My mother once told me that while waiting for me to come home from the hospital, she had all these ideas of how close we would be but instead I had rejected her, I was an infant who didn't want to be held. She said I was a cold baby. This story, which she related during the last years we had contact, contradicted the story they'd begun to sell, when I was twelve, that I had become alienated from them when I was sixteen months old with the deaths of my twin brothers and subsequently no longer trusted them. Toward the end of our last period of contact, on one of the occasional long, meandering phone calls during which I sat and listened and often never said anything at all and wondered at how she didn't seem to notice, how she was satisfied with our conversations always being one-sided, she impromptu confessed she wasn't a mother who showed affection, who touched and held and hugged, and she wondered if that had an effect on any of us. She said her parents hadn't shown affection, so she didn't know how. She said she'd asked my brother, B, if he remembered and he'd said he didn't. This surprised me that she would mention him, that she would raise this question to him, and I had reason to doubt that she had. She asked if I remembered, but I didn't trust questions, I'd learned when I was small not to hand over to them any scrap of information about me and my life lest it be somehow twisted and used against me. Besides which, during these calls she would at least once self-congratulate on her parenting and how I was lucky to have such a wonderful, kind father when her father had been a horror. According to her, we were never physically disciplined. "We never spanked you," she'd say. And yet, "Do you remember our ever spanking you," she demanded once or twice in that weird duplicitous voice she could have, which would make me freeze, which would make me hyper-alert, because it was like a double-edged razor blade sneaking between my cells, secretly seeking something other than what she was asking about and I didn’t know what she wanted, what were her ulterior motives. I would stop scrolling on whatever news article on the computer I was perusing because, though this happened in some fashion on every phone call, it could still be a surprise, a little stunner that forced me to think about how I was going to lie and how I wanted to tell the truth but I couldn’t because there was no trusting her.
After a long pause of some struggling indecision I vacantly replied, "No."
The balance is an awkward one. On the one hand, we are told who we are and what our experiences have been, a personal, familial, and social form of self that is built upon the foundation of our early reliance on parental figures. On the other hand, we have also the self that is built on our initial awarenesses, interior private emotions and perceptions, and these may run counter to the parental and social construct. Some have no reason to not believe what they have been told, they have trust in what they believe are reliable witnesses. Some don't have that trust, they know their witnesses lie, though they may not know how much they lie. All of us greatly depend upon the trust that the other is telling the truth, or at least what the other believes to be the truth. We are raised to trust without question that the world around us is exactly as we are told, and we too are exactly as we have been told we are.
I was the eldest of seven children. The twins, both boys, were born and died when I was sixteen months old. The eldest son, B, was born in Richland the summer I turned three years of age. The second son, W, was born in Seattle in the spring when I was five. My sister, A, was born in Richland when I was almost eight. I initially left home when I was seventeen, and my youngest sister, D, was born in Augusta about eighteen months later during the period of my first estrangement from the family. I only reconnected because my parents contacted me when I was nineteen to tell me I had a new sibling who was ill and might die. They sent a letter, and I wondered how they knew my address as my husband and I lived under the radar in order to avoid having my parents show up on our doorstep. After all, they’d threatened to make me disappear, I was terrified of them. But I agreed to meet, in order to see my new sister who they said might die. “Are you sure you want to do this?” my husband asked. I said yes and he supported me in that decision. As it turned out, what my parents had written, that she was sick, was a lie, but I didn’t address it. D was perfectly healthy and they acted as if I’d not been told she was ill, as did I, because I was there meeting my baby sister and that should be special, and because one isn’t so surprised to realize one was lied to and you don’t call them out on it because it feels too dangerous, no matter how calm things may seem to be there’s always the underlying current of threat that ensured the success of the theatrical my parents were presenting, they said their lines and up to certain levels of derangement one went along with the script in order to avoid hell, one self-protected by not revealing what one was thinking, and because one is used to there somehow being two stories, she was sick and yet she was not, one didn’t argue the point as all points were unstable and never in one’s favor. I didn’t immediately disconnect again because I’d the idea I would stick around and keep an eye on things, to make sure my youngest sister was safe.
If I remember correctly, my mother had cheerfully volunteered they knew my address because one of my siblings had a friend who had an older sibling who knew and had told them.
That initial meeting after nearly two years estrangement is an episode I’ve never revisited, I have always avoided thinking about it, a part of the big past I scraped off the table and into the trash can, and I feel nauseous as I experience it again. My first time in my parents’ new home, which they’d moved into not long after I left. A new suburban brick home so architecturally devoid of style it made the most modest neighboring ranch rectangle stand out as an example of iconic design. There was a two-car garage on the right, in the middle a gated and narrow courtyard entrance to a front door hidden from the street, and on the left the only rooms of the house facing the street were the two foremost bedrooms, each represented with one narrow window covered with Spanish wrought iron window grills that were purely decorative in this neighborhood, instead they were a no trespassing declaration of separation from the world. Inside, the main room and combined dining and study area faced an oddly expansive, uninviting, barren back yard that didn’t have a single tree or shrub, backed by a wall of woods that served as so effective a barrier one wouldn’t even guess Highway 28 was beyond, and became home to the chickens and roosters my mother, before we reunited, had elected to keep on their patio, the myth being she’d always wanted to raise chickens, but there were soon no chickens in the yard as they had opted to fly over the fence to enjoy the freedom of the woods, or be eaten by dogs in neighboring yards. Coyotes had yet to move into the area. For some reason my parents had moved from a popular, established subdivision to a new, somewhat lower-income one on the edge of nowhere, which I didn’t realize then neighbored a new and very exclusive subdivision to which some other families from the old subdivision had begun to migrate, West Lake, a gated community with country club and golf course that I now read had been established by Governor Carl Sanders and partners. And maybe West Lake answers why my parents had moved out there. Maybe they couldn’t afford West Lake but could neighbor it. Or maybe they didn’t want to risk the social attention of peers in West Lake, but they could neighbor it. The only exterior, natural light in the faux-wood-paneled main room was had via a double-paned glass patio door that was ugly in the way most patio double-paned glass sliding doors are ugly, as was the patio ugly so one didn’t care to pull back the heavy drapes to view it, the impression had was of a cave, which felt visually cramped but had far more footage than it seemed, chaotically filled with blue and orange flower print sofas that were so overstuffed they approached being Jeff Koons levels of kitsch baroque excess, dark wood end tables, credenzas and cabinets, television, every surface covered with multi-colored crochet doilies made by my mother, even the shades of the table lamps draped in brown, red, orange, green, yellow and beige crochet. The former house on Edinburgh was a nightmare, but this one felt as sick, though everything in it was as new as the house as if to defy old ghosts. It didn’t occur to me to wonder at the expenditures of the brand new life. I don’t remember my other siblings being there when we first arrived, instead they each came drifting in and out during our brief visit, breezing through, barely a nod given to me, “Oh, hello”, then back out to see friends.
Members of a family can have various perspectives due true differences in experience and the information granted them by parents and other family members. For instance, our mother was frequently hospitalized between the time I was seven and thirteen years of age. I discovered, in my late twenties, that my sister, A, had no knowledge of her hospitalizations. The last time our mother had been hospitalized she was six years of age and not only had she no memory of the hospitalizations, she was unaware that era of our lives had been erased from the family history. While I imagine our youngest sister, D, eventually learned our mother had been hospitalized, she might have considered it to have little relevance to her life as the hospitalizations were before her birth. My siblings and I will have different perspectives, different stories, which I take into account with all biographies I read. Just because a sibling reports on things being a particular way doesn’t mean that this was the experience of others. There are many biographies in which it’s explored whether a person may have been physically or sexually abused, but a sibling or other relative says absolutely not and it’s taken as the definitive word. It may be they are covering up, protecting the perpetrator because they have a lifetime of being taught to protect them or the family’s honor, maybe they are protecting themselves because they have to maintain the veil of normalcy that they’ve draped over the family in order to prevent a crisis of confronting things as they actually were. But they may also have a different perspective and different stories because the way they were raised was like living in different countries.
It's true that my two younger sisters were never spanked. And my youngest brother was rarely spanked. But I had been, not infrequently on a daily basis, not spanked but whipped and beaten just for existing, for having the badness to breathe.
Spanked. When I was a child, whatever the physical abuse, it was described as being spanked, and if one was being spanked one wasn’t being beaten, for spankings were only disciplinary, and if one was disciplined one had done something bad to cause this. I don’t like the word “spanked”. An etymology website notes its appearance in 1727 with “spank” defined as “to forcefully strike with the open hand, or something flat and hard, especially on the buttocks”. As a noun in connection with the punishment of children, it seems to date from 1854. It can refer to paddling, caning, and slippering, defined as a punishment usually administered with a sports shoe with a rubber sole rather than a softer, more flexible bedroom slipper. Some sources state spanking is to be hit on the bottom as a punishment. Beating a person is defined as to strike with repeated blows so as to injure or damage, or to hit someone hard and repeatedly. Spanking seems a word born to legitimize corporal punishment in respect of children, with a line drawn to separate the action from a beating that instead infers an outlaw aspect of rage rather than justice on the part of the perpetrator. With the use of the hand as the instrument, spanking often takes for granted the use of the open hand and palm, the closed fist instead belonging to the realm of a beating and abuse, a fight. But a spanking has a broad range of interpretation if it involves use of objects for inflicting physical punishment, and the definitions give no boundary in respect of force used or duration where a “spanking” becomes abusive. I become bogged down, looking on the internet for how people now respond to the issue of “spanking”, though research has found that it negatively impacts brain development and biology, that the brains of children who have been spanked respond differently, with a heightened activity response for threat detection as they skry even non-threatening facial expressions for meaning. They are more likely to be depressed and anxious. I become bogged down looking for a variety of personal opinions on the internet because there are so many voices who believe spanking is an essential form of discipline, that it did them good, those voices mixed in with individuals who are suspect, who relate spanking stories that after two or three sentences begin to hint that this is for them sex porn. I become bogged down because it is so deeply inculcated in others, the biblical spare the rod and spoil the child, passed along generation to generation. Individuals who experienced the most innocuous forms of physical discipline are perhaps the most dangerous in their cavalier and thoughtless upholding of a practice they say is righteous and always hurts the parent more than the child.
My mother actually rarely “spanked”, that was left to my father. My mother would suddenly lash out grabbing any object at hand to strike me with over and over so I would cower then run holding my hands over my head as she struck me wherever my hands weren’t, my hands weren’t able to protect myself all over at once and I was concerned most with my head. And, no, I know that is wrong about her not “spanking” me because I remember my mother many times becoming furious when she spanked me because she said my bottom was too hard, she said I didn’t feel anything, she’d complain she couldn’t hit me hard enough with her hand because I felt nothing so she would have to hit me harder and harder with whatever object she weaponized. I would start laughing hysterically as I tried to escape her and she’d scream about how I felt nothing, how I was laughing at her, how I was mocking her, how I felt no pain at all. Sometimes, she was right, I would stop feeling anything, I would start laughing for no reason. A few websites say a child who laughs when spanked is feeling embarrassed that they have done something wrong, so they become silly, but this wasn’t the case. I was desperate, but the pain was gone and I’d just uncontrollably laugh, I couldn’t help it, then another bout of sudden hell would be over and I’d lie on the floor scarcely able to breathe.
Why my parents were resolved, from her birth when I was seven, not to physically abuse my sister, A, but continued their abuse of me for years, I don't know. I began to think of myself as perceived as damaged goods. When I was seventeen and A was nine, I was left to babysit her one night and she wasn’t supposed to go out after a particular time. We argued over this. I had been babysitting her since she was born but it had now been about four years since our mother had last been hospitalized and during that time our parents had rigorously pushed for me to be perceived as the bad one who was in conflict with everyone else. My nine-year-old sister was insisting on going out after hours, in the dark, to wander the streets with a friend and wouldn’t listen to me that it was my job to keep her inside. She finally said, “I’m going to do what I want. You can’t tell me what to do, you’re not my mother”, and I snapped and unwisely slapped her. For years the responsibility had been put on me to act as her guardian and now I couldn’t protect her, she wouldn’t listen to me, because I had been so undermined by my parents. I didn’t smack her hard but it doesn’t matter. I slapped her face. When our parents got home, she told our father, and he turned to me in front of her and everyone, and as he yelled, “Don’t you dare ever touch her again!” he drew back his arm and struck my face and nose with such force that blood flew all over me. I reasoned from this that I was right, I was considered damaged goods, but I had known that for years. I didn’t wash the blood off my face and didn’t change my clothes, wanting to see if by any chance I would get an apology, hoping the blood would eventually coerce an apology out of him. He didn’t apologize. I went to school on the bus with the blood on my face and on my clothes, wondering if anyone would ask me what had happened. No one did. I felt as if I was invisible. But the blood had turned brown so perhaps people thought I was just dirty.
As I’ve noted, there was a lot A didn't know, such as her having no knowledge until in her twenties that our mother was hospitalized due mental illness, off and on, from not long before she was born to when she was about six years of age, during which time I was given the position of daily caring for my siblings regardless whether our mother was in the hospital or not, which was difficult but I had already long been responsible for their care. Despite these responsibilities, I was also, however, the designated black sheep of the family, the problem, and my siblings were ever more deliberately alienated from me after our mother decided she would never be hospitalized or see a psychiatrist again, which is when my father left behind the physiology world and returned to medical school to become a psychiatrist, I suspected because he intended to take over prescribing medications for her. When I was as young as nine years of age, because our mother could not, I would put together birthday parties for my siblings, inviting neighborhood children and planning games and decorating, but I was told to have everyone believe our mother had arranged the celebrations. Our mother home from the hospital for a day, my role was to stand back and make sure all went smoothly while she enjoyed the love and excitement of my siblings’ thanks—which I understood, the children needed to have confidence in her, and she needed to feel involved. She would return to the hospital and my role was to then clean up, and I tried to not be pained that my devotion went unrecognized, that my function was to do the work but be invisible.
A photo of weak Kodak Instamatic color. I’m twelve years of age, in our home on Edinburgh Drive in Augusta, in the family room that for a couple of years had only had the color Magnavox television in the corner and the blond wood table with the extension leaf, long lost, that my parents had for their dining table when they first married, but now the room also has a green Colonial style sofa that is very suburban Southern style and is supposed to complement the pine paneling that is in nearly every family room in the neighborhood. The floor is a beige linoleum that was discolored before we moved in with numerous applications of wax and is perhaps the reason shag carpet came into style, to cover ugly linoleum floors that were ankle deep in old wax all over America. My mother hasn’t made an attempt to decorate the home and the few items in the room are a combination of suburban kitsch and whatever. Over the table hangs on the wall a single small, purchased image of something, probably flowers, in a round wood frame, an insensible decoration. On the table below is a globe and a tall table lamp with an ugly fluted, green glass globe base, the shade askew atop a brass-toned column. On the television is an ugly and forlorn potted plant in a white ceramic vase. Next to the fireplace is pressed a toy chest entirely padded in red vinyl flecked gold, which I still resent for the Christmas when several years beforehand the boys got a toy chest, and I got one, topped with bows, because the toy chests were our presents, and I didn’t know what they were supposed to hold, what toys of mine they were supposed to keep off the floor, it seemed like a prank that would never be amusing. In the center of the room hangs an ugly brass ceiling lamp from which dangle balloons that I spent a long while blowing up by myself, and from the lamp I’ve hung pink streamers twisting into the four corners of the room. I’ve taped balloons up on the far wall as well, dark blue and light blue balloons, red balloons and yellow. This is the fruit of my attempt to make the room festive for A’s birthday party, and I was proud of what I’d done, which looks pathetic in the photo, I stand at room’s center with my hair pulled back, forehead covered with bangs bent and frizzy that my mother insisted I have since I was a small child because she said my forehead was too high and had to be covered up. I was by then buying my clothes with money I make babysitting, my parents that year having sat me down for the announcement that I would have to buy my own clothes from then on with my babysitting money as they couldn’t afford to buy clothes for me. This wouldn’t have saved them much money as they did a good job of not buying me clothes beforehand, which made for such embarrassments as the November day my mother was again in the hospital and my father looked at me outside in the cold, I was standing next to the car as we were preparing to go somewhere, and he told me to go put on something other than the pair of shorts and shirt I’d outgrown, no coat, and I had to tell him that was all I had. Because no clothes are being purchased for me, and it’s more than expensive enough for me to have purchased a couple of skirts and tops for school, in this photo I’m wearing a white sleeveless button-down shirt with a collar that is my mother’s because I dig in her Goodwill pile and make do as well with clothing she never wanted or wore, and a faded pair of what used to be floral print jeans that I’ve cut off for shorts as I’ve outgrown them. I stand slouched, staring off into the corner, not smiling, my arms behind my back, and I don’t know who took the photo or how I felt as they took it but I do know that I was struggling to make peace with my excitement over pulling together A’s birthday party and the disappointment with pretending I didn’t do it. My mother would come home for a couple of hours and return to the hospital and I understood and didn’t understand why I had to make myself invisible, but wished my sister knew I was the one who cared enough to pull together this party for which my mother receives the credit and thanks. I was torn because I knew it was better to be selfless and not take credit, that it would be selfish of me to do otherwise. I still felt it was unfair that my father would tell me everyone needed to believe my mother arranged the party, but I accepted it was spiritually best to be without the vanity to want praise and got used to not taking credit, to being invisible, to looking for good projects that seem to need someone invisible to accomplish them or else they’d not be done.
When I say that I was, from the age of twelve, paying for all my clothes out of what I made babysitting for others on days when I wasn’t babysitting my siblings, this means that I was paying for everything I wanted or needed, school supplies as well, and if I wanted books or art supplies or paper for writing, anything. My parents hadn’t been much for buying me anything anyway—I will perhaps to some sound critical and resentful, when instead it’s a matter that I didn’t have things because my parents never imagined that I should have anything. One would think they’d at least invest in books, but other than some purchased in early childhood, they purchased only a few for me, I remember a Cherry Ames, Student Nurse book, and Bobbsey Twins: The Goldfish Mystery, given to me when I was ten because it was my reading material for a road trip and my father made the selection because he had gone on a trip to Japan for a conference when I was seven. I loved reading about the Bobbsey Twins but it was the only book in the series I ever got, and I never had any of the other series books that my friends had that were popular then, like Nancy Drew, or any of the many books popular for young and older children that people reminisce about reading. I looked forward to visiting others who had the Dr. Seuss books and Charlie Brown, and I’d frustrate and irritate friends by ignoring them and consuming their books. They didn’t understand that unlike them I didn’t have books and I was hungry to read what others had in their homes. Even the Highlights magazines, if anyone had those I would be immersed in them for as long as I was visiting.
Another photo from that party shows I’ve set the kitchen breakfast bar for seven guests, the kitchen breakfast bar being what we used for our dining table always while I was with them on Edinburgh. I’ve placed a party favor above each plate, the type that you pull on each end and it pops open to reveal a surprise. There are paper party napkins folded beside each plate and upon each a fork for the cake and a spoon for the ice cream. I can’t get rid of the straw basket piled high with extraneous clutter that sits always at the end of the table where it joins the wall under a rotary dial phone, the long cord of which drapes down over the table. I see two colonial-styled captain’s chairs my mother had purchased for her and my father. There is a black metal folding chair with a cushion. One of the chairs that went with the newlywed blond dining table, still in its natural color. One of the chairs that went with the newlywed blond dining table but it has been painted a light olive green and the paint is chipped and worn. A small Colonial-style lamp sits atop the dishwasher next the table. A curtain my mother had sewn, decorated with yellow, green, and brown rickrack, is over the window next the table, which is open. The photo is splotched red and tries for the error of a double exposure with another photo in which there is a hint of the folding venetian doors between the kitchen and the family room. Another photo shows more guests may have shown up than I’d anticipated, seven small ones, plus one of my brothers, circulating around A as she is blindfolded and being spun about for a game on the back concrete patio that is strewn with a long spiraling green garden hose that my father didn’t bother to put away and will trip up the guests. I obviously didn’t know what to do with it either and had to work around it. My brother, B, flings a red balloon about with the same arm upon which is a sling reminding it is sprained. Or perhaps this is from when he jumped off the roof, playing Batman. My other younger brother is not pictured but was there. I am realizing the bulk of these guests would have belonged to a Roman Catholic family that lived two doors up the street. It had been two years since we’d been to Roman Catholic mass or confession, but we were still Roman Catholic enough.
Again, I may sound hypercritical. What does it matter if the chairs didn’t match and if my parents didn’t decorate? But I knew something was wrong with neither one of them caring how we lived, not paying any attention to their children, and as a present to my parents and my family during my teen years I purchased furnishings for the family room, a wood curio display case (four shelves) to be hung over the sofa, that held the antique teacups my mother went through a brief period of collecting, and which I had begun purchasing as gifts for her, the shelf in a Colonial style to match with their sofa, and I purchased also a Colonial bucket-style side table and newspaper holder to sit next to my father’s recliner, and a maple Colonial coffee table, all with my babysitting money. The furnishings were purchased from the Sears catalog but they were real maple and oak, no particle board, no plastic. I wasn’t the only one who tried to buy love in this way and decorate the home. My brother, B, with the proceeds from his first job at a jewelry store, would buy our mother an even larger, magnificent console curio display cabinet, fifty inches long with glass shelves, interior lighting, and two Lalique glass doves to display inside it. He was happy to make our mother happy with him for a moment, but I remember his standing there expectant, waiting for her to fully realize how much he’d spent, so she would appreciate his sacrifice, and knowing he would wait forever, just I had waited forever for my parents to comprehend my sacrifices, and sometimes they didn’t even appreciate them at all, for my father had told me he didn’t like the bucket side table I got him. I asked him why he didn’t use it and he had brusquely replied, “I don’t want it.” When I had made him a cardboard briefcase when I was eight, and he threw it out, I had realized, ah, I thought I had worked hard and given him something wonderful, but instead I wake to the fact I have given him something childish and stupid and handmade and for that reason he’s ashamed of it, I must give him better gifts. When I was older, about thirteen, I thought the bucket side table alongside his recliner would be in the league of better, but he coldly told me, so as to wither and crush me, told me in secret so no one else would hear, not even my mother, that he would prefer nothing over the bucket side table to hold his newspapers and ashtray and drink, which is when I realized he would never accept a gift from me. The existence of the bucket side table was then a daily reminder it was a gift that had been turned down but too late to return. I understood I was attempting to purchase the love of my parents, their favor, while also sacrificing my money to try to make a home for my siblings and myself, and while I was a little proud of making the home look nicer, I also hated myself for it, finding myself pathetic because I knew one couldn’t purchase love and I thought it grotesquely obvious that this was what I was trying to do. I felt the same way about my brother. I had sympathy for him because I knew the reason he purchased the expensive display case and the Lalique glass satin doves, yet I also found it all pathetic, just as I thought I was pathetic as a teen.
When my parents didn’t buy bed linens or coverlets, I used my babysitting money to buy bed linens and coverlets and wall art for the room A and I shared. My mother asked in that prying odd voice she had why I purchased the linens and coverlet in a fanciful Noah’s Ark theme, wasn’t it more suited for a child, and I explained it was because I wanted my little sister, who was almost eight years younger, to be excited with the redecorating, it needed to be also for her as we then shared the room, so I had chosen from the Sears catalog something she’d really liked.
I’m not going to get into yet how I was “disciplined”. But, as I was saying, my mother had asked me if I remembered them ever spanking me, and I lied and said no, one could take my acquiescence as cowardly, and point out that I too was lying, when instead it was self-protection, there was no point objecting as I knew she'd never admit to anything they'd done, she'd done, which made me wonder why she asked in the first place, what was up her proverbial sleeve if I instead replied yes, I couldn't guess. Was she testing me, her self-perceived control over me, or did she possibly believe I wouldn’t remember. With her gaslighting assertions of no abuse I was always put in the position of wondering if she actually had no recollection or if she only wanted to seem she had no recollection. But I believed she remembered as she was prying and was satisfied to find I’d say no. As to the confession of her not having been an affectionate parent and if that had affected me, I decided to noncommittally reply, "It's fine." On these calls, I paid as little attention as possible, distancing myself by roaming the internet. iPhone in my left hand or resting on my desk, paying just enough attention to her voice so that I would know when and whether to punctuate with a yea, nay or uh-huh, with my other hand I scrolled and tapped through domestic, political, international news, focused on my computer's monitor. My voice was so cool and blank, I would almost feel guilty, thinking of how she'd accused me of being the rejecting infant. Anyone listening in, I knew, must imagine me to be the cold and unfeeling one, even cruel in my disengagement as she told me for the one hundred thousandth time how cruel her parents had been. Sacrificing a few hours to do not much more than sit and listen, which had been my job throughout my childhood, to babysit my mother, I thought I had matters well enough in hand. But I didn't. I'd even imagined this was, in its own way, a connection, that I was in the only way possible between us showing my love, taking the opportunity when I could to try to move into a subject not emotionally charged, that wasn't a fantasy or lying fabrication, to try to move her out of her monologues and into a real conversation, which was difficult as she never read, she never watched movies, she had no use for anything involving history, she didn't care about the world except for the chem trails she believed had taken over the skies, and GMOs she had to avoid and for which reason they ate special foods purchased over the internet. We couldn't talk about any of my interests as she didn't care about them. She didn't have interests other than herself and her dog, a Shih Tzu she spent more money on in a year than she had on me in my entire childhood, for which reason I felt a minimal, childish resentment that I ignored because it wasn't the dog's fault. When I brought facts into a conversation that contradicted false assertions she made about history or the world, she'd say, "How do you know? You don't know everything." When I offered to send her articles, she’d say, “I have my own sources,” or, “I don’t care. I don’t have to study history to have my own beliefs.” But if I said something with which she agreed I was "smart". The curious thing is she spoke like a child when she wasn't dissecting a person with biting criticism, and because she spoke like a child it was impossible to deal with her or even conceive of her as a mature adult. Grasping, peevish, she had to be the center of attention, and if the topic of interest strayed from her for even a few seconds she would become petulant, pout and refuse to participate, disinterested, then would reoccupy the stage by childish force. If I could take it, it's because she wasn't screaming at me, as she used to do when I was in my twenties, and my husband had asked, coming in from the other end of the apartment, "How can you take it?" From a closed room he’d been able to hear her yelling at me over the phone, how ungrateful I was to not take a white pair of shoes she was offering me, which I didn't want. Several years before I had accepted a pair of black patent heels from her that she suddenly didn’t want, only to have the shoes stick on each other while I was walking and pitch me down some stairs. When she learned of it, she said, “They made me almost fall too, that’s why I didn’t want them,” and when we got home my husband angrily took the shoes and threw them in the trash. The day I refused the white shoes was the day before I broke contact the second time. It was the day I realized that something was wrong because my husband felt sick to his stomach listening to my mother scream at me, and I felt nothing. It was the night I dreamed my father laughed at me for being in contact because it kept me in their control and not recognizing how I’d been abused. That second time I cut contact lasted for nearly twenty years. And of course it wasn’t just over a pair of shoes, it was over a lot of things that had happened that I kept excusing in order to keep the peace. And I cut them off because my control over my sleep was breaking down so that I was screaming in my sleep. Before, I’d been able to stave off the night terrors by telling my brain not to dream, not to dream, don’t dream. I cut them off because I knew if I didn’t I couldn’t permit myself to examine why I was waking up screaming at night, and everything about the past that I’d shut down and out of my life in order to survive. If I later let them back into my life after nearly twenty years it was because my father wrote that my mother was ill, which I believed, just like I’d believed when they wrote the first time and drew me back into their lives by saying my youngest sister might not live. And I reasoned too that maybe, with all my family consequently then accepting me back into the fold, my siblings having cut contact with me when I cut off my parents, that my son would have cousins, which might be nice for him, and my parents wouldn’t hurt him because I wouldn’t ever let them around him without me being in the room protecting him, which would be a rare event as they were a continent away and maybe they’d be long–distance nice to him, and I’d let him make up his own mind about them, I’d already resolved I wasn’t going to tell him anything about what had happened to me until he was sixteen or seventeen because I didn’t want him to know, I wanted him to have a normal life, I didn’t want him to grow up with my burden of family drama.
I was wrong to imagine I wasn’t being used as long as I was hundreds of miles away. The eventual crushing realization of how I'd been manipulated and used during those last few years in which I had consented to contact (my father had been the one to reach out to me which I later realized would have been only at my mother's urging), would be beyond devastating. Those last few years I thought I was adroitly dodging land mines, only to be hit with a veritable atomic blast when I imagined we were most connected, after which we would never speak again. Shattered, I stopped answering her calls, and my mother didn't try to pull me back in as she'd used me up. And while I'm ready to come clean with my childhood that laid the basis for that final brutal blow, I'm not sure...well...I've a while to think about whether if I can write about it or not. And how.