The greatest abuse.

Michele
Michele
Sep 3, 2018 · 16 min read

There is no good form of abuse, and each person’s experiences are different. While I was abused physically and verbally throughout my life, the emotional abuse I experienced was so insipid, so evil and so manipulative that it crippled me from being able to view the world in a healthy way that would have allowed me to enjoy my life and prosper. It started when I was a very young child, and didn’t end until my abuser died when I was 37. This is my perception of the greatest abuse.

I first saw my husband early in the morning, in late-May of 1993. Even though I could only see him from behind, my breath caught when my eyes fell upon him. He was of average height, had brown eyes and dark blond hair, a stalky build and was wearing jeans, a white long-sleeved t-shirt and had a tattered green backpack slung casually over his right shoulder. He had incredibly sexy shoulders and arms. But beyond the physical, I just had a feeling. I knew my life would never be the same.

We were young, both turning 20 by the end of that year. We both still lived at home with our parents; mine abusive, controlling and overprotective and his, the complete opposite, almost to a fault. By the halfway point of the summer class we were taking, we were good friends and by the end, we were dating. We both fell hard and fast, and soon became inseparable, and in November, he proposed. We felt as if we’d known each other before, and had finally been reunited. It just felt so intensely right that I never doubted it for a moment.

My mother, upon seeing that this one seemed destined to stick, eventually forbid me to see him more than a couple hours a week and began a campaign to end us. I was a whore, he only wanted one thing, he would soil me and dump me, and so on. In an effort to keep us from saving money for our future, she began demanding my paychecks. Our plan to save for six months and get married was ruined, and I felt hopeless. I needed to get away from her to survive. I packed as much of my belongings as would fit into my car, and he showed up in his for the rest. My parents called the police, who were flummoxed as to why they thought they could keep their 20 year old daughter from moving out, and before long, we were on our way. (Not without a LOT of drama.)

Unfortunately I would let the abuse continue for decades.

We squatted in his parents house until we could get into a cheap apartment a couple weeks later, and the rest — as they say — is history. As happy as we were to be together, without constant punitive rules and verbal, emotional and physical abuse (yes, my mother still hit me often through the time I moved out at 20) there was always a dark cloud hanging over us, for many years to come.

After a brief period of estrangement, my mother somewhat apologized, and T and I decided together that it would be best for me to maintain a relationship with her. He didn’t want to feel like he’d come between us, and knew how important the mother/daughter relationship should be. I tried to forgive her. I tried to have a “normal” relationship with her. We met for lunch and chatted like we might have been girlfriends, and she gave me relationship advice…even advising me to stick things out at one point when I was wondering if maybe my relationship wasn’t going to work out after all.

If I’d known then what I know now, I would have suggested T and I move away, leaving no forwarding address.

We married in August of 1994 — an elopement to avoid pressure from his family to have a Catholic wedding, and also to avoid interference and control from my side of the family. Well that, and we were really broke anyway. Two weeks later I became pregnant, and by late-September, I found out. I told my mother, and any progress we’d made was gone. She was insanely jealous. She’d had an illegal abortion at my age because her first husband was abusive, and she’d just left him when she found out she was carrying his child. She was jealous that I had a husband who treated me well and was happy we were having a baby. She advised me to have an abortion. When I said I couldn’t, she took it as a personal affront to her choice, and began an entirely renewed campaign to destroy our marriage and our lives.

We were irresponsible. We were too young. We would make HORRIBLE parents. We wouldn’t have enough money. We’d never succeed starting a family so young. My health would fail. I’d get fat and be obese the rest of my adult life. T would leave me when my body changed. T would be jealous if I breastfed. I didn’t have the right temperment to take care of an infant. I was emotionally immature. And worst of all, when my husband expressed excitement at the idea of becoming a dad, she went so far as to say that he was a pedophile and only wanted to become a father in order to abuse his future children. (The pregnancy was unplanned — though not unwanted — so that made absolutely no sense.)

I had my baby. I gained weight. I was fired from my job while on disability/maternity leave. My husband still found me attractive, worked two jobs to support us (while going to school) and adored our daughter. All he wanted was to be a good husband and father.

My mother threatened to call CPS before we even brought our baby home, because we’d left unexpectedly during dinner (my water broke and it was 45 minutes to the hospital) and hadn’t had a chance to clean the kitchen or scoop our cat box before we left, and because T didn’t want to leave my side while I was in the hospital with our baby. She said she’d make the call if we took the baby home before cleaning, and actually booked me a motel room to stay in while T went home to clean. We were both so sleep-deprived after a 3 day NICU stay that we didn’t have the energy to fight.

I think any mentally healthy new grandmother would have just gone to the house to help out…

She criticized everything from that point on. When she came to visit, she said she could smell our Diaper Genie from the street. She dropped by all the time to “help” but then would berate me for not having showered, or for being behind on dishes or laundry, or for being not losing the baby weight or for <insert anything that is normal when you have an infant>.

Funny, as at 12 years old, I had to take her moldy soup pot down to the creek to dump it. It was April and she’d made it for New Year’s Eve. I often had to re-wear stinky, dirty clothes to school because she wouldn’t do the laundry, and would not let anyone else in the house use her washing machine. And I’d resorted to eating dog biscuits as a small child because she hadn’t fed me. But supposedly I was was the one doing badly.

She told me I had to lose weight fast or T would leave me — and even if I did lose weight, my body would never be the same, so he’d still probably leave. She told me he worked with lots of young, beautiful, thin, educated and successful women and that it wouldn’t be long before he’d fall in love with someone else, because he worked long hours and came home to a disheveled wife and house. He obviously no longer loved me and was only staying with me out of guilt. She tried to talk me into throwing him out and moving back home with the baby.

She made him sign a quit-claim deed on the house we purchased, even though HE was paying the mortgage. We’d gone into a house deal believing my parents would simply be co-signors but she manipulated the situation because she believed T would leave me and try to take the house. She also constantly threatened to take the house away from us, even though I was on the mortgage and we’d never missed a payment. She said if we were homeless, she’d get custody of our daughter.

Years passed and we decided to have a second child. My mother was again jealous — my father had three children from a previous marriage and only agreed to have one child with my mother. And he was a “terrible” father anyway, so that was “for the best” according to her, but it still bothered her immeasurably that my marriage was happy and that my husband actually wanted more children.

We eventually had four children in all, after several years of secondary infertility, between our second and third. She told me that the infertility was God’s way of telling me I shouldn’t have more children with T, because he was evil. She said that my husband only wanted more children so I would be more dependent on him, and would be trapped. At the same time she was telling me he would leave me as soon as he had a chance.

Looking back, why did I believe any of it? It seems so obvious now, but I’d been abused and manipulated for so long, I didn’t know how to not believe it. I’d been groomed from early childhood to be 100% dependent on her, emotionally and otherwise.

Every positive thing in my life was begrudged by her, and every negative thing was celebrated and used as a chance to say “I told you so” while simulataneously pretending to comfort me. Over the years she used manipulation and gaslighting to control us, and try to have control over our children. She used whatever she could to her advantage, twisting facts and circumstances to seemlingly prove her many points about all our shortcomings.

We eventually moved from California to Arizona to try and break free, but my parents followed us, at her insistence. They purchased a home in our neighborhood — even though we told them we weren’t settling there. When we moved 70 miles away to be closer to T’s job, my mother insisted that we only moved away so that they would go bankrupt trying to follow us. (The housing market had crashed since they purchased their home.) They eventually decided to short-sell their house to again move close to us — just a few miles away.

We went through a very difficult period of several years of illness with our third child. She was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis (later changed to Crohn’s colitis) at 16 months of age and had serious complications from ongoing Crohn’s activity her entire life. By two, she was so ill she spent the the better part of a three month period of time hospitalized. She had a stroke at 2.5 years of age (in between Crohn’s hospitalizations) and was in a coma for several days.

During that time, we were still new to our state and had no support system. My mother offered to stay at our house with the kids (our oldest was only 12 and not equipped to be home alone with her younger brothers) and we didn’t have any choice but to accept the help. We had a breastfed baby at home and were homeschooling our two older children — and T was again working two jobs. We felt very strongly that one of us needed to be at the hospital at all times — we never left our daughter alone.

During this time, my mother took advantage of being alone with the kids to tell them all sorts of horrible things about their lives. She told them I only homeschooled them because I wanted them at home to help with chores and with their younger siblings. She told them their curricula was a waste of time, and told them not to do their schoolwork. She threatened me daily (while my youngest daughter was still in a coma post-stroke) that she would “march them down to the local school and enroll them.” I told her to do what she needed to do, and figured I’d deal with it later. (She didn’t do it.)

During this time, she spent her days on the couch watching talk shows and leaving our older daughter to care for her 14 month old brother virtually unassisted. She also was made to prepare all the food they ate, and do all the cleaning and laundry (of what little was done). All while my mother criticized me for how unkempt the house was, every time I came home for a couple hours to see the baby for a bit and get a shower and clean clothes.

She did anything and everything she could to create more stress during the most stressful time we’d ever experienced, all the while extoling her virtues and acting as though we couldn’t have managed with her.

Additional years passed, and during those years, I trusted her less and didn’t allow her as much access to myself, the kids and our lives as I had in the past, but I was unable to completely pull away. Our daughter’s illness had shaken our marriage just enough that I allowed myself to believe that maybe my mother was right and the relationship would eventually fail due to stress, financial strain, my ballooning weight and my own health problems. Through all of this, T ultimately was a dedicated and devoted husband and father, despite our difficulties.

For our 15th anniversary we decided to celebrate with a vow renewal and intimate reception, having made it through so many difficult years. I’d always wondered what it would have been like to have a bouquet and a wedding cake. We didn’t really celebrate our marriage when we were married — it was some illicit thing we’d snuck off to do in secret. I never got to feel special as a new bride.

We foolishly invited her, and she said she would come, only to back out hours before, for no reason other than she “couldn’t stomach” seeing me marry “that smug asshole with the cob up his ass” again. I was crushed and embarrassed. I should have enjoyed myself more without her there, but I felt completely worthless that she didn’t think we were worthy of celebrating our marriage and family. (Which are the two most important things in my life, and always have been.)

Although very late that hurtful act was a breaking point for me, and for us, as far as the mother/daughter relationship was concerned. I lost any hope we would ever have anything close to a marginally healthy relatioship. No matter what I did, it was never enough.

I began to realize (this was a process that would take years) that it wasn’t us, it was her. My husband loved me, I loved him, and we had a healthy, happy family and many blessings. For our own sanity, we began to pull back more than we’d ever been able. I avoided her, refused to help her run her errands, didn’t answer phone calls much of the time and just generally tried to sever that unhealthy co-dependency. I also made sure she could see the kids, supervised after what she’d said to them in the past. She usually chose not to see them.

I wasn’t able to completely break away until she passed away in March of 2011. The events leading up to her death were difficult, making the end even more complicated.

To explain this, I have to rewind a bit to the previous summer. We had a date to meet her and my dad for dinner with the kids. The kids were all very excited to see their grandparents, whom they hadn’t seen in several months, even though they lived just 3 miles away. While we were making the 30 minute drive to the chosen restaurant, my mother called and canceled. Knowing how disappointed the kids would be, I complained quite a bit to T, after the call ended. T commisserated and agreed while I vented. All the crushing emotion of her boycotting our vow renewal came out. I was very angry. But, the call from her hadn’t really ended, and she’d listened silently for several minutes before starting to scream and shriek, which alerted us that the call was still active.

We apologized but she then abruptly ended the call and called my dad, who after speaking to her, called and screamed at us and canceled as well. We decided to take the kids to eat anyway, so they wouldn’t be as disappointed, and she called back to scream at T while he spent nearly an hour trying to smooth things over, pacing around the car while the kids and I sat inide, all of us crying off and on, waiting to go into the restaurant.

After that, I only saw her a few more times. We saw her briefly at Christmas, but things were very strained. She became ill in early March of 2011. It was clear through her constant phone calls and increasingly irrational behavior that something was seriously wrong. I tried to persuade her to go to the doctor. I offered to make the appointment and take her. She continued to refuse. My dad was working a lot and in denial (and fearful of her wrath) and a few days before her eventual death, T and I called the paramedics and had them do a welfare check, because it was obvious in speaking to her on the phone that she wasn’t in her right mind, even for her. (She kept calling me to berate me and scream at me, despite how ill she was.)

Even though she couldn’t get out of bed and her blood pressure didn’t register right away, the paramedics decided not to force her to go to the hospital. She screamed at me the whole time, saying how dare I interfere when I so obviously had never cared about her. I left, but maintained phone contact over the next few days because I knew something was very wrong, and both T and I felt that she would most certainly die without medical treatment.

A similar scenario had occurred about five years before, and we’d insisted my dad take her to the hospital, where she was told her electrolytes were so off, her heart would have stopped by the end of the day had she not gone in. She was diagnosed with C. Diff at that time. Her doctors suspected undiagnosed Crohn’s or ulcertative colitis (which my mother’s brother and my daughter both do have) but my mother refused to undergo the diagnostic testing.

Three evenings later, on March 22, she called and asked to speak to my oldest, and then screamed and cried to her that none of us cared about her, and that she may as well die. I took the phone away from my crying daughter, and she said the same things to me, and then hung up in anger.

A few hours later, after 11pm, my dad called me panicked because he was on his way home from working late, and had spoken with her and she was incoherent. I told him he needed to call 911 right away, but I wasn’t sure he would. T happened to be out of town on a business trip and I called him for advice because I couldn’t think. He said to head over to their house right away, and call 911 when I got there, if my dad hadn’t yet. I loaded the kids into the car and began the three minute drive, and saw an ambulance turn onto the main road to their house. I followed it and sure enough, it was for her. There was already a fire engine parked on their street, and paramedics had been inside trying to revive her for several minutes. The front door was wide open, and she was on the floor, unclothed, receiving CPR from a very frantic paramedic, who’d been there a few days before.

I heard a woman screaming, “Daddy! What’s happening?” over and over, and realized after a few moments, that it was me.

She was loaded into the ambulance and I followed it to the hospital, just minutes away. I could see the paramedics vigilantly working on her, through the read window of their rig. My father stayed back at the house to make sure none of their cats had escaped, and to do his daily chores and “clean up” before she returned. He truly believed she was coming back and would be livid that he allowed her to be taken to the hospital.

She never regained consiousness. The medical team tried for 90 minutes. Briefly she had a faint heartbeat, but she never breathed on her own and had no brain activity. At around 1:30am on March 23rd, she was pronounced dead at 62 years of age. My husband booked the earliest flight home, and I picked him up from the airport at around 10am that morning, after only a couple hours of sleep. I forced myself to function until I was in his arms, because I didn’t feel like I could survive falling apart without him. I collapsed in the pick up lane at the airport and I don’t even remember how he got me into the car and back home.

As sad as it is to say, I didn’t realize until after she was gone and the gray fog of grief began to lift, that she had robbed me of much of the joy I could have — and would have — had my entire life. She robbed me of my faith in myself. She stole my childhood by way of abuse and then she stole my adulthood as well, because she couldn’t let go like she was meant to. She robbed me of the joy of falling in love, getting engaged, and the getting married. She robbed me of much of the joy I should have had with each of my children’s births — and throughout their childhoods. I spent the first five years after she died on antidepressants, too numb to fully be present, so it didn’t end with her death, even though it became clear.

All those years, I‘d held onto tiny shards and glimmers of joy, overshadowed by doubt and shame — and that’s not the way it should have been. My entire existence was manipulated to make me feel like I was unworthy of love, unworthy of respect, unable to make good choices or be a good wife and mother.

I know now, logically, that none of it was true. I am left to process the sheer magnitude of all the years I will never get back, and somehow find a way to move on and find joy, and also learn to believe that maybe I’m not so worthless. I can’t turn back time and re-live the first 17 years of my marriage, or my children’s childhoods. That time is gone — and she took it with her when she died.

We had so many happy times all those years — we have hours and hours of videos of our happy children, interacting with contented parents — even my memories have been overshadowed by what I was told. I can see in those videos that our family has always been happy, but at the time I was brainwashed into believing that I was wrong.

The pain of this reality makes all the abuse — verbal, physical, emotional — I endured during my life seem insignificant, yet at the same time, magnified. I don’t know if I will ever be fully whole, but I will never give up trying to piece myself back together.

“The way you speak to your children becomes their inner voice.” — Peggy O’Mara

Michele

Written by

Michele

40-something photographer, writer, performer, vegetarian, animal lover, wife and mom.