Forgiving My Mother, Part 1: The Process

It is time to talk about my mother.  I really don’t want to, even now.  Forgiving my father was easier because I could point to specific horrors he unleashed on me.  It was easier because my very survival and emotional growth depended upon it and I wanted to be happy and live in peace more than I wanted to carry anger about the injustice my father served upon me.  It was easier to forgive my father because I bore witness to his pain.  Finally, it was easier to forgive my father because I saw what I believed to be remorse in him, even if the remorse was in the guise of confusion. 

Somewhere when driving across the country, I chose to forgive my mother and I can’t give a good reason why, except thinking about my mother has taken up valuable time I could be investing in other activities.  I do not hold my mother more or less accountable than my father, they were a match made in hell, and I was the defenseless soul they tormented.  Maybe hurting me was the one thing in their marriage they could agree upon.  Well, at least it seemed that way.  The one time I tried to address the sexual assaults my father subjected me to, she said “Well, that’s just how men are.”  It is possible she viewed the sexual assault of a child as a normal part of life, no matter how much harm resulted.  I often express gratitude I was able to become the person I am, despite the odds.  It didn’t happen by accident; I worked very hard to get here.  I took a hard metal look at myself, my characteristics and my life and I changed what wasn’t working.  I also had many people in my life that helped and supported me along the way.  These wonderful and patient people put up with me no matter what silly thing I might be engaged in at the time.  Most of them were brave enough to tell me the truth, and I even listened to a couple of them.  Up until recently, I held my mother up to my standards.  I held her accountable by my achievements, though I recognize the same life has destroyed many other people stronger than me.  I feel fortunate I was able to become the person I am, but I did not consider my mother was just another person who did not survive her life.  My perspective with my mother revolved entirely around the fact I protected my children to the best I was able, and she did nothing to protect me.  That has nothing to do with my mother or forgiveness. 

My anger and inability to forgive my mother was drowned in my own feelings of worthlessness.  The ocean of worthlessness was deeper than I imagined, and it took me a very long time to find my way to the shore.  It takes a long time to find the shore when you are blinded by your own self-righteousness.  I attended regular pity parties on my own behalf, demanding my mother make an appearance, which, of course, she never did.  When people express unhappiness or sorrow over something going on in their life, I always tell them “It’s OK to have a pity party, just don’t stay too long.”  It is good advice, and I didn’t follow it.  I plagued myself with questions such as: “Why didn’t she love me enough to protect me?”  “Why wasn’t I worth protecting?”  “She knows this pain, why would she want me to suffer as she did?”  “Why did she beat me because my father sexually assaulted me?”  “Why did she blame me for what my father was doing to me?”  “If she thought my father engaging in sexual acts with me was my fault, why did she facilitate his access to me?”  “Why did she look the other way?”  “How could she look the other way?”  There are more, but you get the idea.  I am a master at finding ways to prolong my own sorrow. 

I hold myself up to a very high bar of expectations, probably an unrealistically high bar.  If I ever reached that bar, I could very well get a nosebleed from the height, or become dizzy from lack of oxygen.  Who knows?  Maybe the bar is so high my head would explode under the pressure!  I don’t cut myself any breaks for the obstacles and challenges I have faced in my life; therefor I have set myself up to always fail.  By logic, if I fail, then I must be a failure.  Every once in a great while, I allow myself to feel the tiniest bit of pride because deep down I know I have achieved something.  Since I am so logical, let me tell you where my mother falls into this.  If I am a worthless failure and I protected my children, then there is no excuse for her not to have protected me.  It gets even more twisted.  This logic holds that since I am a worthless failure, then my mother, as broken as she is, somehow must be a far better person than I, or at least far more capable.   It makes a whole lot more sense in my head than it does in writing.  While my mother’s acceptance was never an issue, it is the same type of dynamic as when I sought the acceptance of my father, even after I knew what kind of man he was. 

It is time I see my mother for the broken and damaged woman she is.  My logic is flawed, and now I am compelled to admit it.  The fact is my mother is not a better person than I am.  People who tend to feel worthless, such as myself, easily revel in feeling superior at a time like this, so I will try to keep myself in check.  In all honesty, I may want to throw this up in my mother’s face, (that I protected my girls) but it does not make me a better person than she is, either.  I really have to get over trying to feel superior to another human being.  When someone catches a glimpse of it, I always look like an ass.  It’s not a good look on me.  Grey washes me out, and swatting the flies off my face gets really annoying. 

My mother’s childhood had to be a nightmare, just from the little I know.  I know what that kind of childhood did to me.  There were large gaps in my memory for a large part of my life.  I was a strong willed child, so I gave a good fight, but eventually I had to conform or my parents would have killed me.  I don’t mean to sound melodramatic, they would not have meant to kill me, but my fearlessness and defiance caused me to be beat harder and longer than my brothers.  I challenged them to beat me by not crying.  Eventually, I would have enraged them to the point that they would have beaten me a little too much and they would have accidentally killed me.  Back then, they could have buried me on my beloved farm and told everyone else I was sent off to live with relatives.  No one would have missed me.  So I adapted to my environment. 

The things my father did to me turned into nightmares, so that I didn’t have to believe it was real.  Nothing happened to me, it was a nightmare.  My father took on various shapes and forms in these nightmares, and he was so well disguised I could not recognize him.  Eventually, I even hid the nightmares from myself.  They became buried so deeply they turned into the night terrors that disrupt my sleep, twist my bed linens, and cause me to fight epic battles during the night.  Since the sexual assault wasn’t real, I locked it inside my mind so there was no memory of it for a long time.  It was so pervasive; I could not even remember all of it at the same time.  The first memory came back at age 25.  Actually, it came back a few months earlier in the form of a drawing.  When a child is traumatized to the extent I was, all emotional growth becomes stunted.  Early therapy sessions were not the traditional “talk therapy” between two adults.  My counselor recognized early on I could not relate to her as an adult, and she could not reach me by treating me as an adult.  Early counseling sessions were more art therapy than talk therapy.  I drew a very detailed picture of what my father was doing to me, but the drawing was the drawing of a child.  Images in the drawing were very simple, and not very clear.  I drew it, but I couldn’t tell the counselor what the drawing was.  I would not be able to verbalize what the picture was for a very long time.  My mother did not have the benefit of counseling.  It is true I sought out counseling on my own, but mental health was in its infancy when my mother needed it. 

I can say with conviction that I was not born to be the damaged adult I became.  My parents taught me to be a liar, and I was groomed to be a thief.  I was never taught social skills, and if the immaturity from stunted emotional growth was not enough to isolate me from having friends, the dyslexia and ADHD sealed it.  Because of my childhood, I never developed a sense of self or identity outside of my parents, and that is a very difficult thing to try to gain as an adult.  Emotions were too difficult to feel, so I became blunted and disconnected from life.  There were a couple of emotions I could feel, like jealousy, envy, a sense of unfairness which fueled a slow burning anger I refused to acknowledge.  I couldn’t identify when I was having specific emotions, because I buried them deeply inside of my subconscious.  I could not feel compassion for anyone because I could not feel compassion for myself.  I lacked a sense of moral compass because the compass I had been given was not working.  I was unable to understand I was accountable for my own actions, because no one in my family seemed to be.  I did not understand my actions had the potential to harm someone else, because I no longer felt the pain of being hurt by others. 

The damage was profound and affected every area of my life without exception.  Poor self-esteem and anxiety contributed to a struggle with anorexia/bulimia that not only threatened my life, but the life of my first daughter as well.  Pregnancy and anorexia are not compatible.  Fortunately, I was able to temporarily place the welfare of my child above the disease, but I did not conquer it until I was in my early thirties.  Hypersexuality and promiscuity are cardinal symptoms of someone who has been sexually assaulted as a child, and I was no exception.  I flirted with men and women alike, though I am heterosexual.  Everything revolved around my body image and my self-esteem was directly linked to men.  I needed them to find me sexually desirable in order to have any value at all.  My make-up and style of clothing was garish, sexual and blatant, all in order to draw attention to myself.  I sought attention from any avenue I could.  I felt worthless and at times even invisible, so any type of acknowledgement I was real and worthwhile was sought whether it was positive or negative.  All of this only served to reinforce I was a worthless and disposable human being, but that is all I knew. 

The early years of my parenting I am ashamed of, because I thought since I wasn’t beating my children like I was beaten, then I was a good parent.  Through parenting classes which begun at The Battered Women’s shelter, I learned there were many forms of abuse, and raising my children in fear was no better than what my parents had done to me.  I yelled at my children for the smallest infractions.  I didn’t yell a little bit, I yelled in rages.  As an example, when Eileen would spill something, not only would I make her clean it up, I would yell and humiliate her as she did.  She was dumb, clumsy and stupid, all because she accidentally spilled something, and she was six or less years old.  I didn’t just yell for a minute, I yelled at her for several minutes.  I shamed my beautiful child for the smallest infractions.  I used to be proud of the fact that I didn’t have to spank or beat my children to get them to obey, all I had to do was to look at them a certain way when I disapproved, and they corrected their behavior.  I cannot believe I was proud that my children feared me.  Of course, I learned this from my parents.  I was yelled at and humiliated but did not recognize this is hurtful or abusive because I had become numbed to it.  I am ashamed of the parent I was, but it was the parent I was taught to be.  I cannot forgive myself for the harm I caused my children, no matter how unintentional, so it stands to reason forgiving my mother is a challenge.  It was a learning process, but the more I learned about what abuse was, the more I was horrified at the person I was. 

I married the kind of man who would reinforce what my parents had begun, what they taught me.  I accepted his abuse of me because that is what I was taught was acceptable behavior.  He violently raped me more than once and yet I accepted it because I was married to him, it could not be rape.  It didn’t matter that even the thought of his touch was revolting to me.  Ironically, I initially entered into counseling to save my marriage!  My husband told me I was crazy and needed psychiatric help.  That was probably the only true statement he made to me in all the time I was with him.  He meant it to hurt me, but in the end it saved my life, and the lives of my children.  I do have that to be grateful to him for.  I wasn’t crazy, but I was in desperate need of psychiatric help, even I could agree with that.  I felt “crazy” by this point.  Even though my husband revolted me, I did not want to be divorced, I did not want my children to be deprived of two parents, and it appeared from my twisted perspective that Ron loved his daughters.  So if our marital problems were my fault, I was willing to go to counseling to fix it. 

It wasn’t long before the counselor started to talk to me about being in an abusive marriage, but it took her almost two years to convince me I needed to have a plan to leave.  I was making steps to leave him, by looking for work and planning a life as a single mother, but in the two years it took to convince me my marriage could not be saved, and I was not to blame for him beating me, the violence in the marriage had also escalated exponentially.  It became so dangerous for me there my counselor gave me her home phone number.  I was to call her if I felt threatened.  Considering the level of violence I was accustomed to, it took quite a bit of violence for me to feel threatened.  I don’t think 911 was available yet in our area, or if it was still an emerging service, but I do not remember 911 as being an option.  The police and legal system did not recognize spousal abuse on any serious level yet, so calling the police was also pointless.