All Mothers Love Their Kids.. Right??

Little Livvy was chatty. Whatever the scenario, she had a lot to say. Observations, opinions. Questions.

In one of her little worlds – Grandma’s garden, the park, Ra’s cozy lounge room – her running commentary was enjoyed. Praised. Welcomed.

But in her other little world – her home – her thoughts and comments were annoying. Her questions were no longer clever or observant, they were cheeky, bold.

Bold. Her mother used that word a lot. By the tone her mother used, she knew to be bold was bad.

It was a lifetime later that she learned to be bold meant to be courageous! To be confident and take risks.

That’s definitely not what little Livvy’s mother meant. To be bold was a clear accusation of insolence. Appalling rudeness.

It’s hard to imagine little Livvy was capable of appalling rudeness. She was proudly a whole four years old. She had a little brown bob and persistent curiosity as to whether her skirt would twirl if she spun around fast enough.

How does an adult conceptualise a child, a young child that hasn’t even learned to read or write, as an opponent?

What does a mother tell herself after slapping a face so small the stinging red swelling outlines only a section of her mother’s hand?

I know some of the answers from study, and other parts I know from my mother’s pathetic confessions.

The fact she viewed her comments as actual explanations is perhaps more illuminating than the comments themselves.

“You wouldn’t break!”

Sitting in the passenger seat of her aqua green car, I studied her expression trying to determine if she was frustrated or impressed. By the way she repeated herself, it seemed to be at least a little of both.

“I tried to break your will. I tried everything. But you wouldn’t break!”

At wise mature 18, I knew there was truth in what she was saying. But after years being the target of this personal war, it felt strange to hear the mother put words to the unspoken mission.

I also felt some pride. I didn’t break.

Was this what it looked like to win?

Had I won?

Because listening to the mother pour out all her maternal failings while sitting in her car out the front of the shared house I now lived in after she kicked me out, it didn’t completely feel like winning.

It felt strange. New, but not good.

Now, decades on, I recognise it as the mother’s instinctive manipulative genius.

I had just starting my final year of high school. The mother was acting strangely.

I’d been out late. This wasn’t unusual. From around 15 years old my time had been exclusively focused on my friends – outings, hanging out, parties whatever. For the first time my parents’ negligence worked in my favour.

Where other friends had to deal with parents wanting to know where they were, giving them deadlines to be home etc., I was a free agent. My parents didn’t ask where I was going or where I’d been.

Until late January 1999. I’d turned 18 early January, an event that while marking my legal agency somehow ignited the mother’s sense of motherhood.

It was after 1am. I was coming in from Australia Day celebrations in the city. Year 12 was beginning the next day, which is probably why I was coming home at all.

There the mother was, sitting in the largely dark formal lounge room, in her white dressing robe.

It was the type of fabric that if it had been washed gently with softener, and put through the tumble dryer on a low temperature, it would have been supple and luxurious to wear. But the mother’s robe was rough and rigid, more grey than white.

Acknowledging the mother in the barely profunctory manner that random encounters with her tended to elicit, I turned and started up the stairs.

To my surprise, the mother was not ready for our encounter to end.

“It’s after one am!” She exclaimed, as if she were informing me of something unknown. “You have school tomorrow!”

Clearly angry, she seemed to have decided – for the first time in my life – to play the role of protective teen parent.

I glanced back towards her ghostly silhouette, now standing in the middle of the unlit lounge.

I laughed.

“You picked a really weird time to decide to be a mother, goodnight.”

It was so weird but at the same time it clearly had nothing to do with me.

Months later after she’d kicked me out over a phone bill, I had the same sense that her tearful confessions were not really about me.

After several more experiences of her showing up at 6pm when I was tired and had homework to do, my compassion for her was running thin.

It seemed she felt compelled to tell me everything she had done wrong. From the beatings to her maternal disinterest to admitting that I had been her favourite, she poured it all out while I sat in exhausted shock and comforted her.

At 18 I considered my mother to be a bitch, which in itself is not unusual. I was years away from recognising or accepting that my mother had physically abused me throughout my entire childhood.

The neglect, both physical and emotional, was even harder to pin down. In some ways, in my 40s, I am still recognising the ways my parents failed myself and my siblings.

So at 18, the mother was confessing in very general terms about being a terrible mother to a daughter who was largely in the dark.

Which of course was all part of the manipulative genius that is my mother.

While she cried, I would tell her it was ok, that she did the best she could, that I was ok. I forgave her, I reassured again and again.

Then came the little seedlings of blame, the same little gems she planted with my sisters and dad.

She’d told a Bible study once, she said, that she “hits her kids.” And none of them had done anything about it, my sister said, her voice laced with recrimination.

Those evil Bible study goers, I guess was supposed to be my response.

And my dad’s family, who we were very close to, they were next in line to take responsibility as far as the mother and my sister were concerned.

“Mum completely lost it hitting Josh one time,” my sister explained with no hint that Mum belting the shit out of Josh was the core issue, “they ALL SAW! And they did nothing.”

Here, of course, we run into a legit issue. My family had looked the other way regarding my mother’s abuse.

What my sister failed to mention was when it was raised with my father he made it clear that he would not stomach any word or accusation against my mother.

It’s also worth mentioning that someone, a neighbour perhaps, called the police about children screaming in our home at least a couple of times. Both times my father – a police officer for 40 years – assured them that everything was fine.

The mother has acknowledged since she kicked me out that, in her words, she “was a wicked, wicked mother.” She says it with Meryl Streep flair – glancing down, spitting the words out as if they taste bitter and painful.

In the car sessions, she would cry about how horrible she had been as a mother. Over time compassion fatigue set in and I would demand to know why if she felt so bad, why did she keep showing up at my house and crying, knowing it drained me and made me feel sad?

She would tell me that even though she felt “terrible” for kicking me out while I was still in high school, that she thought it “was for the best.”

She never offered for me to come home. Instead, she repeated that now she was finished being my mother – “it was so hard to be your mother, Liv, it was so so hard” – she believed we could now be friends.

For years I tried to be her friend. So desperate to have a mother, I did my absolute best to see her as a person, offer her compassion and listen to her.

It got harder to be her friend when she so clearly, enthusiastically celebrated my bulimia. A lifelong believer that fat people are worthless, lazy and unintelligent, she couldn’t even feign the vaguest concern that I was unwell.

When I was 17 my eating disorder had not yet significantly affected my weight. She found evidence I had been making myself sick in the shower. She told me I was deliberately trying to get attention, rolled her eyes and walked away.

Five years later, I was in the grips of bulimia. I had lost several dress sizes and spent 20 minutes in the bathroom after every meal.

My mother was ecstatic, bragging about my ‘success’ to both my sisters and encouraging them to follow my lead.

By 30 my enthusiasm for overlooking the mother’s character deficits was waning, but still there. So when it came time to ask the mother about these strange memories I had about being strangled I was not concerned about upsetting her. But part of me was still on guard.

Although my weight had fluctuated over the years, I had married a very wealthy man and had a tribe of beautiful children, so my favourite child status was still intact. Although her bragging about my life now prompted irritation and resentment, more than quiet pride.

On this occasion, my mother was visiting my kids. I had given birth to triplets the year before, and also had a three-year-old.

The mother had offered to come and help with the triplets three nights a week for six months. A significant offer of assistance, much welcomed at the time. Two months in, however, the mother had tired of the novelty and stopped coming.

She did however block in time whenever she wanted to see the triplets, although they were having their afternoon nap on the day in question.

Ever direct, I opened bluntly, “Do you ever remember strangling me? I have these memories..”

Never one to back down, the mother returned the query with an incredibly calm, directness of her own.

“Yes. You were 12, you wouldn’t get in the car.”

It’s been more than a decade since the mother sat on my couch, across my square coffee table. Yet I still struggle to comprehend the ease, the speed and the clarity with which she answered that question.

Perhaps more telling, though, is her silence. Nearly 30 years had passed since the mother had tried to kill me, grabbing me with both hands around the neck.

She shook me so hard that my entire body was moving.

She shook me so hard that my sister screamed (for the 2nd time in my life) for the mother to “Stop, stop! You’re going to kill her.”

Perhaps my response was just as strange. The mother’s confirmation felt like validation to me, those strange images in my mind were real. I felt initially excited, relieved.

“Did you get my neck x-rayed? Because I have this memory of going down to Pennant Hills..”

“Yes, yes, I had to get your neck x-rayed – you kept saying My neck! My neck!”

“Where did you get the referral? I don’t remember seeing a doctor?”

“No, I called one of my doctors, one of the doctors that referred me patients.”

What did you tell him?

“I told him I had grabbed you around the neck, and needed an x-ray.”

“Holy shit, how stressful. What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking this is it, it’s over – they’re finally going to get me.”

At the time I went on asking questions and connecting various dissociated dots. But her comment that she believed ‘they’ were finally going to get her has stayed with me.

It may have been the most honest statement the mother has ever made. In that one brief aside, she admits she knew she was abusing us kids and she knew if officials became away she would be in deep legal trouble.

Decades of blaming the devil, blaming the Bible study, blaming the passive nature of my father, blaming his family and anyone else she could think of at the time.. it is as close to taking true responsibility as the mother is capable of.

When I was 18, the mother had told me that when I was 13 she had prayed for God to heal her so she would stop beating us kids.

When I was 23, I confronted her about this obfuscation. When I was 13, I was getting taller; being physically bigger made it tangibly more difficult to abuse. She admitted immediately yes, of course, she shouldn’t make excuses etc etc.

There is a big difference between saying yes I did terrible things and actually feeling remorse. I have no evidence the mother has the capacity to feel remorse, or guilt, or empathy.

The thing is when you cry for years about what a terrible mother you are, you take away that weapon. No one can come to you about what a terrible mother you are.

But then you admit calmly, immediately that you strangled your 11-year-old decades ago. You recall details, without prompting, and even express your concern at the time that you would be caught.

In the hundreds of conversations since, you never once mentioned strangling one of your daughters. And perhaps more tellingly, it never occurred to you that the chronic neck spasms your daughter suffers from resulted by a historic injury at your hands.

There are only two options. Either you didn’t mention it because you did not see strangling your 11-year-old as significant, or because you were hoping it was never brought up.

Either way, the evidence of the mother having the capacity to care, to protect, to actually love is non-existent. For all the ways that she presents herself to the world, the mother lacks fundamental humanity.

In truth, little Livvy never had a mother.