tw: suicide, parental trauma, family trauma, grief, domestic violence.
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Mother’s Day is a fraught day for me, as is any other day associated with family or parenthood. For a while after my father’s death, I literally could not bear to be online, or in view of anything that reminded of him. But in many ways, he and his death were easier things to navigate compared to my relationship with my mother. For one, my father was a wastrel who abandoned his family to marry my mother’s best friend after the latter’s husband came to threaten our lives. He was such a terrible father that my mother once warned him she would take police action against him if he insists on continuing his emotional abuse of me.
As much as child-me misses him, adult-me recognizes him for what he is: a monster.
And we all know what to do with monsters.
My mother is different.
For one, she’s still alive. For another, I recognize now as an adult that a lot of what she did, a lot of who she was, was the result of an impossible amount of trauma. She was a girl of fourteen when my father, seven years her senior, seduced her into his bed. My mother stayed with him into her forties, working herself half to death because my father did jack-shit. She stayed because she was certain her children needed a father, and while I think she resented us for it, she didn’t resent us enough not to make that choice for our happiness.
I’m thinking about her today because I’ve been thinking a lot too about how Roe vs. Ward was recently overturned, and what my mother would say about it. She’s a very conservative personality, terrified of change and anything outside of her norm. But when I talked to her about the issue of abortion ages ago, she told me with more ferocity than I’d seen in her ever, that I could choose abortion as many times as I needed. I had no obligation to a cluster of cells.
I’m older today than my mother was when she had my sister. There is a part of me that wants to reach across time and space to the girl-woman that she was and tell her run. Pack your things. Take your children. Run far. It will be frightening at first but you have survived so much already, and it will be okay. Just go, please go. You’re doing no one any favors by staying there.
She was far from an angel. My father made her monstrous too, and I cannot even begin to list the ways that she contributed to my own trauma. I don’t know if I can even talk about what she did. Not yet, maybe not ever.
There’s a part of me that wants to have a relationship with her, some kind of friendship. An understanding between victims. I don’t know yet if that’d happen, but I hope for it. Maybe, I’m a fool. Maybe, I’ll come to my senses and realize that you can’t fix some things.
But I know I love her still — and well, we’ll see. We’ll see.
We go back to media recs next week.
Please enjoy a palate cleanser of my two homicidal children.
You exorcise your monsters so deliberately and precisely on the page, and the human I know, thus ritually cleansed, is so wise and sensitive and wonderful. I love your reaching back to your child-mother in friendship. I hope the future surprises you both, in love.
All I can add is that I second Claire's comment.