On Shadow Work: Learning to Forgive My Abuser
Wide awake in bed, I hear the garage door open at 11:42 p.m. Next, the car door slamming shut, then the keys jingling. I turn on my side to face the wall and firmly close my eyes. She comes through the entrance and closes the door behind her softly. Within a few seconds, she’s standing at the threshold of my room.
I try to imitate the breath of deep sleep between moments of involuntarily holding it. She’s still there. My neck is burning while I peek open to see her shadow on my wall. I don’t breathe. I watch her shadow study my room, angrily mutter how I’m a “shedding snake”, and walk away. I heave a deep, silent breath out of my tiny 6-year-old body, and give myself permission to slip into unrestful sleep.
It didn’t stay this pleasant. When I was a preteen, she noticed the dishes weren’t done and, while I was still asleep, grabbed me by my hair and dragged me down the stairs into the kitchen to wash them.
Trivial mistakes were met with an open hand or a closed fist. A report card with a B. Some bickering with my older sister with who gets to play next (she, by the way, was the favorite). My unkempt room, again. Replying with a “what?” that had a hint of attitude in it. And, sometimes, for no apparent reason.
At seven, I was asked to close the refrigerator door when I poured a glass of milk for myself. I had a recent habit of leaving it open, thinking that I could lift the gallon easily and quickly before she could catch me. But indeed she did catch me, and I nervously tried to cover up my tracks in vain as she approached me.
Without hesitation, she picked up the plastic chair from the kids’ table and beat me with it repeatedly until it broke. I laid there, crying in pain, hating myself for not obeying. She left me on the kitchen floor with the scattered plastic shards and spilled milk.
Did she have moments of humanity? I remember her apologize once, but only when I was a small child without any noticeable manifestation of defiance. But of course, deep down, something was brewing.
She chased me around the house with a flyswatter that had dried blood and guts on it from insect carcasses. I was cornered, and she hit me all over my body. Hard. Over and over. My arms, my legs, my back, my face when I uncovered it to beg her to stop.
I was too young then to remember the reason why she did this, but I remember the sting from the wounds chafing against my long sleeves and pant legs, or not knowing how to answer why I was wearing my winter school uniform on a hot day. Or a hot week, for that matter.
She laid me on a mat with ice packs and rags to soak up patterned grids of blood droplets. I was numb, staring at the ceiling, still some residual tears falling. I look over at her carefully and she is also crying.
“Sorry,” she says with a whimper of regret.
“It’s okay.”
I loved her, my short-fused, relentless, all-knowing, inescapable mother.
I loved her as a small child does when they naturally and purely love their parent, without judgment of their past or who they are today. They would do whatever it takes to give and receive love. An open heart is a child’s life source.
Forgiveness and patience are what I gave until I learned that, no matter how much I would endure, I would not receive what I was naively looking for.
Over the years, her singular apology was drowned out by other words.
Stupid idiot. Disgusting animal. Worthless. Useless. Nobody will love you with all that eczema. Nobody will hire you, either. Call CPS? Yeah right, coward. And the rest of her words was incoherent yelling at the very top of her lungs about something I failed to do or failed to be, just a few inches from my face.
If there were any good-natured words to show she cared in the form of motherly advice, it was to never trust men. “Never trust men,” she’d repeat throughout my childhood, having a father who came and went.
My father was an easy-going person whose lap I would find safety and comfort upon. I told all my friends in kindergarten that he was coming back home, and shrugged when they asked, “well, where’d he go?”.
When my mother attacked me, he’d subdue her by standing in her way, catching her violent claws, and yelling in my defense. He was my hero, who would disappear again in four months for a year or so, and return only to leave again, and few more times after that.
My sister and I would hide under the bed together, listening to plates breaking and hysterical screaming and the shuffling of garbage bags and, finally, a door slamming shut. He would stop coming back when I turned ten.
My mother said good riddance and many other things to curse his name. The unsurprising truth is that he was unfaithful to her, and every time he would leave was to be with another woman. My mother made sure I was aware of this, yet I still looked up to him upon that pedestal.
I watched him, exiled on the couch with the glow emitting from his phone under the bedsheet, texting to whichever woman it was this time. It was a poorly kept secret. My mother showed me his stashed Viagra bottles and, as a young child, I didn’t know what that meant or how to comfort her.
She was vigilant to find out the gory details. I was instructed to go through his phone and look for names. Another time, to put a voice recorder in my pocket when I spent time with him. I pretended like I looked and came up with nothing, and I only recorded enough dull conversation to show I made an effort. During those last numbered days, I continued to curl up on my Dad’s lap and ask him to read to me.
To cope with all this anger and frustration of a troubled marriage, my mother turned to gambling. She was a high roller in Vegas, Tahoe, Reno, and eventually a casino resort that was a 10-minute drive from our new, post-divorce suburban house.
My remaining childhood memories are mostly of lazying around in hotel room confinement until my mother came back. At 7 in the morning, she’d return from hours of dropping coins into slot machines, only more empty-handed and desperate than before. She wanted to win a life bigger than to support a single mother and two kids, a jackpot of a life that could prove that she had survived from it breaking her heart repeatedly.
She worked two jobs as a Registered Nurse, her afternoon shift being in the Emergency Room. She’d leave home at 6:15 a.m. and return at 11:42 p.m., exhausted and irritable. My sister and I were left alone at home often, but we were responsible and careful not to do anything that would upset her further. She trudged through each day, surpassing her body and mind’s limits until she had neither.
In her eyes, your work ethic demonstrated your value as a person. She was the youngest of eight, raised on a small farm in a village in the Philippines. Her militant father strongly believed corporal punishment (in other words, being smacked around) was conducive to building discipline, resilience, and focus.
All eight children and their mother were subject to this. My mother said she was glad to be disciplined in such a way, for it has given her grit to push past comfort (or, I think, ignore vital signals) to obtain any goal.
In her late twenties, she emigrated to pursue the American Dream — the excessive two-story suburban house, the row of gas-guzzling muscle cars, and the successful, happy family. She got most of what she wanted, besides the latter.
With a worn-out body, a cold heart, and tired eyes, she could show her grassroots that she had “made it”.
Trauma is a sacred family heirloom. My mother planted seeds deep in my core with the intent to nourish and harvest abundance in this life. Values, beliefs, truths. She inherited these seeds from generations before and sowed them as if it were tradition.
And when they grew, they became tall, wild, persistent weeds. Her garden, too, was ridden with grief that reverberated throughout the family’s traumatic legacy.
Over the years, I have perpetually hacked away at the parasitic brush alone. I resented her for this life’s work. Yet, she may be the help I need to overcome this unhappiness overgrowth.
In Mark Wolynn’s It Didn’t Start With You, he states:
If we truly want to embrace life and experience joy, if we truly want deep and satisfying relationships, and health that’s vibrant and resilient, if we truly want to live up to our full potential, without the sense of being broken inside, we must first repair our broken relationships with our parents.
I don’t feel ready to reconcile our relationship. I don’t even know if I want to. But there is a myriad of stories of people healing together with their parents through compassion and forgiveness. And as they say, forgiveness is for you, not for the offender. They come out the other end together and weightlessly move forward in life without such a burden.
It’s still difficult to forgive her for what she’s done, but now I have some sense of why she has become this way. She has gone through her own trauma and I have compassion for her pain. It’s my responsibility now to do the work to become open-hearted, for our sake.
She’s at the door. I just have to let her in.
