My Mother And The Ambiguity Of Abuse

By Elena Kristof

Several weeks ago, I found myself mingling about a deserted playground with a couple of my closest women friends. With our backs to a creaky swing set and our bare feet in the sandbox, we suddenly — and rather appropriately given our kiddie surroundings — began discussing our childhoods. Specifically, the trauma, abuse, neglect, and fear that hung over each of our respective upbringings.

While each of us embodied our own unique version of “damaged goods,” our various perspectives on what we’ve found in the aftermath of our childhoods spanned the spectrum. Health and closure. Forgiveness and redemption. Exile and eternal numbness. Confusion and grief. An emotional phantom pain at the knowledge that whatever it was we needed was never there to begin with. We spoke of the struggles and hardships we’d been forced to dodge — seemingly from day one — and the painful imprints that’d been scattered along the trail ever since.

Yet the slope of abuse is a slippery one. Not simply given the ugly subject matter itself, but the means (or lack thereof) by which we attempt to measure it, assign a name to it, define and gauge and give weight to it. It often seems the further you wander from physical, tangible abuse, the more intricate its implications.