Monster or Mother?

                                     “Monster or Mother?”

“‘You’re not a monster,’ I said. But I lied. What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”

― Ocean Vuong - On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Wren read the book quoted above for a class she took last semester.  She brought my attention to the book and the page this quote came from when she came home from break and encouraged me to borrow the book from her when she was finished with it.  I have just begun to read it, and it is both beautiful and haunting at the same time. It is bringing up many thoughts and questions for me about my parents and about my own parenting.

I want to preface this by saying I am not looking for praise, accolades, or words of assurance to contradict my thoughts.  This is an exploration of the past and present; a wondering if you will.  I am aware that I have a very skewed sense of self.  My perception of myself is often vastly different from what people tend to tell me they think of me.  My thoughts about myself are almost all negative.  The way that I talk to myself is horrific.  So much so that I would not wish my inner dialogue on my worst enemy.  It is my mother’s voice I hear constantly inside, and the things she continues to say to me are horrible.

The thing is, I know that my mother suffered a similar experience in her own childhood.  She herself was molested by an older family member.  I know this because once I revealed to my parents what had happened to me, they sent me to therapy.  I went to three sessions with a military therapist in Saudi Arabia.  On the third session, he told me that now we had processed together what had happened, it was my job to help my family get through the situation.  The fourth and final session was a family session.  In it, my mother revealed that she had been molested, and we spent the whole session talking about that, and I sat silently.  Then therapy was over, and the situation was seemingly fixed and never to be spoken of again.

Was my mother a monster?  Or was she a woman who suffered as I did and had no mental health options during her early life?  I want to let her off the hook, but I can’t.  I have so much anger, and I have so much anger toward my father as well, for just sitting back and allowing me to be emotionally battered by her for years.  I can give allowances for them not knowing about the molestation - maybe.  But their actions after were egregious.  

Wren said to me the other day something along the lines that I must feel relieved to have broken the cycle to be a good mother despite the bad example I had been given.  She saw my hesitation and said, “You do know you are a good mom, right?”  I could not bring myself to say it, so instead I said, “What I can tell you is that I know you and Dermot know you are loved”.  I wrestle with not having been their primary caregiver for years.  I also know I have caused them upheaval and pain throughout their short lives because of my addiction and mental health struggles.

My therapist said to me that she thinks I know deep down that I am a good mother, but I don’t feel it, and that we have to get to a place where I feel and believe it, and that is my challenge.  I think I also have to take charge of my inner thoughts so that it's my voice I hear and not my mother’s.  I would like my thoughts to be more a lighthouse than a monster.

Pandora's Box

                    “Pandora’s Box”

“According to legend, when Pandora opened the box, horrible things flew out, and all of life's miseries were let out into the world. I think my Pandora's box contains your memories, which will spill out of that box like ghosts tearing apart the fabric of the soul and bursting forth.”

― Shahid Hussain Raja

The memories keep coming.  I want to stop them, but I know that part of what has kept me sick for all these years has been pushing these memories down and away.  I have not wanted to deal with them - I mean, who would.  And in the act of not wanting to know them, I have protected them, kept them in my own Pandora’s Box.  They have been locked away, safe in a way that I never was as a child.  

I asked the trauma therapist at the rehab I just attended, why it was that they began surfacing now and with such fervor.  She believes that the little girl in me can no longer stay silent.  The little girl in me is drowning and needs to be heard and saved and that I need to finally let her speak her truth.  I don’t know how I feel about that.  I don’t know personally or professionally what I believe anymore.  I wasn’t even sure about repressed memories until I started experiencing them for myself.

When they come it’s like I am transported back in time and for a moment I am re-living what happened.  It feels real, I suppose you would call it a flashback.  I can recall the sights, smells and textures and what was said.  It is beyond terrifying.  I would not wish it on my worst enemy.  I would not wish it on my abuser or parents even.  Afterwards I feel like a lost little girl and have the emotional capacity of a limp rag.

I am exhausted just about all the time.  I am in group therapy three times a week for three hours.  I am about to start EMDR in individual therapy today.  I am on a myriad of new medications for mental health and some for a medical issue I am dealing with at the moment.  Three of the medications I take cause fatigue.  I want to sleep all the time, but I don’t.  I have to get up and keep going.  If I don’t face this head-on now, I will continue to cycle in and out of active addiction and in and out of rehabs.  To say nothing of being a constant source of disappointment and concern to the people who care about me most…  I don’t want to die… not anymore.

I want to live and live well.  I don’t want to be so haunted and afraid.  I want to walk through life and exist congruently.  If that means that for now I have to open my Pandora’s Box and deal with all the terrors and evils that are in my past, then I will.  

I have to remember that the last thing to come out of the original Pandora’s Box was hope.

Her Favorite Store

 “Her Favorite Store”

“She shrieked and shrieked for her mother, but her mother was already there. Her mother was the monster.” – Holly Black

I was sitting in group therapy the other day listening to someone else share when I had a memory resurface out of nowhere. It hit me like a wave and knocked me over as if I were standing, wading by the shore and was taken down by the undertow.  The previous day I had gone with Wren and her good friend shoe shopping.  

Wren wanted to get a pair of thigh-high boots.  She asked me if I would help her pick them out, so off we went to shop for shoes.  We strutted into the store and stalked through the aisles of DSW looking for what she wanted.  We found some options in the sale section in the back and she plopped down to try on options while I pulled more boots out for her to try. She rejected some until she found the pair she liked.  She put them on and knew they were the right ones.  She knew because they made her feel herself and they changed the way she walked.  I knew what she meant.  I have a pair of cowboy boots that do that for me.  When I wear them I walk differently, like I own the room.  I had her walk the length of the room and she looked like a runway model, sashaying her way around, all boss-like and confident.  It was a great shopping experience capped off by lunch.

Fast-forward to group the next day and the tidal wave of repressed memory resurfacing… I am having a very different shopping experience with my own mother.  I am maybe eleven years old and we are in Al-Khobar in Saudi Arabia.  There were no stores in my own town of Dhahran apart from the commissary so we had to shop in Al-Khobar for everything else like clothes etc..

We had gone to buy shoes.  Because we were out of the main camp we had to cover up.  I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and a skirt that went to my ankles.  I needed new shoes and as my mother browsed for shoes for herself among the aisles she had me get my feet measured by the Lebanese salesman.  He began measuring my feet, but as he was doing so his hand reached up under my skirt and it began moving up my leg.  He kept his eye on my mother and began to fondle me under my skirt.  I froze.  I did not know what was happening and I did not know what to do so I did nothing.  I was terrified, disgusted and confused.  My mother did not notice.  Eventually we bought shoes and left.

Once outside, I began to cry and my mother asked what was wrong.  I told her what had happened.  Her immediate response was to tell me to not tell my father.  She told me that he would “do something stupid and end up in jail” and it would “ruin all our lives”.  She made me promise over and over all the way home.  She didn’t comfort me or ask me if I was alright or hug me.  

The next time we went shopping in Al-Khobar, she steered me toward the shoe store and tried to go inside.  I refused and she became angry.  She insisted we go inside but I again refused.  She told me it was her favorite store and I was ruining her shopping trip.  I continued to refuse and she didn’t speak to me for the rest of the day.  She would continue to try and force me to go back to that store every time we went shopping in Al-Khobar and I refused every time.  Every time she would get angry and stop talking to me.

I never told my father.

Betrayal

 

“Betrayal”

“Stab the body and it heals, but injure the heart and the wound lasts a lifetime.”

― Mineko Iwasaki

Years ago, I watched a movie with John Travolta. It was called “The General’s Daughter,” and it wasn’t all that great.  Basically, Travolta is an undercover army detective tasked with solving the murder of a general’s daughter on an army base.  During the course of the movie, it is revealed that she had been raped years earlier, and her mentor tells Travolta that there is something worse than rape. Travolta asks what could possibly be worse than rape, and by the end of the movie, he understands that the betrayal of her father, who covers up the rape, is worse.  I remember watching this movie and feeling punched in the gut as I understood this on a molecular level.

On February 6th of this year, the alarm went off in our bedroom to let us know we needed to get ready for work.  But instead of getting up for work, I turned to Tony and told him I had relapsed and had been drinking for a while.  I then told him he needed to take me to the psych ward because I was suicidal and I had a plan.  He drove me to the hospital, and I stayed on the psych ward for ten days before transferring to rehab for a further thirty.  I make no excuses for drinking again, but I had begun to remember things; horrific things.  I will tell you that even as a therapist, I wasn’t sure about repressed memories until I experienced them for myself.  I always knew I was molested and by whom, but the details were fuzzy.  When I spoke at meetings and told my story, I would say that there was a lot about my childhood I did not remember, and I considered that a blessing.  But now it seems the memories are surfacing, and I cannot stop them.

I talked to a trauma therapist at the rehab and asked her why I pick up drinking when it is the last thing that I want to do.  She told me that because the memories are returning, she believes the little girl inside is seeking oblivion and doesn’t know of a better way to cope.  I don’t know how I feel about that, but I am exploring it.  What she said next has impacted me greatly.  She told me to stop chasing forgiveness.  She said, “Fuck forgiveness.  You can’t forgive an unforgivable act.”  She talked about allowing myself to get angry at my abuser, and then she said, “And now we have to talk about your parents”.  She told me they were supposed to protect me, and they didn’t.  They were supposed to defend me and, at the very least, help me after I told them, and they failed at every turn.  She told me not to let them off the hook with excuses like, “they were from a different time”, or, “they did the best they could”, or, “it was an impossible situation”.

I had never really looked at it that way before.  I had always been told by other therapists that I would never heal unless I could forgive.  Well, I don’t think I have ever truly been able to forgive.  Not him, and especially not them.

When I broke down and finally told them, my mother’s first words were, “Well, at least he never hit you”.  Let.  That.  Sink.  In.

We travelled extensively as a family living overseas.  They continued to put us in the same room in hotels.  Once, the hotel made a mistake with the reservation and gave us a room with a queen bed instead of two twins.  My dad’s solution to this was to put pillows down the middle of the bed as a vain attempt to separate us for the night.  Looking back at these examples now, I cannot fathom what they were thinking.  There was no humanity in these actions at all.  I was just a sacrificial lamb.  Did they care about me at all?

Ask anyone who knows me, and they will tell you that I am very emotional.  I am a crier.  I cry in empathy.  I cry when I am happy, when I am sad, I cry when I am frustrated, I cry when I am watching commercials, and sometimes just because it is Thursday.  When my father died, I went to his funeral and sat through the whole thing dry-eyed.  When my mother died, I did not shed a tear.  There is a lot of anger there.  I just don’t know how to access it yet, but I am working on it.  I no longer want to misdirect it at myself.  I deserve better than that.

The Scratching on the Wall

“The Scratching on the Wall”

"There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it." — Alfred Hitchcock

I am so tired.  I am tired all the time.  I tried to lock the door to my room earlier tonight

but my mother caught me and yelled at me again.  She shrieks every time she catches

me.  I don’t fully understand why it angers her when I lock my bedroom door but it isn’t

allowed.  On the nights when I can manage it I get uninterrupted sleep and it is so

glorious.  I worry that tonight will be one of those nights.

I am about to fall asleep when I hear it.  We share a wall.  His bedroom is next to mine. 

He scratches on the wall with his fingernails.  He does this on the nights that he comes. 

I don’t know why, but it is a forewarning of sorts.  It’s his way of telling me to get ready. 

“I’m on my way” it says.  The scratching is almost worse than what comes after.  My

gut clenches and I begin to go numb because I know what this will entail.  It means I

will suffer and my mind begins to blessedly drift and my body starts to shut down.

There have been countless nights like this one.  Countless nights of terror.  Countless

nights of no sleep.  Countless nights of being an object of perversion.  Countless nights

being left feeling empty and disgusted.  Countless nights being left to feel dirty and

unloved.  Countless nights to build up walls and tear down my self-esteem.  I already

feel I have no worth and at fourteen I no longer feel I have the right to dream of a future

that has any light.

On this night, when it is over, I have had enough.  I am angry and disgusted and

exhausted.  I wait until I am sure he is asleep and the house is quiet.  I am fueled by

rage.  I leave my room and go to the kitchen.  I stand in the light of the moon and search

for the largest knife I can find.  I creep to his room and up to his bed.  I stand over his

sleeping form.  My face is twitching with rage - murderous rage.  I hold the knife above

my head for ten seconds, twenty, thirty - I lose count.  It feels like an eternity.  He sleeps

on unknowing.  No one is aware of what I am doing but me and God.  And maybe it is

God who stops me, I don’t know.  I have a moment of clarity.  If I do this, this suffering

will stop, but a different suffering will follow.  My life will change forever and it won’t

be for good.  

I bring the knife back down to my side.  I stand there for a long time watching him

breathe and I cry silently.  Eventually I walk back to the kitchen and, with hands

shaking I return the knife to where I found it.  I stand there asking myself in disbelief

what I was thinking.  I am horrified by myself.  I could have killed someone.  I was fully

capable and had every intention of doing so.  The rage I felt was oceanic and I am

petrified.  I go back to bed disgusted by myself on a whole new level.

This is the night that I shut the door on anger.  I turn it in on myself rather than risk

hurting others.  This leads to stuffing my feelings with food.  It leads to drinking and

other forms of self-harm.  I often have suicidal thoughts and I begin to actively hate

myself.  I hurt myself over and over throughout the years, denying myself the grace I

so freely give to others.  This marks the beginning of most of the problems I cause

myself.

The abuse will continue for two more years.

Through the Blue Glass

“Through the Blue Glass”

“We've been shattered and reconstructed, told to make an effort every single day to pretend we

still function the way we're supposed to. But it's a lie, it's all a lie; every person, place, thing

and idea is a lie. I do not function properly. I am nothing more than the consequence of

catastrophe.”

― Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me

    I lay on the couch in the front room.  On the couch, we are not allowed to sit on -

in the front room, which we are not allowed to use.  It’s the middle of the night, and

I am watching the cars that occasionally drive by our house.  I’m catching the

reflection of the headlights through the blue Yemeni glass bottles in the front windows.

    My mother has been collecting these glass bottles for years, and the light that reflects

from the headlights calms me.  I do this on the nights he comes to my room and cuts

away at my innocence over and over again.  He then leaves me there, goes to his room,

and falls asleep as though nothing has happened, as though I don’t matter, have no

consequence, and my existence is just an extension of his perverted desires.  

    I am left to pick up my pieces.  I lay there on the forbidden couch, catching the pretty

blue rays, trying desperately to lull myself back into my own body.  I am trying to put

my pieces back together like a jigsaw puzzle.  Over time, though, more and more pieces

go missing, and the puzzle looks less and less like me.  

    On the forbidden couch in the room we aren’t allowed to use through the blue glass.

Ann

 

“Ann”

“The fiercest anger of all, the most incurable, is that which rages in the place of dearest love.”

• Euripides

I found out on Labor Day that my mother passed away earlier that afternoon.

I didn’t know how to feel about it. My mother and I had not been in contact for nine years and all the things I feel are roiling around inside me, mixed together and brawling with each other.

I have been trying to write this piece since then. I have started it and stopped it several times. I spent a long time trying to find a quote that would fit and I settled on one that was very forgiving and kind. Then I could not keep writing and I was stuck. I realized that I was trying to make this piece more palatable for others to read. I don’t know if I wanted others to see me as less angry or if I wanted to spare people discomfort or what, but I couldn’t write because I wasn’t writing the truth.

The truth is that I am full of rage. I am so angry and bitter and I don’t do anger very well. I don’t like how anger feels and when I get angry I get scared. Not only am I angry, but I am angry with myself for being angry so I am all over the place.

When I was in graduate school we did an exercise where we did a family genogram. I dug deep into the stories I had been told and put down on paper the traumas, the addiction, the domestic violence, the sexual abuse and neglect as far back as I could remember. I discovered a pattern of sadness that went back several generations and I cried when I had to present it to the class. My thoughts were a scrambled mess and all I could think was, “this stops here”. 

After I came out of rehab the second time, I did extensive step-work and therapy. Forgive me, but at the time I thought I had everything all figured out. That turned out not to be true as I went back to rehab for a third time and have had to do even more trauma work. But at the time I thought I was essentially cured of all things and I was floating along on a fluffy cloud of pretty colors while my ego slowly inflated and I didn’t even notice. 

I remember getting a call from my brother one afternoon while I was working and my body started to shake. I asked my therapist why this continued to happen after I had come to a place of forgiveness and relative calm in my life. So why did I panic whenever I heard from my brother or my mother? My therapist explained that even though my mind had reached a place of acceptance, my body still remembered the traumas. 

I grew up wanting for nothing in terms of material things. I traveled around the world and went to an expensive boarding school but there was verbal abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse and neglect. There are large portions of my childhood I don’t remember and I have to think that may be a blessing in the end.

My mother was mentally ill. I know that she was molested by her older brother. I know that she had OCD and severe anxiety and she could not cope with many things in her life. I know that her mental health or lack thereof, ruled our household. My father never challenged her and stood back and let things unfold around him. My brother had anxiety as well and he molested me. The ripples of sickness had staggering consequences.

I know that I have mental illness as well. I have depression, anxiety and substance use disorder along with severe PTSD. I have not been a model parent either. I have been absent from my own childrens’ lives at times while I have been away trying to get well. What I will give myself grace about however is the fact that I have gone away to try and get well and I have shared with my children what is wrong. I want the cycle to end with me and I want them to have a chance at a life free of the generational abuse and “sweep it under the carpet” mentality that has cast such a large shadow over my family tree.

I am now fifty years old and both my parents are now gone but I would say I haven’t really had them for years now. I want to be able to say forgiving things like “they did the best they could” but I’m not sure that I am there yet and I can’t say that I ever will be. What I can say is that I am grateful that my mother is no longer suffering from the crushing anxiety that plagued her all her life.

There are people who will read this and feel I am being unkind. There is pressure for people like me to remain in the role of the “good daughter”, “good sister” because “society says” we should. Forgive me once again, but fuck that. Just because someone holds the title of family member, that does not mean they are automatically kind and loving.  It does not mean that they earned the right to love you the way you deserve to be loved.

 And that is just it. I deserve to be loved. I always did and I didn’t get that as a child. Not as a daughter and not as a sister. I was used and abused and belittled and demeaned. I grew up in a fog of despair and secrecy that taught me I had no worth and I acted accordingly. I treated myself abominably for years and sometimes I still do. I have to remind myself of my worthiness often and it is hard and it is counter-intuitive and it shouldn’t be like this - not for anyone.

So my mother died on Labor Day and I am angry. I am angry she did not fight harder to overcome her demons. I am angry she wasn’t capable of being what I needed and deserved. I am angry she lost out on being what she could have been. I am angry my children did not get a grandmother worthy of their love. I am angry that I did not get to resolve these wounds. And I am angry that I am angry. I am also angry that I still love her.