Growing Up

 I’ve been thinking about my mother again lately. And just a fair warning, this post will stray from my usual posts. It’s not pretty, my experience with my mother. It’s not the typical mother-daughter relationship portrayed in movies and TV. Honestly, it’s quite the opposite and, not to mention, confusing. 

Growing up in a single parent home with my younger sister was fine. That’s about as typical as my experience gets. From there, it strays into dysfunction, the kind of dysfunction that’s not really talked about. I didn’t know it was dysfunction until a few years ago. To me, it was normal. 

My parents divorced when I was three because the night my father beat me, the sexual abuse was discovered by hospital staff. Growing up, I didn’t remember what had happened, but I knew from hearing mother talk that I had been “molested” by my dad, whatever that meant. I knew it was something bad, though. Then, she would use other words, like “sexually abused.” I definitely knew that wasn’t good. As I got older, she would tell all of my teachers about it, making me step out of the room when she talked to them. I remember times in the grocery store lines where I didn’t know the people or person in front of us, but she would be talking with them and I’d hear her say, “She was sexually abused by her father, but looking at her you’d never know it.”  As if that wasn’t bad enough, it didn’t stop there. During orientation weekend at my college, I found out she told the chancellor and his wife. When I expressed anger about it, she said she was “making sure you knew you had someone to talk to.” I was frustrated. She had made it my identity and I was finally going to go to college where no one knew and I could start new. But no. It would still remain my identity, hammered in by mother’s incessant need to ensure someone knew about it. 

Not only did I experience sexual abuse, but domestic violence, as well. As an adult, and even as a young adolescent, hearing people argue, scream, yell, and even seeing children being spanked scared me. Growing up, when mother said she was going to spank me, I’d cry and beg her to let me use the bathroom first, because I knew if she didn’t, I’d pee myself because I was so scared of being spanked. There were times, though, where I didn’t know it was coming and she’d slap me across the face. Those were the times I’d pee myself. I was terrified when that happened, terrified because I’d peed myself and what would she do because of that? One time when I was in my teens, she slapped me across the face so hard that I lost my balance, fell back against the wall, hitting my head on it, and peeing myself. At some point when I was older, maybe in high school, she told me that when I was going through counseling as a small child due to the abuse, she was told not to hit or spank me because it would traumatize me. They were right. But she didn’t listen. 

No child is always well-behaved. It’s the parents’ job to teach them when they misbehave. When I misbehaved, my mother taught me terror. I remember several times over my childhood where she would threaten to send me to live with my father when I was misbehaving. I’d cry in terror, thinking she really would do that. She’d threaten to call the judge and tell them that I needed to go live with my dad because she couldn’t handle me. In addition to the terror that would course through me, I wondered how she could want to do something like that. She knew what my father had done, yet had the audacity to threaten to send me there. It told me she wanted him to hurt me. It taught me that if I didn’t behave, I’d be sent away. It taught me that I was only wanted when I was behaving myself. Sometime when I was in high school, she told me she never was going to do that, send me to my father’s. She only said it because she didn’t know what to do. She made me promise not to tell my sister. Sometime after that, she and my sister were yelling at one another, mother from the living room and my sister from the back of the apartment. Mother threatened my sister she would send her to live with our father. When she said that, she looked at me and winked. Like it was our secret she wouldn’t do that. I still cried. I felt the terror that was already ingrained into me. Knowing she really wouldn’t do that didn’t take the terror away. She had already done damage. 

In Kindergarten, I would find rocks on the playground and put them in my backpack. I thought they were pretty. Mother would do “backpack checks,” to ensure we didn’t have anything in our backpacks we weren’t supposed to. I remember one time, I was in the bathtub after school. She left me in there to go check my backpack. She came into the bathroom and spanked me on my bare butt because she found a rock in my backpack. She was so angry. I was never to bring rocks home again, because if I did, I’d be spanked. She didn’t see what I saw in rocks, and to her, they were just garbage. She couldn’t appreciate her child’s interests. That’s how it felt all through my growing up years. When I was in high school, I participated in two school musicals. It didn’t seem like mother was very supportive, as I didn’t have her to pick me up from after school practices. Instead, my drama and English teacher had to drive me home. On opening night, I didn’t expect mother to come. What kid doesn’t expect their parent to come on opening night of a show they are in? Me. I didn’t. I felt like an inconvenience to her. It felt like she couldn’t be bothered with the things I was interested in. The night before my college graduation, there was a parent and grad dinner and chapel service. I had told my mom I wanted her to be there, and that I’d pay for her dinner so she could be there with me. I wanted her there. I reminded her about it. I told her it was important. The night came. I ate dinner by myself at a table with some other peers and their parents, because my mom wasn’t there. After dinner, as I sat in the chapel, watching it fill with grads and their parents, I called my mom to find out where she was. She was at the hotel. Twenty minutes away. And she didn’t come. When I told her I was disappointed, she yelled into the phone, “I’m such a disappointment, I’m such a bad mother.” I cried as I hung up the phone. I cried as I sat through the chapel service without my mom. I cried after the service when I went to the music room to play the piano, the one thing I found comfort in. She couldn’t be bothered to come to an event that was important to me. Years later it still hurts that she wasn’t there. 

Mother was not mentally stable when I was growing up. I remember sometime when I was in high school, she came out after a shower without a shirt. She put her shirt on in the living room where I was, and as she did, I saw her stomach. There was a huge, ugly, purple bruise on her stomach. I panicked, because I didn’t know what happened. She had been stabbing herself with her insulin needles, she told me. I didn’t know what to make of that. Another time, she had a huge, red, raw spot on her arm. I presumed she had taken my nail brush that was hanging in the shower and rubbed her arm raw. Another time, she had a huge burn on her arm that I suspected she did on purpose. As I went through high school, I’d go home most days expecting to find she had killed herself. In college, I expected a phone call saying she had killed herself.

“You’re my friend.” What I needed was a mother. When I told her this, she got angry and yelled that she would be my mother, then threatened to make my life miserable. I recanted. She could be my friend. I was in high school. That day I decided I didn’t need a mom. I’d been doing fine without one, anyway. 

She would do weird things. Once, while we were getting the laundry ready to take to the laundry mat, she directed me to come to her. As I got close to her, she grabbed the bottom of the shirt I was wearing and blew her nose in it. She laughed. I was disgusted. There were times I’d be in the shower and would get out to find she had hung my bra and underwear in the hallway on the wall. She’d scare me while I was in the shower, pushing in the shower curtain with a loud noise, or turning the light off while I was in the shower. She thought all of these things were funny. 

You’d think that after moving out and away the abuse would stop. But, it didn’t. I moved to CA in 2012, and in 2013 or ‘14, cut mother off for about 9 months. I felt like the worst daughter. I wrestled. It was a tough time. When I finally broke the boundary, I found she had gone back to church, been diagnosed with ADHD and Bipolar, and altogether seemed to be a different, healthier, mom. After some time passed, her old self reared its head. For the next several years, I would go back and forth between having communication with her and cutting her off. She’d often say hurtful things and couldn’t understand me. 2016 was the worst. She wasn’t doing well physically, so I went home to visit her for a few weeks. It was the worst visit. She was shockingly different in her appearance than the last time I had seen her. I was afraid I’d lose her. While she had had time to process her stuff, I had not. I was emotional during the visit. She couldn’t understand why I was so emotional. Not only that, but at the start of the visit, she subtly threatened that if I wasn’t serving the Lord, I couldn’t say in her house. That hurt, as I had been a believer since I was a child, and had continued serving Him when she had not. She didn’t know me at all. Then, during this visit, there were times where I’d be upset about something and she would leave. I felt abandoned. She never was able to handle my emotions, and me being an adult was no different. She still could not handle my emotions. Rather than helping me with them, she left. Not only was that trip the worst visit, it was also very hurtful. 

My final straw was in 2019 when she texted 6 of my friends, blind texting, as she had no idea who she was texting, tell them she didn’t know what I was telling them and if it was true, but that she was worried for my mental health and that I wasn’t serving God where I was, but was whining and crying about wanting to go to Africa. She told them she was my mother, but my sister in Christ, and she had things to teach me. She did this because I would not talk with her when she wanted me to. I had set a boundary with her, and this was retaliation. I was so hurt by her words and actions. 

Since then, things haven’t gotten better. In the summer of 2021, I sent her two letters, telling her things I had always kept from her because I was afraid of her. The letters described how I felt about things she had done. Using a third party, because she was blocked on my phone, she said that I could send more letters if they made me feel better, but she would send them back to me unopened. She also said I needed God, then a psychiatrist. 

It’s hurtful to me that she could never be a mother. I’m not sure she’s capable of being a mother. She tried to be my friend, then my sister in Christ. Once, after hearing a sermon at her church, she had the audacity to suggest that our relationship was like that of a married couple, where both of us needed to give 100%. Rather than being my mother, she wanted to be like a married couple. She didn’t feel I was giving enough to our relationship. But, she is the mother, I’m the child, albeit an adult child. I’m still her child. 

I often feel stuck in childish ways, because I never got to be a child. I feel stuck behind my peers mentally, emotionally, and developmentally, because of all the years of abuse I’ve endured. I used to think that the abuse from my father was the hardest thing to get through. It was hard, but to be honest, trudging through and healing from over 30 years of abuse is much harder than healing from 3 years of abuse. Yes, I have been abused by my mother for over 30 years. There is so much more I could share regarding the things I went through with mother. Perhaps I’ll share in another post. Probably reading these things, you are thinking, “So what? That’s abuse?” Please understand that without walking in my shoes, you can’t possibly know the depths of the hurt and pain I have experienced with this woman called my mother. Narcissistic abuse, as well as mental and emotional abuse, are often hard to identify. It has taken me about 30 years to see that her treatment of me is indeed abuse. This was part of my growing up. And in ways, I’m still growing up.