you wouldn’t change. It only took me 25 years to learn that lesson.
By the time I was a few months out from the wedding, I knew that I couldn’t do this anymore.
I had finally figured out that you were abusive, that you were not the mother I always wanted or, really, that I pictured in my head. I always thought of some idealized version of you that didn’t exist.
You had lost your job. I tried to help, but couldn’t do it all without you helping yourself. You and your partner became increasingly rough and verbally abusive to my sister and her little family.
Over my birthday weekend, I had my sister and her family up at my place. We planned it all — blocking you on social media, them secretly packing, and how I would have the police on standby.
On May 4, 2014, we came in and started moving them out unannounced.
I told you that you were too unstable to be around them, that there needed to be a break. I lied and said they would be living with my hubby-to-be and I at our new apartment, the one you never got the address for.
At one point, we were alone in the room.
You told me that you knew this was a long time coming, that it was clear I hated your guts.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Part of me knew going into this that this would be the last time in our lives that we would see each other. Part of me hoped that you would get back on your feet, that you would make the changes I asked you to make so you could stay in my life.
I was planning on playing the the wedding invites by ear, depending on what happened this day and in the next three months. And then you did the most hurtful thing…
You uninvited yourself to my wedding.
I wanted to scream at you, to tell you how hard I had worked to try to help you, how unfair it was that you would do all of these things to me.
I was honestly too shocked to say a word, and you left the room.
Aside from being hurtful, you took something that was mine to give or not give — again. It was not your decision whether or not you would be coming to my wedding, and it’s ridiculous that you ever thought it was.
Later that day, you tried to call me to ask what in the world you did to deserve this. I had already blocked you from calling my phone.
You emailed my work account, only to get an out-of-office message.
You started talking all over social media about what a horrible person I was, about how college turns our children into ‘liberal snobs’ and that should be banned.
You told everyone that I was horrible and didn’t invite you to my wedding, despite the fact you said you wouldn’t come. You kept trying to get in touch with my sister during my wedding day, to break down her resolve and try to get her to tell you where we were so you could come.
What you didn’t know was that I had planned with everyone to have contingent plans in case that happened.
Eventually, I had to mail a cease and desist order to you and your husband, who I’m guessing took it upon himself to message me repeatedly about what a liar I am.
It’s been almost a year since I sent that, and it’s been glorious.
Without you at my wedding, without the knowledge that something always goes wrong with you at an event, I enjoyed myself.
I truly enjoyed myself for the first time on my wedding day.
We listened to rap music and drank mimosas for breakfast.
I danced with my friends and sisters — all of them.
I even danced barefoot with my dad, the man you never told about me until I was sick and the State of Oregon forced you to prove paternity… the man I finally met two weeks earlier when I saw legal documents you lied to me about.
My wedding day was a celebration, a culmination of a lifetime of waiting and hoping:
hoping I would dance with my dad;
hoping I would actually marry someone;
waiting for someone who cared for me, though it meant spending more time in a toxic environment;
waiting until you were out of the picture to truly be myself.
Without you, I have learned so much about myself. I know what I truly like and dislike. I know what I’ve actually been through and what I’ve been lied to about.
I know who I am.
That doesn’t mean this has been easy. Seeing ads about Mother’s Day events or presents stings. Seeing people praise their mothers feels like a dagger in my heart.
I’ve joined the likes of Harry Potter and Bruce Wayne in becoming an orphan. I’ll never have the relationships I want with parents. I grew up wishing my dad would come see me — something you told me he didn’t want to do… which, in reality, was something you told him would confuse me.
Despite being someone who despises liars, who thinks they are the worst people in the world, you lied to me about nearly everything.
On Mother’s Day in 2014, just a week after cutting contact with you, I celebrated the fact that I mothered myself. I got a tattoo of those little stars from the Harry Potter books, a series that got me through all this by helping me remember I could still do great things.
I got them to remind myself that I turned the page, that I am the only one who gets to write in my book because…
