A personal account of generational abuse.
Disclaimer:
I will start off by saying I’m not sharing this very personal account for sympathy or pity points. I’m not seeking that from you, because I’m not a believer in victimhood. I believe to truly rise from any state of oppression a better and more improved individual—the most dignified and respectable path to take—epitomizes revenge. Jerry Seinfeld said it best: the best revenge is living well. I ended up becoming a three-time, multi-state Judo champion in just four years of training, and even managed to build this website on my own to read and write more. My siblings went on to succeed in their own fabulous ways. We’re doing OK for what it’s worth. But those battle scars from early childhood abuse still haven’t healed completely to this day, which is precisely why I’m writing this post. The reasons for sharing this story of mine are twofold: to provide insight into the harsh and abusive nature of a narcissistic parent, and to delve into the psychological and generational repercussions the children suffer thereafter. Beyond lies the story of a narcissistic, loveless mother… Get ready for a tense ride.
My mother despised me. I often wondered what I did wrong, or what about me specifically made me such an unlovable person to her. It certainly didn’t help that my mother was all too happy to affirm this feeling any given time she felt was necessary. “Chloe, you’ll always be alone.” That was one of my (ironically) favorite quotes I’ll never forget emerged from her mouth all too willingly. Words intent on cutting me down peg by peg. My mother was a diehard proponent for corporal punishment, but it was her cruel words that bruised in deeper shades than the beatings.
The explosive tirades my mother would suddenly burst out on us, her children, on any given day, were as calculating as they were unconstrained, intent on shattering self-esteem. She had a knack for identifying secret weak spots—vulnerabilities or characteristic ‘defects’— and would all too delightfully expose them to anyone listening nearby, any empathy or concern for our privacy thrown out the window right into the trash can. Coupled with her helicopter-style reign of control, it was a consistent disaster in the making, for you couldn’t escape her smothering helicopter-parenting, so you had no choice but to regularly endure her verbal and physical abuse. And I’m not exaggerating. It was abuse in the purest sense and form, because the intention was always to harm us in one way or another.
“A mother would never do things to intentionally hurt her children,” you might argue. “She made mistakes, like all humans do.” To which I would ardently reply: “You haven’t seen the inner workings of mine.” I know my mother’s intentions were meant to harm us. Why else would a mother do to her children what I will describe in detail below? It is nothing short of cruelty, a demon dancing to the cries of children.
My first prominent memory of abuse begins with my older sister and I having a grand old time jumping around on the living room couch. I couldn’t have been older than four or five, so my older sister was six or seven, latest, at the time. Our little bodies, pent up with such fizzy vitality, decided that couch-jumping was a perfect way to release some of our endless bubbling energy. Giggling and bouncing about, our young imaginations wild with game ideas for this new endeavor, abruptly ended when we spotted our mother. I can remember it as vividly as if it happened yesterday: My mother gasped, mouth wide open. We stopped dead cold in our tracks, smiles wiped from our faces instantly. The hauntingly still scene before us broke when she ran to fetch The Stick. The Stick was a black vacuum pole attachment, about a yard long, my mother’s favored weapon of choice for corporal punishment.
She went for my older sister first. She threw my sister over her lap, pulled down her pants to expose bare cheeks (bare skin hurts worse after all), and ruthlessly flogged my sister before my very young eyes, each loud clapping of The Stick upon my sister’s bottom resounding through the room like cracks of thunder. Like a deer in headlights, or more appropriately, a child watching a horror movie for the first time, I could simply watch, aghast, as my sister’s wailing face shifted from scarlet red to royal purple. It was the face I remembered more vividly than her piercing cries, because it was a face contorted with anguish, like that from a painting. As I continued to gawk at this scene before me in a dumbfounded stupor, I realized too late afterward that I would be next for the beating.
I couldn’t will myself to run away and hide. I was paralyzed where I stood. The shock of seeing my older sister suffering, coupled with the inevitability of the situation—that my mother was stronger and faster than my little body could even hope to compete with—disabled my movement. I already accepted my fate after she finished pounding on my sister and reached her wicked claws out for me. I, a little four- or five-year old girl, took the beating as well as my older sister had. Perhaps it was worse for me because, preceding my beating, I was forced to witness and have forever ingrained in my mind the image of a wailing mouth and a tortured pain etched across my sister’s face. But then again, my sister could have suffered the same fate watching me while recovering from her beating. I was too busy taking the beating to have taken notice.
Another similar, psychologically agonizing memory that will forever tear up my heart remembering is the face of my younger brother after a trip to the mall. My brother couldn’t have been older than six or seven at the time, so I was around eight years old. My brother was growing impatient waiting around at the mall while my mother shopped, so he made a little fuss, stomped around, and pouted in defiance. This “scene” my brother had made stewed up a broiling rage in my mother. “You wait till we get home,” my mother seethed through gritted teeth. (This was one of her more commonly used lines preceding a vengeful beating.) My brother and I both knew what this meant at that point in our lives. Panic pulsated through my veins and my heart thudded against my chest when I realized what my brother was about to endure, when “we got home.” If that wasn’t enough, my mother felt it was necessary to drive the message further in the car ride home. “You’re never going to make a scene like that at the mall again. Just you wait till I’m finished with you.” She hissed and seethed and raged the entire trip home with her portents of torture. My little brother was a trembling, sobbing wreck the whole ride home.
When our old blue van inexorably rolled into our driveway, inanimately unaware that it drove us right to the front door of our torture chamber, I was left with the last photographic image of my brother before he was taken to his room for a brutal beating. As I opened the car door, my mother ordered him to his room in an inexplicably hateful tone: “Get in your room.” The cold, authoritarian tone in her voice when she’d say that sucked the soul right out of your body. It would reduce you to feeling like nothing more than a conglomerate of organs ready for butchering.
My brother exited the car. The last thing I witnessed leaving our vehicle was a small child, a pained little face of desperation mixed with fear. Tears were streaming down his sad, deflated face as he gasped for air between sobs. I can still remember how utterly sad and fearful those leaking blue eyes looked before he went into the house to prepare for his beating. I had to walk into the house where my mother rushed to her usual storage closet in the first floor bathroom, snatched The Stick, and rushed upstairs all too eagerly to mercilessly beat the shrill screams out of my little brother. I was left to tremble and pray downstairs, to a God I naively once believed in, for my brother’s survival.
[Forgive my short digression here, but I must admit something. As I type out these personal memories from my childhood here, an intense rage is boiling inside me and I’m forcing back burning tears. I just cannot understand how a parent—especially a mother—could so willingly and brutally beat her own small creations, her little, trembling children cowering in fear beneath her, and over such seemingly trivial issues, too. Such regular occurrences for any child-rearing experience (read misbehaving in public places or jumping on couches), and yet the accompanying punishment so disproportionately severe. It is both revolting and infuriating to think about how she terrorized such helpless children over molehill circumstances, and forever traumatized them all in the process (a not-so-molehilly consequence thereafter). There were plenty of beatings from The Stick, by her hand—too many to recount and too many suppressed in the subconscious, to avoid further trauma. Only the most brutal of them have found a way out of my protective subconscious barrier and onto this digital paper. And there are more yet to tell…]
As brutal as our childhood beatings were, they were comparatively less pernicious in the long run than the emotional abuse. In situations of physical abuse, the victims eventually grow bigger and stronger. A good lot of physical abuse victims eventually go on to practice weight lifting or a martial arts fighting style to fend off their abusers. With enough training and time under their belt, they can eventually subdue their abusers. I’m proud to belong in the group that did.
Fascinated by martial arts since I was a young child (Goku from Dragon Ball Z being my main source of inspiration for it all), I joined my younger brother in Korean Tang Soo Do martial arts classes at the age of seven. Tang Soo Do incorporates swift, flashy kicks that can inflict decent damage with enough practiced reps. I trained consistently, three to four days a week, and with enough kicking reps and knuckle push ups under my belt, I found myself growing stronger. Five years later, I found myself strong enough to finally fend off my raging mother. I vividly remember that moment of victory occurring in the bedroom I shared with my other two sisters:
I, a hormonal pre-teen, had just “copped an attitude” with my mother about some insignificant event that neither of us remember now. It probably had something to do with her assigning me extra cleaning chores—a Cinderella-type punishment she was fond of implementing whenever she was feeling extra punitive— alongside my other punishment chores tasked to me for whatever else I had purportedly done wrong that day. So when she assigned her vengeful, extra Cinderella tasks to me, I must have made a passing remark, a snide comment, something along the lines of “Yipee” or “Woohoo” in /s fashion, that awoke her animal instincts for fighting.
“WHAT DID YOU SAY TO ME?” She bellowed something along these lines to me. Before I could even get another snarky word in edgewise, she was practically stumbling over her own feet to that first floor bathroom closet to retrieve her prized Stick. Little did she know that the instinct to fight was stirring inside me at that moment, too.
As she rushed to my bedroom, I stood still in my place. I braced myself for the first strike of The Stick. WHAM! Right on my left outer thigh, I felt the burning, stinging impact of the hard, plastic Stick against my bare skin. A large, red welt was already forming at the targeted spot on my thigh just a moment later. I clenched my teeth tightly together, but otherwise made no indication that I had felt that pain. Pain was viewed as a weakness and something you needed to hide in that household. I looked her dead in the eyes, and told her rather cooly, “You’re not going to strike me anymore.”
When a predator finds its prey suddenly returning blows, it’s taken aback at first. It may even take a few literal steps back in anticipation of a real threat, like a dog backing away from a feisty and ticked off cat. Not my mother. The idea of her ‘inferior’ child prey standing up against her had her seeing blazing red. I knew better than to think that’s all it would take to stand my ground against her.
“Oh, so you think you’re pretty tough now, huh?” My mother scoffed. Then she readied The Stick for another blistering strike. The next moments proceeded in a frenzied blur. The moment she raised The Stick up a second time, my animal instincts finally took over me. I ran up to her and immediately closed the distance between us. I clinched up with her and tussled with her standing up. She tried to bring The Stick up again to strike me, but it was useless. The Stick’s range for striking was severely limited with me holding her in a clinch.
While in the clinch I found the strength to actually throw (preceding my Judo years, mind you) my own mother onto the ground. The Stick tumbled to her side. I grabbed it and, unlike my mother, showed mercy in this moment of triumph. Rather than deliver the same punishment unto her, I took the higher road and firmly declared she would never strike me again. And she never did strike me with The Stick again after that. I reveled in this proud moment for as long as I could. I had achieved the unthinkable. I had suppressed my oppressor! Anything seemed possible to me now. At least I knew now that I could square up against a ruthless dictator.
How naive and foolish I was. For that joyous moment would soon be squashed like all the other ones before, but this time by her words, not by her hands. Like the ruthless dictator she is, my mother found other effective strategies to keep me under her authoritarian control. Emotionally abusive mechanisms would soon enter the regime, chaining me to her tyrannical reign once more.
Having found herself in this precarious situation—that her children were growing bigger and stronger by the years—she learned very quickly that other forms of abuse would be needed for her to remain in power. Physical beatings alone just weren’t cutting it anymore. And as a desperate dictator is wont to do, she grasped for any plausible mechanisms to control. She found success in other devious forms of manipulation: searching for vulnerabilities in her children with which to hit below the belt; unleashing private, hidden secrets to humiliate us with; and the good ol’ ‘divide and conquer’ strategy (that any Big Government knows all too well about to remain in power). This last strategy would triangulate and ensure that we, the siblings, never got too close to each other and banded together to revolt. This was especially important to my mother. She never wanted her children to realize they had latent potential to join forces and overthrow their ruler. She either needed to keep us silenced, or divided. To do that would rely on the basics, the foundation upon which all of the manipulation rested on: our self-esteem.
My mother loved cutting our self-esteem down into little pieces, chop by chop. She would search for any weakness she could find about you. And then she’d set about making you feel as worthless as possible. When we started experiencing major hormonal changes in our bodies, for instance, which included the development of the quintessential teenage acne, she would all too lovingly refer to us as “walking zits.” In hindsight, our acne ranged from low to moderate in severity, but boy, did our mother love to make us feel otherwise! The smallest red blister or whitehead that poked its head would have her go off on a tantrum about us being pizza-faces, grease monkeys, or the notorious “walking zit.” If the acne-shaming weren’t enough, she also had a keen fascination for making all of her daughters feel as fat and ashamed of themselves as humanly possible. Any time my sisters and I would gain a few pounds, she’d make us feel as fat as fifty pounds over: “Why don’t you keep eating?” (/s) “All you care about is eating and eating and eating.” “Boy, your sister has gotten rather big and bloated, hasn’t she?” “Wow, she’s really puffed up this month.” A personal one aimed at me was: “Chloe, when you gain five pounds, you look like you’ve gained twenty.” Thanks, ‘mom!’ I know I can count on you when I’m feeling down about myself!
I don’t know which was more upsetting: the fact that she herself was obese when she fallaciously called us fat—I kid you not, she was fifty, sixty, and even seventy pounds overweight at any given time (projection, anyone?)— or that, looking back at old family photos, none of us were even remotely overweight. My sisters and I have discussed this with each other at length in our young adulthoods. We all felt like we were fat back then, and have suffered from body dysmorphia in varying degrees since, but when we went back to look at our photos of our old selves, we couldn’t find those overweight girls anywhere. In fact, we were actually pretty damn slim considering. Harsh words, and those coming directly from a mother to a child, have a profound impact both on how we see ourselves in our minds, and in that reflection in the mirror.
This is only the beginning of the story where the verbal abuse is involved. The ego-destroying sentences strung together like silk from a spider, calculating and fatal, to trap her children in her web of manipulation, were mere child’s play for a person of my mother’s caliber. The next step, naturally, was to stay in power—to keep us trapped in that web—by ensuring constant chaos in the household. Our privacy was the first to be forfeited amidst the chaos.
She ventured for other ways to manipulate us…by venturing into our bedrooms in search of any hidden secrets. Our bedrooms were scoured and private belongings including sentimentally-loaded diaries were raided from our secret hiding places. She used our personal diaries, with our deepest thoughts and feelings poured into them, as a mere tool to gain the upper hand in arguments. Whenever we’d argue with her, she’d promptly resurrect our most private feelings and thoughts, putatively safeguarded in our diaries where they were thought to rest in peace, at whim, to whoever was unfortunate enough to be nearby. When she discovered some of us wrote in our diaries of having depressive and suicidal thoughts from this rather tense environment, under this rather ruthless reign of a dictator, my mother scoffed at us and made sure to let everyone else in the household know of our most privately withheld feelings.
“Are you done being suicidal now?” She once callously asked one of us in the flattest tone imaginable. Not a drop of concern could be felt in that empty tone of voice. The lack of empathy, the dearth in concern, the bloodless response to your child’s innermost struggles! How such a coldblooded being could be called ‘human’—let alone mother—is frightening. Our private lives, which are considered sacred enough to be protected under federal laws, were disregarded and tossed aside like litter in our household. And our feelings fared no better than our privacy.
Tears from the children were frequently received with an unfeeling, stern face by my mother. Feelings were flippantly tossed around, openly discussed with whoever was around, with no regard or concern for the meaning of “privacy.” Third degree levels of suffering from the children were received with first degree levels of concern from my mother. When we’d express grief over her publicly announcing our private diary entries to everyone else in the household, she’d jeer at us and say with a special kind of meanness, “Well, if you didn’t want me to say them, you shouldn’t have written them.” We learned quickly to mask any pain we felt with a steely poker face. We needed to appear strong on the outside no matter how much it hurt on the inside, to stand against her however we could. We couldn’t let her know that the things she said to us killed our egos—our selves—inside. We didn’t play by the normal, healthy, warm and fuzzy familial rules. In this household, the rules of survival were all that mattered.
But when our cool, steely demeanors developed enough to successfully conceal the pain we felt from her constant barrage of insults and the betrayals of trust and privacy, she retaliated with even greater force. Her newly constructed instrument for manipulation would be the most pernicious of them all, pitting the children against their father and even worse, against each other, in what is known in psychology as triangulation.
Triangulation can involve one parent teaming up with their child against the other parent. This can occur, for instance, under circumstances involving abuse and alcoholism. The non-abusive or non-alcoholic parent can privately discuss with their child the issues of the other abusive or alcoholic parent, inadvertently dragging the child into the personal affairs of both parents. The issue should be handled directly by the one parent to the other, but instead, the child is unwillingly pulled in as a third party member. This type of triangulation is toxic to the child because it places them in a surrogate parent position, where they’re forced to play the role of mediator between both arguing parents. Emphasis on forced. A child should never have to deal with adult problems.
This parent-to-child triangulation was a common theme in our household. Our mother provoked our father as much as he provoked her (they were suitably a match made in hell for each other), and almost as frequently as she provoked us. (My father was fortunate enough to work long hours, six days a week, so he avoided her antagonizing tactics more than we did growing up.) My father would constantly complain to us about my mother’s profligate credit card spending habits, even when we were small children with no idea how the real world worked quite yet. My mother, on the other hand, would derisively mock anything about him to us, from his mispronounced words (English is his second language), to his mannerisms (“Look at him, with his hands behind his back! Looking like a fool!”). She went a step further than that, as she’s prone to doing in spectacular fashion, and made sure we all knew about her trips to the mall, where she’d vindictively charge his credit cards on frivolous items whenever they argued. “I’ll get him back for yelling about dinner last night. We’re going to go shopping on his dime.”
Now, despite those last few sentences being particularly funny when taken out of context, (can anyone else envision this being said in a scene of a sitcom by a vindictive wife?), this was an extremely tactless thing for her to do—to involve her children in such a precarious situation between herself and their father. We became prime witnesses to her misdeeds and extravagant spending, and yet we were forced to keep our mouths shut to avoid her wrath being redirected at us. This, as you can imagine, put us in a very awkward situation with our father. We wanted to tell him the truth, but we feared her wrathful discipline in return. We remained tightlipped about the whole ordeal until my father was $55,000 in credit card debt, among twenty-five credit cards unknowingly opened in his own name (one of the many instances where my mother would financially abuse him, and eventually us, when we became “credit card age”) and filing for divorce—and bankruptcy—many, many, (read dreadful) years later. This was only one of many other triangulation-related experiences regularly occurring in our household. The most intrinsically manipulative of them would triangulate the children against each other. That lone target child, maliciously excluded from the rest of the group on our mother’s bipolar whim, would take on the role of the sacrificial lamb. They’d be selected for the stoning by our mother, in our version of The Lottery.
A perfect example of this: When one of us was arguing with our mother, she would single that child out and punitively assign all chores to be done for the day to that child alone. Both bathrooms would be cleaned by the sacrificial lamb. Weeds would be pulled in the blistering heat of the summer, by that child alone. The entire yard (almost half an acre) would be mowed by that single child. All in one day. Then the name calling, bashing and otherwise verbal berating of that child would commence. Behind that sacrificially branded child’s back, she would stab them fifty times over the necessary to kill, painting them in the worst light possible to the other siblings. Her intent was no doubt to humiliate in the third degree and disrupt peace among the siblings. “Your sister can’t fit in her old jeans anymore. I guess sitting on your ass all day and eating isn’t paying off.” (My sister was never fat…ever). “Your brother is a raging lunatic. The smallest things will set him off these days.” (She would start antagonizing him first, and he’d react accordingly in defense). “Look at her, on a Friday night, with no friends calling to ask her to come hang out. I wonder why.” (Meanwhile, I would try to go out with friends on the weekends and she wouldn’t allow it, either to punish me for whatever disproportionately minor misdeed I had supposedly done, or as a way to assert control over me.) This went on for a while in the house. But she must have grown bored with revealing our stored away secrets to the others and verbally stoning us with insults every day. She eventually upgraded her manipulation tactics to include…completely making shit up out of thin air.
She started conjuring up fake news stories about one of us and spreading the false narrative to the others to further divide and conquer us. I’ll never forget when I first discovered this ploy of hers when I found myself not talking to my older sister for days out of spite. We had had an argument with each other a few days earlier. My mother had taken it upon herself to fabricate a tale (that I shamefully believed) about my older sister. This tale involved my sister supposedly running to our father to complain about me dating a high school guy in my grade earlier than she had been allowed to date. I was so angry and felt so betrayed after hearing this that I couldn’t bring myself to confront my older sister until a few days after the matter. (I was a young teen in a tense familial environment, so healthy confrontations weren’t taught to me then.) When I finally confronted her about it, she was genuinely confused.
“What are you talking about? I never said anything like that!” My older sister angrily snapped back at me.
“Oh really?” I pressed. “Then why were you so insistent on me not dating my boyfriend?”
“I was the one who supported it! I told mom it should be OK for you to date a little younger than me.”
It hit us both at the same time at that moment. Our adolescent, developing minds sorted the information and worked out the meaning of this. We came to this conclusion:
Our mother had been fighting with my older sister at the time (there really never was a dull moment in our household). They hadn’t been talking to each other for nearly a week. My mother seized that opportunity to vengefully isolate my older sister from the rest of the family through triangulation (we didn’t know the word at the time, but, boy, did we understand the concept on a very personal level). She set about doing just that by dragging my dad into this extremely important matter involving me dating some regular NPC dude in high school. For whatever reason, my mother resented that I was dating this guy, so she complained to my father about this, who really didn’t do anything about it except weakly parrot her words a few times to me before taking flight. Nevertheless, my dad was now involved in a scenario blown way out of proportion, and I was very mad because of it. I just wanted this unnecessarily drawn-out, dramatic episode to end. Little did my father, older sister, and I know, the pieces on the chess table had been strategically placed for just this moment.
My older sister would be scapegoated. My mother ratting me out to my dad would become my sister ratting me out, the ultimate sister-betrayal story of yore. This would piss me off and cause me to fight with my (innocent) older sister. The triangulation process would seamlessly proceed according to my mother’s plan. Among the chaos and uncertainty from dividing the family against each other, my mother would conquer over everyone else and re-solidify her control over the family unit (the foundation was always shaky). It was the simplest scapegoat tactic and it had worked tremendously (well, before it backfired obviously. I guess she couldn’t see how our chess pieces would work out her ploy eventually.)
I gobbled up her story word for word on the way to picking up some Taco Bell one evening. I was a young teen, swept up with all kinds of teenager emotions over that dramatic episode. I wasn’t seeing things clearly. My brain was too underdeveloped and inexperienced to see how I was being played by my own mother, triangulated against my older sister on nothing but woven lies and deceit. By the time we rode home, with the Taco Bell bags warm on my lap, I was burning mad at my sister. Ordering an additional Nachos Supreme would have been less damaging to my arteries than what my mother was doing to me and my older sister.
She had intentionally procured ill will between siblings and further isolated my older sister from me and the rest of the family, all out of bitter, petty vengeance. When our teenage minds worked out the manipulation by our adult mother, we gained a deeper understanding of the inner workings at play. Our mother would stoop as low as she could to get her revenge, even if it meant destroying the symbiotic ties of family and the mental securities of her own children.
Even with all of these manipulative cards already in hand and at the ready to use whenever the mood struck her, my mother’s diabolical thirst was never quenched. She would constantly hunt for more controlling, more ensnaring traps to lay out for the kill, each one worsening in cruelty and audacity. The physical beatings were the most salient component for psychological trauma. The triangulation was the most pernicious. But a branch of triangulation that would force the children to betray each other on an even baser level would trump all others in depravity. Before we matured and developed enough to do otherwise, our mother would force us to personally deliver her The Stick by which our sisters and brother would be beaten to submission.
I don’t remember precisely when it started—perhaps because we subconsciously suppressed these traumatic memories out of necessity — but at some point in our childhood, our mother forced us to be complicit in The Stick beatings of our siblings. We came to dread these words with every beat of our heart, every muscle fiber of our being: “Get me The Stick!” It was unbearable enough to have to listen to the loud bam, bam, bam of hard plastic on vulnerable, bare skin, and to hear the accompanying cries and screams of “Please mommy, no more!” as she mercilessly flogged our siblings with The Stick. Now we’d have to partake in the beatings as third party messengers. The thought of it sickens me and curdles my blood even now. Do you know what it feels like to be forced to commit a heinous, immoral crime? Not just any crime, but one of the worst of its kind (torture), and on your own brothers and sisters? It gnaws at my soul every time I dwell on how I participated, however unwillingly, in the beatings of my siblings. Sure, I wasn’t the one who initiated the beatings. But I didn’t stop them, either. I was too much of a fucking coward then. I suppressed my moral compass for those few moments and, out of sheer fear, I would grab that cursed Stick and grittingly deliver it to my mother before she started pounding on my brother and sisters with it. I have never stopped resenting my past cowardice in failing to stand up to my mother whenever she made us do this to each other.
I could have refused to bring The Stick to her—and even did a few times—but she would retaliate by whipping you both, with doubled-down force. She’d even confiscate your prized possessions in the form of video games, books, or cell phones—your only means of escaping the hostile landscape surrounding you—for disobeying. This seems rather petulant and first-world privileged to fear the confiscation of material possessions. I realize that. But in an environment as tense as one in a minefield, both places equally capable of setting off an explosion, our escape from our harsh reality in the forms of paperware books and hardware videogames and cell phones were our only source of refuge outside of school. Threats of these kinds subdued us, and we’d grudgingly deliver The Stick. Thankfully, we grew bolder with age and wisdom.
There was one hopeful night where the three oldest siblings (my sister, brother, and I) finally joined forces against my mother. Our youngest sister was in first grade. Don’t let that detail escape you. She was in a fussy mood and “made a scene” at an open house event at her school by pouting and dragging her feet across the floor. If you recall the story of my younger brother “making a scene” at the mall, you’ll already know the direction this story is headed. The older siblings knew their little sister would get The Stick tonight. Fear poured in on the fateful ride home that night after open house. While all the other children of the school were heading home for bedtime, our younger sister was heading home for much worse. Our mother was livid and seething through gritted teeth again the whole way home about my younger sister’s “inexcusable display.” Our youngest sister was crying helpless tears. The rest of us were silently thinking of ways we could possibly prevent this from happening tonight.
The climactic point came. Our clanking blue van pulled into the driveway of the boxed in prison we called home. We all stumbled into the house with feelings of dread, our minds racing on what to do next to avoid the unavoidable. But something changed that night. We hadn’t spoken a word the entire car ride home, but we were all in sync with each other and planning on doing the same thing. We were not going to fetch the wretched Stick for her. In fact, we were going to fight it however we could.
I’m honestly ashamed of my decision that night. To “fight back,” I ran outside, into the creek that provided me my only peace and serenity at home, and desperately prayed to God in the stars above to save my sister. Somehow, I was still under the dumb impression that God existed the way it’s proclaimed in the Bible, and that by praying I would be able to save my sister. (In hindsight, this was one of those turning points for me when I realized how much more harmful religion is than it is helpful.) While I was doing the docile lamb thing praying outside, my older sister and brother were fearlessly standing up to their hateful mother indoors, the true heroes of the story. Later they would tell me the full story.
Apparently as I did my sheeple prayer, my mother was trying to triangulate again by forcing someone to fetch her The Stick. My brother and older sister refused. Growing impatient with this sudden display of disobedience from her inferior children, she resorted to grabbing the nearest thing to strike my younger sister with. Her desperate, grasping hands found a wide, plastic hair brush. Good enough. She managed to clobber my younger sister (first grade, remember) on the head with it a few times. I could hear my sister’s cries from outside, and I desperately prayed to God harder, tears streaming down my face as I prayed aloud. My prayer was “answered” soon after. My brother and sister, with tears pouring out from their experience-worn eyes, begged my mother to stop. They reminded her, sickeningly enough, just how little and feeble our young sister was, and how she’ll definitely behave from now on after all the punishment she received for the night (already too much for a young one to have to endure). By some miracle (pun intended because I prayed like an idiot), our combined disobedience disarmed the wicked Witch that night. In that pinnacle moment of daring revolution, my mother was thrown off guard. She seceded from her alliance with corporal punishment that night. Of course, this was how other manipulative tactics would take root and form, and sometimes she relapsed into striking us with her hands, but we silently celebrated a groundbreaking victory that night. We knew that none of us would be beaten and bruised by the Stick again.
Stories like these have bogged us down our entire lives. We aren’t sinking or drowning in despair today, but the extra weight feels too heavy sometimes. It can be too much for us to bear, and we’re all coping from these traumatic experiences in our own ways. My siblings have shone in their careers so far, and their future seems brighter than today. That is their story to tell. As for my story, I finally found my voice and my will to fight on. My will to fight has even transferred to real fighting. Judo, the martial art of using an opponent’s strength against them by throwing them and subduing them with choke holds and arm locks, has been a very appropriately relevant way of coping from all the pain and hurt I felt by my mother. I finally developed real strength and the courage to fight head on, so unlike my sheeple cowardly days where I used to pray to a God I can no longer believe in.
Writing, in its own way, has also proven therapeutic. My blood still boils at the violent images I’m struck with as I write out the most painful accounts of abuse, but it’s helping me put everything into perspective. It’s helping me to formulate the diabolical processes of my mother. Hopefully, after identifying them, I can finally seek out a way to heal from them myself.
My mother deserves whatever bad karma or punishment is headed her way. And trust me, karma really does come back around. It’s already bit her quite hard on the ass. Most of us have ceased communication with her for years now. I’m personally going on seven years with no communication) My older sister is the only one who remains in contact with her today.
According to my older sister, my mother said she’s having “nightmares of pandemonium” these days, where she constantly sees herself burning in hell. Good. At least her subconscious hasn’t betrayed herself quite yet. Perhaps deep, deep down she does feel regret for all those she’s burned and bled out over the years. Maybe there’s a chance for redemption there. But have I seen that regret and shame surface yet? Has she admitted fault and begged her children to forgive her? Has she set out on a spiritual journey to redeem her corrupted soul by focusing on giving to others, not just bleeding them dry for all she can get before moving on to the next victim?
Not even the slightest.
My mother found my blog site a few years ago on Facebook and decided to message me. (This would be the reason I had to take a two-year hiatus from blogging to regroup, mind you.) Huge walls of text asserted that “she truly missed me” and “loved me so much” and “wished we were talking again.” Gag. I can’t help but cringe from reading her claims to “love me.” It’s all so counterfeit to me. The last time I lived under her reign, eleven years ago at nineteen years old, the summer after my first year at Rutgers University, we were screaming at the top of our lungs how much we hated each other. I had meant it then. She had proven it all throughout my life. I swore that day that I would never return to live under her oppressive reign again (and I set about doing just that). Reading these delusional messages from her now that spout her tawdry “love” for me quite literally sickens me. Nothing has changed.
In those messages she claimed—she wouldn’t directly admit to doing anything wrong—that what had transpired in that household was minor in comparison and “could have been worse.” It could have been worse. You can’t make this shit up. If you can’t understand my frustration, please imagine, if you briefly can, being in a fictitious world where you are a slave who is regularly lashed by your slave owner. After years of abuse at your master’s hands, you are suddenly emancipated by law and are free to leave your master without looking back. Now imagine if your master were crazy enough to reach out to you years later to restore your relationship by saying, “Well, all things considered, it could have been much worse. I mean, I could have raped you and whipped you, but I only whipped you.” (The parallels between these real and fictitious worlds are astonishing.) In this hypothetical scenario, how do you think you’d feel? What would your PTSD, if it could manifest itself into corporeal form, say to you about that? What would your corporeal whipped backside, scarred from the bloody lashings by your abuser, have to say to this?
Are you fucking kidding me? Is all I could say to myself as I read her wall of delusional messages. To go from brandishing The Stick on us if we so much as “copped an attitude” with her; to intentionally pitting her children against each other; to constantly screaming aloud “what she could have been” had she not given birth to us; to this fakery? To these false proclamations of “motherly love?”
I am a thirty-year old woman now. I’ve had years of experiencing abuse firsthand, and years of experience reading it in psychology textbooks, journals, and scours of books from professional psychologists. I know the ins and outs of abuse. I know what my mother has done to us all these years. I know what she’s trying to do now. I am livid at her weakness. Yes, it is absolutely a weakness. A person who can’t admit their wrongdoings—who simply denies it away and refuses to apologize—is a very weak-minded person who feels so lowly about themselves, they can’t emotionally handle admitting they’re wrong. Her delusional mind—perhaps because it’s decayed over the years—truly believes by ignoring and denying away her years of abuse, they will go poof and magically disappear from all our memories. This is her final mode of manipulation, denying us the truth of everything she’s done to us.
We have all suffered gravely from her abuse. Every one of her children has suffered from low self-esteem or body dysmorphia or self-destructive habits or learned helplessness. I have suffered from all of these and much more because of her. But no more. She will answer to her sins and her crimes one way or another. The wrath in me has been stirring all these years and it has culminated to this point. If she really can’t understand why most of her children refuse to even listen to her, she can read my dear blog post about it. Maybe something will finally “click” for her while reading this. Maybe she’ll remember the illicit hatred she felt for us. Maybe she’ll remember how loud our cries and screams were when we begged her, “Please, mommy! No more!,” as she mercilessly beat us with The Stick until we welted (and told us to cover up our marks and lie to anyone who asked about it in school). After reading her last Facebook message to me two years ago, this is all very doubtful. Nothing has changed.
Was my mother ever kind to us? Were there any good times? Of course. As with anything in life, there were good times mixed in with the bad and horrid times. We laughed together, we cried together, we even had enlightening conversations together. I learned my fashion sense and style from my mother. I learned how to stand alone against a crowd and fight if I had to. Years of isolating triangulation taught me how to fend for myself and even built a special kind of individuality in all of us. ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ sort of thing. In rare moments of tenderness, my mother would actually behave like an authentic one and say something kind and encouraging to us. She would sometimes call all of us her “beautiful creations” (who she would also pound on from time to time). But then she’d just as suddenly withdraw those words of encouragement and replace them with their opposites whenever her mood suddenly shifted. (“Chloe, you look so ugly when you’re angry.) Nevertheless, there were sweet times sprinkled in with the shit times. I cannot and will not deny that we had some sweet memories spritzed on the shitty ones. But no matter how much sugar you put on shit, it’s still not going to taste good. The stench of those traumatic memories overpowers the pleasant but more delicate fragrances of the good ones.
Our self-esteem has been brutally torn to pieces. Scar tissue has hardened all around us as a way to heal. Walls have been built up high to safeguard us from any future attacks. Despite being deemed “functional” adults today, an inner child in each of us is still huddled in a ball, shivering in fear. We’re learning about the kindness and warmth of others in this world, but our battle reflexes are still fully engaged to this day, prepared and alert for open hostility.
Our “mother” was a menace of our childhood. There is overwhelming psychological evidence to support the abusive mechanisms she used against us—which I exhaustively laid out here—and how severely they hurt us as a result. In my Neuropsychology class at Rutgers University, I learned how physical abuse literally changes the shape of children’s developing brains. This negatively affects their neurocognitive functioning in many ways. For example, emotional processing of information is compromised when abuse is at play. This makes it difficult for the victims of abuse to control and process emotional experiences in a healthy way. All the long term effects of childhood abuse are still being discovered in studies. And to this day, my mother can’t even acknowledge that there were any bad times at all.
“It wasn’t that bad.” She’s been known to say to whoever among the siblings still talks to her, usually only my older sister. “I mean, what exactly happened that was supposedly so bad?” You cannot make this shit up.
The level of denial my mother encompasses astounds us all. There is a lot of clutter there in her psyche that needs sorting out, fact from fiction. That’s her responsibility. The extra blow comes when she denies us the admission of her crimes—crimes so cruel they can only be surpassed by the most morally corrupt of demons walking about on Earth disguised in hollow human shells (Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell immediately come to mind here). But I suppose on a psychological level, it can be understood. Like in most cases of generational abuse, my mother had also suffered a tumultuously abusive past with her parents. She never spoke much of our grandparents, but from one story alone, I know it was brutal living with them.
My mother once recounted a profound story of abuse she and her older sister (my aunt) had experienced from their own mother (my grandmother). My grandmother had been arguing with my aunt when it erupted to volcanic levels. My grandmother stormed into the bathroom where my aunt had been yelling from, and proceeded to beat her bloody with her own bare hands. My mother heard everything right outside the door. Once my grandmother had her fill of purported retribution, she stormed out of the bathroom, leaving my aunt behind. When my mother took a peek at the scene laid out before her, she found her older sister slumped on the bathroom floor. Her face was battered from the blows and blood poured from everywhere she had been struck. This scene absolutely traumatized my mother.
In this way, my mother can be pitied. She’s a broken, roaming soul capable only of spreading more hate. Where all the hate came from is obvious, but where the love went will forever remain a mystery. She could have been the one to put an end to this generational abuse. She could have broken the cycle by working on herself, educating herself, and building enough skills to function normally, and only then starting a family when she was ready. She broke these two rules before even having them, and begrudgingly bore four children. She betrayed herself, then betrayed everyone else. From physical to verbal to, years later, financial abuse, my mother would do whatever she could to dominate our lives. To this day, she still has a firm hold on certain aspects of them.
My childhood was ridden with episodes of major depression and fantasies of suicide up until my first few years of college. I was a loner in school, and had a difficult time opening up to people at first to reveal my sensitive side. I still do today. My anger can be uncontrollable at times, as if it’s been simmering inside for years, ready to erupt at any time. (This has lent me the competitive advantage in Judo at tournaments, but for everything else, it’s proven burdensome.) When I saw my mother’s messages on Facebook, I was filled with a deeply rooted horror and disgust I had wished to forget.
Memories of her reading a school essay of mine suddenly resurface. I recall a time where I had used the word “inveigle” in one of my essays I (foolishly) wanted her to read. I was proud of my essay, but being a teenager, I was still developing as a writer. I was still hopeful that my mother would look past the shortcomings of my age and lack of experience to offer me some encouragement. Instead, my mother ridiculed my choice of words in the essay and mocked my efforts.
“INVEIGLE. What kind of word is that? Who uses the word ‘inveigle?’ Look everyone, I’m using the BIG word ‘inveigle!’ Look how smart I am!” My mother’s ridicule, loud enough to make sure everyone in the house heard, was relentless. I felt like the most pretentious fool of a writer when she put on that display. Stupid idiot. I immediately thought these self-inflicting words to myself. Who uses the word ‘inveigle?’ If you were actually a good writer, you wouldn’t sound so prissy and wannabe-smart!” What she had done destroyed my confidence in my writing style and thwarted any efforts to persevere. I took a break from writing for a while after that. So when I saw her Facebook messages purporting her sickly love for me, this memory lived through me again. I couldn’t help but feel the fear and dread of sharing my written works to others again after remembering this traumatic scene from my past life. Suddenly, I found myself doubting my writing and my future in it all over again. Can you see how firmly generational abuse holds a survivor down?
When I saw her delusional messages on my Facebook page, that memory was still residing in me. I heard the insults of my word choice, “inveigle,”in my head all over again. I had to take a step back. I blocked her (of course), but I also stopped blogging for two years after that because those memories of what she said still haunt me and my confidence in my writing to this day. Her insidious hold still pulls me back after all this time. I find myself catching myself in these moments of self-doubt. But I’ve resolved to change that. I won’t succumb to her abuse and manipulation any longer. I won’t allow her narcissistic and abusive mentality to deny away her wrongdoings and prevent me from healing. I will continue my journey expressing my thoughts and feelings on digital paper. I will fight her till the day one of us dies if I have to. This story of ours—the story of generational abuse— must never be forgotten. To forget and never tell would be to deny us, the survivors, the ability to finally break free from the cycle of abuse.
Let this story be a lesson for us all. A survivor can live a relatively normal life with enough healing from loved ones and professional therapy over time. It takes a lot of work, money, and time among other factors, but it is certainly doable. Therapy in the form of CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) has proven very successful at tackling the damaged mentalities of victims of abuse. Once I save enough money for it, I’ll be seeking out CBT myself to finally tackle all the byproducts abuse has left behind in me. Victims of abuse should seek out CBT before they seek out meds of any kind.
Another lesson to learn: An abusive mother will reap what she sows. Time will be her worst enemy, when her children are finally old enough to leave the nest and leave her alone with nothing but her miserable mind to keep her company. I would hope that the abuser could eventually realize the extent of damage they’ve done, turn their life completely around, and becomes a saint. But in many cases of abuse, this never happens.
But most importantly, I think the universal lesson to learn from this is the insidious nature of abuse itself. You can never truly know who suffers beneath their hardened walls and disguised surfaces. A wide smile masks the welling eyes brimmed with tears. A confident demeanor can be the glue that keeps together the shattered pieces of self-esteem. The happiest people have the saddest histories. The strongest are those who have suffered the most, and somehow managed to come out on top.
A lot of people are shocked when I first tell them about my mother and what we all went through under her oppressive rule. They can’t believe that we, the seemingly chipper, upbeat, smart and pretty girls and handsome boy could possibly have suffered such a fate. But that’s what abuse does. It conceals. It hides pain. Life isn’t viewed through the same lenses when you’ve been abused all your life. The rules of survival are always at play when you’re the survivor of abuse. Be strong, be confident, the rules of survival tell us. Don’t show anyone weakness, or they’ll tear into you the way your mother or father does.
Perhaps it was because I encompassed these positive traits that my mother resents me. Being the narcissist she is, she could have loathed the idea of her beautiful, blossoming children faring better in the world than she had. Her pain and misery warped her perception of love. She was rendered incapable of loving others in her twisted world of spite and envy. She’s a hollow human shell with only hate left inside her.
I marvel at how we didn’t turn out like her. That was always a fear of mine. Yet somehow, we turned our abusive situation sideways. Not every survivor can live to tell that tale. How did we do it? That question can only be answered in another blog post. A shorter answer wouldn’t suffice. (I will briefly say here that had I been born in the ghetto, into a single mother household (just imagine!), and with little to no income in an abominable school system, the Chloe you see before you would not exist. I’d probably be in jail or resentfully raising three unwanted children from three different fathers in the same unjust system that had oppressed me. One or two of those children would go on to become menaces to society themselves, “serving” society their crimes before serving time in prison. My parents made some wise, beneficial choices in raising us in an environment surrounded by well-to-do, educated people. I’ll give them credit where it’s due.)
For now, I’m just relieved to finally finish this post. It’s been bottled up inside me for so many agonizing years. To finally let it all out is cathartic, a reprieve from my past suffering. Yet I also feel fear and anxiety from writing this, lingering byproducts from nineteen years of abuse. I finally broke free from my mother, yet somehow I still feel chained. The physical bonds have been broken, but the chains of memories still haunt me, and the threat of her presence still linger. At this point I can only wonder how long it will take me to finally shake off the last remnants of my tortured past self. But I’m prepared to accept that that version of Chloe may never completely leave me.
What I do know is that I am no longer a victim, but a victor, of abuse. I have survived and prevailed. I still suffer and I still need to work on the repairs, but I haven’t lost myself the way my mother lost herself at my age. I am surrounded by friends and loved ones. I didn’t end up being alone and miserable the way my mother tried to convince me I would. I became a champion in state Judo tournaments. A champion! Do you know what that title alone has done for someone like me who’s been beaten down the majority of my life? Every year I’m doing what I can to make myself feel good about myself. It’s a long journey and a tedious process with a whole lot of setbacks. But I’m focused on becoming the champion version of myself in all other aspects of my life now. I will continue writing. I won’t allow my mother’s influence to affect my writing anymore. The anxiety and fear are still there, but the unassailable wrath has overridden the fear and doubt and finally stirred me to action. “Hell hath no fury like that of a woman scorned.” Mommy Menace, beware.
To all who took the time to read this behemoth of a post, I can’t thank you enough. You’ve shown me more kindness than my mom ever could. I probably wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t received the love and empathy of such people like you throughout my life. Thank you for reading my story. You’ve brought peace to my anguished soul. Thankfully this is just the beginning for me. The fight continues. And I’ll be back with a vengeance. 😉