Abuse is a Great Lake That Drowns Everything

I always knew that my mother wasn’t the same as other mothers. It began with the black circles and ended with her inability to smile. She expected us to be invisible, so if you walked down a passage, you did it like they do in horror movies. If you stepped on a creaking plank, out would come mother, rage and all. Sometimes she hit. Sometimes she just screamed. I preferred the “hidings”.

When I was near death in the ICU, she didn’t come to the hospital. She didn’t visit during any of my epilepsy-related hospital stays either.

She broke the habit once. I was in hospital on a holter monitor. In those days, the neurologists overseeing this test did their best to trigger seizures by starving you of food, medication, and sleep. I was exhausted, but my mother was magically there every single day. It was like Christmas. She was behaving like other mothers. My hunger and withdrawal couldn’t detract from the brilliance of those visits.

That week never repeated itself. My mother was negligent when my sister and I were young, and she was indifferent when we were adults. We've been confronting the effects together ever since my mother died several years ago. We’re both making progress, but a few months ago, my maternal cousin asked if we could meet. Her mother wasn’t like other mothers, she said. She was cancelling visits with her own daughter to spend time with the ex-husband who had beaten her.

Something happened to those two girls, but nobody will ever know what it was. Control was their religion, and we were required to accept it.

My brother was born when I was 16. I was determined to bleed love into his life, so I took him out of that house as often as I could. For a while, it seemed as though my mother wasn't abusing him. Not after his toddler years, anyway. I felt so confident in this that I stopped worrying about him once he'd left home.

Yesterday, he told me he’s struggling, too. My mother’s abuse hadn’t ended with us.

My mother and her sister have destroyed an entire generation of adults. Three of us have eating disorders. All five of us have self-esteem problems. Two of us are addicts and all of us are scarred. Abuse is a great lake. It grows wider and wider until it drowns everything.

I hit bottom first. At the time, I thought my pain was a kind of failure. Everyone else in the family seemed happy, so why was I so damaged? I thought I must have been born a broken thing. Since my mother’s death, though, my siblings and cousins have begun to reveal their trauma.

I hate my mother right now. I fucking hate her. I could tolerate all the rage she threw at my sister and me, but not my baby brother.

He’s so young and beautiful.

He didn’t deserve any of it.

I should see my own experience in the same way, but I don’t.

I don’t hate my mother for what she did to me.

I can bear the fact that she abused me.

I am so old and ugly. I deserved all of it.

We will all break the legacy of abuse eventually because the one thing our mothers taught us was how to be stubborn. We will thump at this rock until it breaks. And it will break because we have 10 hands to achieve it.