Hey guys, I wanted to post this on another thread on "not much of a childhood", but then I felt as if I would be hijacking the thread, as I could not condense what I wanted to say. So, this is perhaps just another angle to my previous post, this time about my abusive parents.
I was the only child in what seemed a pretty decent home, some would say. From the outside. From the inside, there was a constant presence of my mother’s and my father’s individual pathologies, as well as the pathology they produced when together. This is something I only remembered fully, tangibly, several days ago – and it actually felt for the first time in my life as part of my memory, and not someone else’s.
I always knew my childhood was awful, and that I felt as if I were living in a concentration camp or a prison. I knew I wished not to exist at age five. I was just too small to grasp the concept of death, as I believed that people just disappear into thin air when no longer alive, so I hoped I would just evaporate. I always knew something awful happened to me, but could not tell what. I even talked with my mother, and my father about it. Did I ever have a near-death experience? I would ask them. Was I just too emotional as a child, and could not cope with otherwise normal dynamics of a family life, that included fights and screaming from time to time? Was it their alcoholism, that ran out of hands at one moment?
The only thing they constantly re-affirmed in me was that there was something wrong with me, as they were good parents. I was usually exposed to sentences such as: “We are perhaps not the best parents in the world, but we were not that bad either”, “You can be certain of one thing, that mom and dad love you the most in this world”, “We would do anything for you”. Except they weren’t and they didn’t. They separated when I was ten, but whenever I would start this kind of talk in my teens, my mother would call my father to come over and kind of deal with it. If I were going through some emotions I could not handle, she would feel as if I were doing something to her. As if by my mere existence I somehow was taking the breath from her lungs, jeopardizing her own sense of self. I was feeling overwhelmed with – I did not know it at the time – repressed memories of childhood abuse, and she would behave simply unbelievably insensitive towards me.
I was hurting myself as teenager, because I was hurting inside thousand times more, but she felt as if my hurt was aimed at her. In response to my agony, she sang ironically back to me a popular song about a girl who is spoiled and feels entitled. I still shiver inside thinking of the mocking tone in her voice while she was singing, in a distorted, loud manner. I never felt entitled, I barely felt I existed, and it was her punching the air of my lungs, and not the other way round. I do not want to throw triggers into this post, so I will not talk about the abuse. I mentioned that I remember it started at age three, but it could have been even earlier, as what I remember at age three is pretty gruesome, and I guess it did not come out of the blue, so I guess something must have been building towards that.
Fast forward to the age of forty, I sit in a living room of my father’s apartment. It is pretty small, so I acutely feel his presence, as he is passing by my chair, in order to sit in his place. I do not remember at this point anything. I mean, anything at all. He starts talking, trying to find out what do I know. We are in some kind of argument, that goes on for some time at that point, all the while I do not realize what brought it about. In retrospect, I think that he misinterpreted – or maybe interpreted better than myself – some of my behavior as my memories coming back. He became reclusive, would not answer the phone. Said he would not see my husband ever again, and spoke of many other things that did not make sense to me, insulting me and my life choices.
So, here we are, and he is actually still standing up, turned with his back to me, trying to avoid my stare. And he says: “I have ruined you”, with some pathos, that I find disgusting. I answer: “I do not believe anyone can just ruin another person, and I do not feel ruined, thank you very much”. When I am writing down this conversation now, I can hardly believe it, but I remembered it to the letter, as if it is ingrained in my mind. At that point, I have no recollection of anything that he is talking about. He continues: “Don’t you remember anything from when you were a child?”, and I say: “You know very well that I do not remember much of my life before the age of ten.”, and I kind of brush it off, a little bit annoyed, as I do not understand the meaning of it. And he says: “You really do not remember anything?”, and I kind of stare at his back, while I guess some dissociated part of me is crying their brains out inside my head, but I still say: “No”, and I continue: “I do not understand what do you expect me to remember…”. And he says: “You do not know how happy I am that you turned out this way”.
Now, the old me would say: Look, he tried to say he was sorry. But he never actually said he was sorry, not once. He just stated that I am ruined, as a matter of fact. He never admitted what he had done to me, and he dropped the subject as soon as he realized that I really do not remember anything at that point. He was not looking for redemption at all, he was just looking after himself.
I did remember some of it, however, but only three full years after that conversation. After a lot of mental agony caused by trauma-related disorders of DPDR and D. amnesia, depression and GAD; and not to forget somatization disorder, that translates every damn memory of abuse, that is not consciously accessible, into the re-run of the original pain, over and over and over again.
When I managed to verbally express, first to my therapist, and then to my husband, what I remembered from my childhood, I soon felt the urge to tell that to my mother as well. We still had a pretty close contact, even though she behaved in an emotionally abusive manner towards me my whole life. I managed to sit down, now in her living room, and to ask her not to interrupt my story. I told her everything I remembered, including some details that would make any sane person cry their mind out. She just sat there. She said: “I would have hugged you now, if I weren’t ill” (she had a mild cold). I just stared at her, across the room from me, still in shock of the sound of my own voice resonating with those horror stories that seemed detached from me, emotionally. Then she said: “So, this is why you were behaving so differently, I knew something was going on”, alluding to my standoffish behavior towards her constant attempts to colonize my life some time before that. I swear I could see something of a glare in her eyes when she was telling this, as the only thought she could take from what I was saying was that she has obviously been a better parent. She also said: “I need some time to process what you just told me.” I got up, dissociated, and emotionally blank, and went out of her apartment without a single touch of consolation between her and me.
In the aftermath, she would call to say that I can confide in her. That we can talk it all out. That the bygones were bygones, and so on, until one day something snapped in me. In a voice that did not sound like mine at all, as it was hissing and harsh, whispering and screaming at the same time, it literally made things around me vibrate, I started spilling my guts out. I remember that the first thing I told her was: “I will not have my pain become a pastime for you”, and then it went on and on and on. And the weirdest thing I realized was that whatever I was saying made little difference to her. I have never in my life been disrespectful to her. Now I heard myself telling her in that unfamiliar voice that she was an idiot raising the child, that she could not even tell when her own daughter of three was frozen in horror of what has been happening to her. And she had no reaction to this, she would just continue as if nothing has changed.
I painfully realized that if she weren’t the in-empathic person that she was, probably with some serious issues herself, my life would not have been such a horror story. I blamed it on the perpetrator, of course, but I could not escape the feeling that she was very much responsible. Most people close to me think that she knew, but decided not to see. I don’t know. I can rely only on what I know from my adult life, and that are decades of different forms of emotional abuse from her part.
I cannot go into why my parents hurt me so bad. Of course, I can find reasons for their behavior in their pathologies, but I do not want to be full of understanding any more. It is either-or situation. Either I will heal, and the burden of responsibility for hurting a little child through abuse and neglect will be upon them, or I will immerse myself into pondering on whether they can be understood and forgiven, and in that case I would cease to exist, as this kind of thinking held me hostage of my own mind for four decades. And this kind of thinking has been a cornerstone of my healing.
The thing is, we all grow up in a particular context that normalizes even the abnormal. It took me a long time to realize how toxic and abusive both my father and my mother were. I still cannot find the adequate words to express all the rage in me, but hopefully I will.
I just want to say that I am sorry for every one of you who had been abused or neglected. You were just a little child, and the role of grown ups was to protect you. I guess everyone has to find their way out of agony. Don’t get me wrong, I do not want to influence your decisions, but I feel that forgiveness towards neglectful or abusive people, even if there are your parents, is overrated. The people we have to forgive are ourselves, for doing what we had to do at such a young age to survive.
Wish you all the best, take care of yourselves,
A.