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.