This article is the final in a series of Incest related topics. It is the first time I have spoken out regarding the relationship I had with my mother.
My mind recoils and my stomach lurches. I don’t want to remember childhood sexual assault by my mother’s hand.
My brain stops. All functioning inert. Years piled with emotional abuse have taken its toll. My mother broke my spirit apart.
My gait is a half hearted attempt to walk with its limitations. The physical abuse is evident as each step is taken. I don’t want the flooding of memories to reveal this is not from an accident but again my mother’s doing.
My heart breaks and tears slide down my cheeks. I don’t want to remember abandonment by my mother.
Through it all, I ask myself (ves) yet, once again, “What would my life look like today, would I even be alive, had I not stood up to my mother, twenty-one years ago last month, and said, “I’m leaving.”
Ritually abused survivors released into the main stream of society, in their early twenties, is a common practice. The cults allow them to establish themselves in the world then bring them back years later. It’s a test of their programming, their efficiency and for the next generation to begin. My callback date was my birthday, the year I turned 30. Sixteen years later I still wait, in hiding, for ‘them’ to catch me. I wonder, will I ever let go of the fear and expectation, the paranoia and constant looking over my shoulder, wondering if this is to be the day.
At the core of these ruminations is my mother.
My mother and I were very close. People always commented on our relationship. Envy filled their eyes watching us interact as sisters and best friends, much more than mother/daughter. I defended my mother to the stars. Nobody spoke ill of her around me. Then I moved. I put time and space behind me, topped with years of therapy and was diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder. The ‘closeness’ I once thought came from me was actually from a single alter, Lise. This realization shocked me. I would never let anyone call me Lise. Except my mother. I had hit people, yelled and screamed at them, told them my name was Debbie not Deb, and if they expected to keep their teeth they would remember my real name. The violence against innocent people calling me a common nickname seemed a little harsh—I should have known.
A jury would not need to deliberate. The verdict: guilty by proving means, motive and opportunity. The means and motive existed through the small rural community I grew up in where my mother was part of the mastermind. She took extreme measures to prove no favoritism towards me as the only girl in the family. As she often reiterated, “I brought you into this world, I can take you out just as easy.” The opportunity—when most kids were scheming to find ways to stay home from school, my mother snatched me from school, leaving us the privacy of the empty house.
People squirm when I mention my mother assaulted me. Father/Daughter incest, as I have previously written about, shows that in the high percentile, 80-90 percent of incest comes from the male side of the family. Many people do not believe mother/daughter incest exists and because of this stereotype, much goes unreported as statistically, “In the Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse & Neglect, 7% of sexual abuse investigations involved mothers as alleged perpetrators (Trocme, 2001, p. 493).”( http://www.child-abuse-effects.com/incestuous-sex-offenders.html ). I cringe at the realistic percentages of unreported assaults.
So why are we so reluctant to speak of a mother assaulting her child? My mother was supposed to take care of me. She was an at-home mother, giving up her career to bring up her children. I went to her for everything: the time I fell and cracked open my knee, all the times she made me a soft boiled egg in an eggcup when I would return home early from school with cramps, the time I went to her confused over what to do with my life. These are the things a mother should respond to with care, love, nurturing and understanding. And she did. At times.
The times of love shared with my mother are over-shadowed by abuse. I entailed endless fits of screaming for things like not staying at work because I came home sick. The next time when I fought through sickness to stay at work, I was brow-beated for not having the common sense to come home. When my best friend died, I wanted comfort and an outlet for my grief. All my other friends had found places to grieve. Hoping for an avenue and a shoulder to cry on, I was humiliated for my apparent lack of strength to endure this small tragedy and I had tears in my eyes—something I learned never to show my mother. The messages were clear to me—never approach my mother for anything.
One major result of my therapy has been the realization that my mother, like me, has DID. It is the only explanation for the mood swings, the inconsistent act of mothering versus abuse. The recurring memory I have of my mother entails me coming home from school, work or an outing and holding on to the doorknob leading into the house thinking, “God, please let her be in a good mood. Let her be a mother.” This was an oxymoron, since she would switch in a second from a happy person into a monster, ugly to the core. If I had known then what I know now, I could have saved myself years of trying to figure out what was wrong with me. It never occurred to me living under her roof that she was the root of the problem. Never her. But me.
Today, I have given up the idea of experiencing love with a mother. The grief is insurmountable. Every daughter wants a mother regardless of her age. To accept this never to occur, knowing each of us will die alone without one another is a formable emotional task. There is nothing like the feeling of a good mother/daughter connection and when friends speak of their mothers to me, grief hits and a little bit of me dies all over again.
Seventeen years ago, my best friend experienced the marvel of pregnancy. During those nine months I insisted and exclaimed to anyone listening that her child will be a boy. Many people took me aside and said, “You know the child growing inside her could be a girl. You should be more supportive.” My friend knew my history, but even so asked me one day, “If my child is a girl, will you love it?” I was taken aback and assured her that yes, of course, I would love her. On a subconscious level, I was replaying my life with my mother, the fear transferred to my friend’s situation.
I have not seen my mother for over twenty years, nor do I wish to. The power she exerts over me remains strong today. My therapy always reverts back to this focus. But, she is old and will die soon. Perhaps, this is the one act of kindness she will ever give us: The freedom to live a life with happiness after forty-six years of wondering when I will, as once, be under her rule.