We cannot go back to having an Abuser-in-Chief

We can’t do it again. We just can’t.

My mom left when I was just four years old. I don’t have a single memory of her time living in our house that isn’t connected to violence. I don’t remember her baking cookies or giving me baths. I don’t remember her taking me to the park, or for walks, I don’t remember her brushing my hair or kissing me goodnight. I only remember darkness. I only remember fear. I only remember hitting and hiding, screaming and running. I only remember the tears. I only remember the pleading for it to stop. I only remember the abuse. It has erased every other moment of those four years to the point where I doubt there even ever were other moments.

She left and stayed gone for 5 years. She was gone so long that I didn’t know her at all by the time she resurfaced. So long that I didn’t even associate HER with the violence I had endured. I didn’t recognize her when I saw her for the first time in what I know now was some kind of court ordered, supervised visit in some fancy office with giant armchairs I could disappear into while a stranger lady explained to me in a baby voice she liked to put on for some reason, that she was my mom. That she “loved me.”

From that point on, my mother became a part of my life in a way that often felt like a transaction. She’d come around once a month, take us to the mall, buy us things I now know she couldn’t afford and never actually paid for, we gave her an envelope we never asked about from our dad, and that was it. We never connected on an emotional level. She never tried to, not really, and I didn’t want to. But she was getting her time looking the part of the doting mommy, and I got some fancy sneakers and a crock of French onion soup, a cheeseburger and a chocolate mouse for dessert at whatever pricey restaurant she wanted to eat at that night.

The older I got, the more I began to see there were other costs associated with this court ordered arrangement of ours. The older I got, the more comfortable she became with criticisms. Of me.

“What is happening with your hair? Why are you sitting like that? You always say “huh”, you sound stupid when you do that. Are you stupid?”

And once that gate was open, boy oh boy, would she let the insults fly. They would seemingly come out of nowhere. A conversation in the car on the way to the mall would take a sudden turn, and before I knew it, I was an “idiot” or a “slob”. That I looked like a boy, that I was a brat, that my clothes were wrong and my hair was wrong and my words were wrong, that I was wrong, wrong wrong.

And I didn’t know how to speak up. I didn’t know how to defend myself. I didn’t even think I could. This woman was my “mom”, and according to my dad that meant I had to treat her with respect. But I didn’t know what a “mom” was. I had no idea. Maybe this constant deluge of disapproval was what moms did. So I took it. And I tucked it all away each and every time. Down into that place where I thought those things went. Down to that place that was starting to define me for myself. Down into my subconscious, where what I knew, was that for whatever reason, I wasn’t worthy of love or praise. I wasn’t good enough for tenderness. I didn’t deserve those things. That’s where I had always put my mom’s abuse. I took it all.

I took it even in front of my friend after my mom had left us in the parking lot of a resort in the Poconos while she drank at the bar inside. When at 1:00 in the morning, I finally went in to ask her when we’d be leaving and it sent her into a rage I thought I’d never seen before, only I had. I was wearing the proof of that rage as a four inch scar above my lip which had become a prominent forever feature on my face.