What Kind of Person Does That To A Kid? A Baby? An Animal?

No abuser’s ignorance or era or condition excuses her behavior any more than her treatment of us gives us license to abuse other people.   ~Eamon Dolan

Fourteen years ago, I severed communication with my mother after she called to wish me a happy birthday and then proceeded to ask me if I wanted her to send the hateful letters written about me when I was 10 years old as a school monitor – seems the gestapo-like behaviors I learned from my mother didn’t positively affect the younger school children and they expressed their feelings in letters addressed to me, which my mother kept for some unknown reason.  I declined and called her out for her cruelty (why would anyone want to read a letter professing hate for the reader?).  Phone calls and e-mails from my siblings, aunts, and even a sister-in-law in the subsequent months revealed my mother called them in tears claiming she was so upset and didn’t mean to hurt me (my mother found the letters humorous) only confirmed my decision that of course, my mother would make herself the victim in his scenario instead of realizing she was the aggressor and the bully whose abusive behavior would no longer be tolerated.

One of my earliest memories of my mother was of her beating me.  I was 4 years old.  She was 26. She was napping in a bedroom and I had just finished watching a television show that showed an unhappy mother who switched homes and was happy.  I ran to wake her up and tell her I found a way to fix her (she cried all the time) and that all she had to do was switch homes. My mother was so enraged that she started hitting me and pushed me into a closet. I was terrified and could not understand why she was beating the crap out of me. I found out years later that she was crying all the time because her husband, my father was stepping out on her.  Her world had blown up and yet, that’s not an excuse for a 26-year old to beat a 4-year old.  What kind of person does that to a kid?

At 5 years old, my mother locked me in a high chair after a little boy was teasing me about the ugly hat I was wearing to school and I responded by pushing him away with my book bag.  The humiliation of being trapped in a baby’s high chair was overwhelming.  At 7 years old, I refused to drink the powdered milk served at dinner so I was ordered to stay at the table until I drank it. Time passed and I had not complied so my mother forced my head back and poured the milk down my throat causing me to choke and vomit the green beans I just ate for dinner.  I will never forget the feeling of gasping for air.  The abuse wasn’t limited to me. My mother told me she spanked my 1-year old brother all the way up the stairs when he refused to continue, claiming she had to break him or he would not obey her.  Again, what kind of person does this to a baby?

In another incidence that still haunts me, my mother ordered me and my friend, Colleen to catch a neighbor’s cat.  She told us to get in the car with the cat and then proceeded to drive a few miles to the other side of town, took the cat from us, dropped it outside the car, and drove off.  Why did she do this?  The cat’s owner, Mrs. Israel angered Colleen’s mother, Clare and since my mother was friends with Colleen’s mother, my mother decided to punish Mrs. Israel by taking her cat.  I was horrified and still am today when I recall the cruelty.  What kind of person does this to an animal?

The physical and emotional abuse continued throughout my childhood with my most shameful memories the times she would take me and my siblings (all boys) to the living room, make us pull our pants and underwear down (which exposed ourselves to each other), remove her rings (so as to not break our skin) and proceed to spank our bare butts for misbehaving. When I was nine and sprouting pubic hair, my mother was still doing this fully knowledgeable of the humiliation she was inflicting on all of us. I was filled with rage and hate and knew by age 10 that I would leave home by the time I was 18 and never return to live.  My mother would tell visitors of my plans to leave as if it was a joke – completely uninterested in why a young child would feel this way.  My regret is that I didn’t fight back, that I didn’t report her to child protection services (as we would have been removed from the home and she would have been seen as the abuser she is), and that I didn’t leave before I was 18.  And, I often wonder why my father and other relatives who knew what she was doing didn’t intercede.  Instead, they looked the other way. There’s a special place in hell for people who know about child abuse but remain complacent.

To be clear, my mother loved her children in her own way – as long as they did what she wanted as control was key and she used her fists to hit and slap her children into submission.  She is a deeply flawed human being who married young (to a spoiled narcissist who was a serial philanderer), had 6 children by the time she was 27, and relished being held on a pedestal for being so young and pretty, for having so many children, for taking care of her own house without help, and as one of my brothers once said “for being a friend of the friendless.”  She craved love and admiration and thrived on constant attention.  When I once asked her why she had so many children, she told me because she knew her kids would love her (my grandmother was exasperated by my mother and her emotional needs and yet, my mother spent her whole life trying to get her mother to love her).

There are various words and phrases to describe the severing of a relationship and as Eamon Dolan points out in his soon to be released book “The Power of Parting:  Finding Peace and Freedom Through Family Estrangement,” there are many cultural taboos against estrangement that are continually reinforced by relatives, friends, and even well-intentioned acquaintances.  When I attended a out-of-state birthday party a few years ago, I was approached by a friend of my mother’s who asked me if I was not speaking to my mother because she gave me an ugly grey wool skirt as a gift in my childhood (my mother allegedly told her this).  Really.  I told my mother’s friend, the gift was actually a kind gesture even though I didn’t care for it, and that I severed communication with my mother because of the physical and emotional abuse she subjected her children to, because she would not own up to what she had done, and because she had too much pride to apologize. As is most often the case, concern is not for the person who stepped away – who experienced the physical and psychological abuse – but for the person who was cut off.

Through the years, I have been approached to forgive and forget, to consider my mother’s own childhood, to understand she was in love and married to a man who continuously cheated on her, and that she was raising six children with no help (her choice as she could have afforded help).  One of my aunts even wrote to me that she “beat the shit out of her own kids” but they still talk to her.  I suggested she apologize to them.  But, my best response is that forgiving her would not free me; she would never change and be sorry for what she did; I had to change. Leaving her freed me, and protected my own daughter (my mother taught me how to not raise a child).  As Mr. Dolan so elequently said “No abuser’s ignorance or era or condition excuses her behavior any more than her treatment of us gives us license to abuse other people.”