The Tortured Parent

thoushallnotvex
Nov 6 · 3 min read

I'm watching ‘American Son’ on Netflix and Kerry Washington is playing the role of tortured mother splendidly.

She said something to her son that she ultimately regrets: “things a mother should never say to her child”. Pause. Let’s unpack that.

Maternity leave has me so bored that I’m out here unpacking traumas. And I don’t wanna say this isn’t healthy but what’s the alternative? Relapse into a bulimia nervosa episode? I think not.

Its just that recent events are making me just take a step back and analyze my life as of now and the things I had compartmentalized and stored away somewhere, marked as do not enter, I am now slamming the door open and tipping the boxes upside down.

What is it? Why is that? How is that? Do I remember that correctly? I dusted off an old VCR player in the deep and dark recesses of my memory and I’ve been rewinding dusty old tapes and watching them from the beginning.

Some tapes are then stored in other places never to be watched again. Others are replayed just once just to make sure and they are then to be put back in the same place.

These trips into the memory attic have been fruitful but I still struggle with recalling happy memories without tearing up. I tear up regardless lol.

My focus has been too strong on not becoming my mother. Not letting her behavior and her ways morph me into who I am today. Even though I would argue that that is inevitable. I wouldn’t be who I am today without all those experiences.

And then comes the anger. Why couldn’t it just have been ok all the time? What kind of pseudo nonsense is that? I HAD to be broken multiple times to come out stronger in the end? Does the science even support that?

This is what I mean by being the tortured “woe is me type”. The poets, the beat down ones, the tortured mother who thinks it’s ok to pass that trauma onto their kids just because they done been through the wringer.

I still don’t know what possessed my mum to be so horrible at times and she never wants to discuss it either. I have heard bits and bobs from relatives who knew her as a child and as a teen and it just made me even more confused.

It made me ask myself well damn, how do you go through all that and say to yourself: hey, let me relive that same exact experience except I will become the aggressor this time around.

My point is there’s two types of people in the world and all known evidence points to this, since pain is inevitable. The ones who go through some type of hardship and wish to never inflict that pain on anyone else and the ones who are engulfed by it and wish to seek revenge.

I am the first type, definitely. I been through it and I can honestly say from the bottom of my heart that I would rather delete those memories from my entire being than relive it and act it out onto another person.

I am naturally inclined to be kinder, to know better, to act better and find ways to put a positive spin on things.

The anger, if it is all consuming, will turn a person into the aggressor.

Abu Huraira reported: A man came to the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم and said, “Advise me.” He said, “Do not get angry.” The man repeated his request twice, and the Prophet said, “Do not get angry.”

[Sahih Bukhari, Volume 8, Book 73, Number 137]

The Prophet Muhammed (peace be upon him) repeated this piece of advice twice to emphasize its importance. Do not be angry.

The world is so small, the time we have on here is so so worthless. Imagine your good deeds being taken away from you because you willfully wronged another person. And after the fact you were still heedless and continued inflicting the same pain on to those under your wing.

I am a mother. Allah has blessed me with this and I rebuke the idea of the tortured mother. Whatever I went through 7abibti it is long gone, over and done with, never to be relived again. And I’m gonna stay true to that promise.

thoushallnotvex

Written by

24, The Netherlands

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