Dark Mother

One of my most vivid memories of childhood is coming across my baby book.  In it, my mother, barely 19 years old, writes about me as a newborn.  She had a bubbly, immature kind of handwriting.  She was flippant and silly.  She didn’t describe any feelings for me.  She talked about how pretty I was and how she had high hopes for me.  I think she said she loved me but I don’t remember.  What I do remember is feeling a wave of loathing for her wash over me.  I was about ten or eleven years old at that time, and I had by that time already been completely severed from her emotionally.   What I remember is feeling how fake she was.  She never, ever, talked about me like she did in the baby book.  She never said anything nice about me. 

I cannot recall ever turning to my mother for comfort.  She was known as a kind, fun-loving woman.  Enthusiastic.  Always well dressed.  Telling jokes.  She was the life of every party.  She was fun.  People told me all of the time how lucky I was that she was my mom.  She loved kids. She ran a daycare and all of the kids and all of the parents loved her.  She loved my brother.  My brother was the child of her heart, whereas to her I was some kind of alien who could do no right.  To her, I was just a disappointment. 

There are few pictures of her holding me as a baby.  Almost every photo I am in shows me in the arms of my father or another family member.  Or alone.  Even as a toddler, she sent me away frequently to stay with family or family friends for long visits, days at a time.  

It would have been my personality, mostly.  A quiet, serious person, I showed signs of this nature even as a baby.  My parents would tell stories about laughing as I’d scowl seriously.  My mother was frequently furious because I was rarely smiling or bubbly.  I recall vividly that she turned on me and slapped my face as hard as she could as we walked into the Sears department store.  I wasn’t smiling.  She couldn’t stand it.  She couldn’t stand me. 

She sent me away so frequently and to anyone who would take me that I was exposed to all kinds of risks and dangers.  She would have me spend the night with a family down the street constantly, just to get rid of me.  The father molested me for years, and my mother knew but kept sending me back.  I know she knew because the father tried to touch another friend of mine who confessed to her mother, and her mother told my mother.  But my mother pretended not to believe them.  Or maybe she didn’t believe them for real.  Either way, she didn’t care and I kept being sent there. 

Due to my quiet and introverted nature, I spent most of my time alone and had little interest in making friends.  This drove my mother insane and she kept trying to find hobbies and sports and things for me to do, anything to get me away from her.  Anything to change who I was.  

I was overcome with anxiety as a child, especially when faced with anything new or dangerous.   I remember one time when my family wanted to go on the go-karts and my brother was thrilled about it but I was begging not to do it.  I was shaking with anxiety, I was terrified and crying.  My parents were laughing as I sobbed and begged to sit on the bleachers and wait.  A woman standing in line behind us became so alarmed at the scene that she scolded my mother for treating me so cruelly.  This made her furious and she pulled my arm as hard as she could toward the bleachers and rage whispered in my face that I’d be sorry for embarrassing her before she stormed off back to the go-kart line.  All I remember is feeling a sense of relief that I wouldn’t have to drive a go-kart.  

She frequently mocked and humiliated me, taking great pleasure in upsetting me whenever possible and then telling me I was melodramatic.  As a very small child, before I could swim, she threw me into the deep end of a pool at a family party.  One of my uncles jumped in to help me.   She told me later that I was a real actress and should stop making issues out of nothing.  

Another time, at a large party at a lake arranged by her friends, she and my father left me alone while they socialized and got drunk.  At one point, I stumbled in the dark and fell through a weak wooden plank on the dock, twisting my ankle.  I was scared and crying and strangers helped me up and carried me to the beach, looking for my parents.  They finally found my mother, and when she walked up I was still crying and one of the women there with me told her that she was worried I may have broken my ankle because my foot looked funny.  My mother laughed viciously and said that I’d put my shoes on the wrong feet  and that I was fine.  Then she pulled me up and dragged me away, telling me to stay put on the beach while she went back to the party.  I was probably less than seven years old.  

She began obsessing over my weight by the time I was eight.  She would sit across the table from me, and after I’d had three or so bites of any meal, she’d have decided I’d had enough.  If I tried to eat any more, she would blow her cheeks out as a sign that I was getting fat.  She terrorized me, not allowing me to have snacks and chiding me constantly for being fat.  In the summer after third grade, I went cross country with my grandparents for a long visit with my aunt, uncle and cousins.  When I came back, I was apparently heavier and my mother bitterly complained about my weight gain to anyone who would listen.  I began eating mostly in secret after that.  I would take snacks into a hiding spot and feel waves of relief as I ate in total privacy with nothing but a book for company.  This initiated an eating disorder that I’d struggle with for over twenty five years. 

Her rages were unpredictable.  I would do my best to disappear, to stay out of her line of sight.  She never complained about the fact that I’d spend long days out of the house with nothing but my dog for company.  As long as I wasn’t around, she was happy.  But when I had to be home, there was no way to know what I would do to enrage her.  She’d suddenly snap and hurt me; once before school she became enraged at me for something I don’t remember and broke a ceramic plate over my head.  Another time walking into the house with groceries she suddenly spun around and screamed in my face that she hated me and that the Easter Bunny wasn’t real.  I think I had accidentally stepped on her heel coming up the steps with bags behind her.  

When she had to interact with me alone, she rarely disguised her disdain.  She’d frequently ignore me when I spoke to her, or laugh mockingly if I was upset.  She never pretended to care about anything that I thought or imagined or felt.  She would buy me things, and over time I came to see that she did this more for her than for me.  She felt like a good mother when I was well dressed and when I had the latest toys.  She gloated about getting into a skirmish to get me one of the last Cabbage Patch dolls at K-Mart for Christmas.  I remember the absolute joy I felt when I opened it, but looking back it wasn’t me she was trying to make happy.  It was the story she wanted.  

These gifts from her were the only things I had that felt like kindness or love.  So one day when she came home with a pair of mint green Converse for me, I didn’t tell her that they were way too small.  I didn’t want to disappoint her, I didn’t want her to take them back.  And so I wore them while my feet blistered and bled and I never said a word to anyone about it.  This gift from her was so dear to me that for years I told everyone that my favorite color was mint green because of these shoes.  It wasn’t.  I didn’t have a favorite color.  I didn’t have a favorite anything.  

At one point, my father returned from a long absence.  I believe this is when he went to prison, though no one ever told me the truth about anything, so I can only guess.  I know that he did in fact go to prison at some point in my childhood for an armed robbery, during which he himself had also received a gunshot wound.  I think this event is why we moved from Massachusetts to New York for a few years, returning after my father came back.   With him back, the partying escalated and so did the episodes of domestic violence.  

My father began beating her up more and more often, and during the fights they’d have he would scream obscenities and accusations towards her.   I learned that he thought that she had been cheating on him with lots of men, and one in particular who he said was a Black man.  I would hide in my room, often begging them to stop.  Often I’d intervene.  

Over time, I hardened myself to her.  I felt detachment and mostly loathing towards her.  I thought she was stupid.  I never wanted her help with anything.  I never wanted her comfort.  I thought for most of my life that I had rejected her.  That I had judged her character and found it wanting.  That I didn’t connect with her.  That we had nothing in common.  That I looked down on her.   That is what I told myself.  That is what I felt.  That is what I wanted.  But the truth is that she had rejected me long before.  

I don’t know what it’s like to be loved.  I don’t know what it’s like to have someone really see me and love me for who I am and I thought that that was because there was something wrong with me.  Because she did.  She thought I was broken, and a bad daughter. She thought I was deficient and wrong and she was embarrassed and ashamed of me.  She thought I wasn’t pretty enough. She wanted my hair to be lighter, so she started tinting it with lemon juice and sun-in.  She thought my body was disgusting, so she tried to starve it.  She thought my personality was horrible and serious so she tried to change it and then stomp it out. 

Unthinkable to me was that life could have been any different.  Unthinkable to me was that I deserved better.  I never thought to long for love.  She rejected me, so I rejected her back.  I didn’t think I could or should have anything else.  I never mourned her.  I never grieved.  I was never lonely.  It just was what it was and I shut myself off from feeling anything about it.  

When I left my family home for college, I went into freefall.  Without my every move monitored, criticized and controlled, I did not know what to do.  I did not know how to eat.   Anxiety overcame me.  My eating disorder controlled my life until halfway through my sophomore year I found myself ruthlessly restricting food while simultaneously skipping all of my classes so I could spend hours at a time taking aerobics.   I was flunking out, so I took a gap year to another country.  And then I moved to New York.  And there, with freedom and space from my family I began a long, slow recovery.  I avoided my parents out of pure instinctual self-preservation, because being around them made me have panic attacks but I didn’t know why.  If you’d asked me then about my childhood, I’d have told you it was mostly happy and that my family was pretty much like every other family.  

The last time I communicated with my mother was many years ago.  It was after my wedding, which my parents had ruined by purposely showing up so late that we almost had to start without them and then getting drunk and making a huge scene.   The lead up to the wedding had been a year of personal attacks, attempts to manipulate me, attempts to convince me not to get married and drunken messages promising not to get drunk.   I had sent an email to her after I returned from my honeymoon, letting her know that I needed a little space but that I’d be in touch eventually.   In her response to me, she catalogued all of the ways that I was a disappointment to her.  “You’re a rotten daughter.” she said.  “You always were.”