The house I grew up in and currently reside in is beautiful on the outside. Realtors are always trying to sell it. If that’s not bad enough my father wants it sold since he’s not here and hasn’t lived here for well over a decade. Inside the house, similar to my family, is falling apart at the seams. It’s an old building. Every day there seems as if there’s a new issue: bad pipes, constant clogs in the tub drain, kitchen lights need to be fixed, mouse problem, etc. Old houses come with old house problems. That means non-stop repair and management. I wish my family would put a fraction of that effort into repairing our dynamic but to no avail. It gets worse and worse each year.
I never felt as if my mother liked me or cared for me in the slightest way outside of the superficial. She loved having a daughter to primp, prim, and show off but outside of that she did not really care for me. I would take it a step further to say she even hates me. My mother has said some of the vilest things a person could ever say to their child growing up. She’ll deny it of course but I’ll always remember. I’ll remember all the times she screamed at me randomly deciding that I’m “too fat and lazy” I’ll remember all the times she’s deemed me “too fat and ugly to ever have a man love me” I’ll remember the time she ripped my door off the hinges for stating maybe I would like to live with my father like she’s always threatening. She left it broken for years as a humiliating reminder.
I’ll remember the times she beat me as well. As recently as a few years ago. The way she beat me mercilessly for the “crime” of accepting masks from my father during the start of the pandemic. The way she tried to murder me on Good Friday in 2020 (the irony is not unbeknownst to me; there is no hate like a Christian’s love.) The way she allowed her son to also belittle, demean, and otherwise torment me for YEARS.
I told her when he sexually assaulted me as a child and forced me to perform fellatio on him seconds after it happened and she caught us. She brushed it off with “Me and my brother used to do that. All siblings do that.” Nobody ever came to my rescue or my aid. How do you reconcile with the fact that your own mother is a monster? And that she not only allowed your torment but took an active role in it. Delighted in it in fact.
All she’s ever done her whole life is compare herself to me. When my college diploma came in the mail after I had suffered through the start of a pandemic, online classes for a year and a half, and the abrupt end to college life as I know it, do you want to know what she said? “Your diploma came. Oh, this is how small it is? Mine is bigger.” Living with my mother is akin to living with a stereotypical Queen Bee straight out of a cheesy 80s cult classic film of your choice. As you can imagine, I can barely stand the Queen Bee. It’s her way or the highway. I’d rather throw myself in front of a highway.
When I close my eyes I can conjure up past arguments and the specific places they occurred. Here is the spot in the wall my mother had covered up where she lobbed an 8-pound candle at my brother’s head. Here is the place at the table she used to sit and wait for me to come home from school so she could obsessively show me pictures of my half-sister and say “Look. Look at the girl your father loves more than you. LOOK.” Every time I look at my barren shelf I’m reminded of all the books I painstakingly collected from ages 5–17 only to have them given away carelessly by my own mother because she couldn’t stand to “look at them any longer.” The walls of my room? Re-painted from my green to her sickly yellow her favorite of course. Queen Bees always get their way. I can’t wait for this queen to keel over and die already.
With a mother like this and a not-so-present father, you would probably expect there to maybe be a shared kinship with my brother. A bond over the trauma we endured together. NOPE. My brother has never been my favorite person. He got away with sexually assaulting me as a kid as well as he got away with harming me and beating me close to senseless many times recently. As a child, my father informed me once to never give him anything he asked for because he would just keep coming back for more. That’s just how he is. Never satisfied with what he has. He would often hurt me purposefully and then attempt to buy off my affection later. He would arrange his smarmy lips into a twisted smile and put on this disgusting cutesy voice and go “What do you say? Friends?” What I say is: FUCK. YOU. My mother’s favorite saying? “Children should be seen not heard.” I never had a voice in my family. I never felt loved or appreciated. In fact, I always felt out of place like an unwanted nuisance. Something to be hurt, poked at, prodded, and especially abused.
Something that irritated me the most about my mother is that she refused to acknowledge where her body ended and mine began. As a child when I would lay in bed with her she would often touch me. Repeatedly, on my butt, my thighs, etc. If I became annoyed she would snarl that I came out of her so she was allowed to. I recall being younger and laying in bed beside her as she clearly masturbated and touched herself to porn on her TV….right in front of me. Everything about my mother was always so backwards. And there was nobody who would stand up for me other than myself. She hated me for that.
When my mother kicked my father out for being abusive around 2011 she began to morph further into her current form where she relied more and more on my brother for things she herself had already been doing for years. She suddenly wanted his opinion on how to drive here and there she craved for him to tell her what place we should eat at she loathed how much money he spent on his girlfriends. She wanted a replacement husband and was using her son as a stand-in. Gross. But children should be seen not heard so nobody cared for my thoughts on the matter.
My brother treats women like shit. He always has and probably always will. He bragged about cheating on all his girlfriends to his friends. He’s said all kinds of derogatory things to his current girlfriend who I already warned about his behavior unbeknownst to him. He likes watching terrible “Alpha male” podcasts where sexist men gather to spew garbage about women. My mom knows all of this and loves him anyway. That’s her son. Yet she criticizes me relentlessly. I am the one who she believes to be crazy. I’ve even seen her assert that I’m mentally ill. All for refusing to be broken by this circus of ridiculous individuals who call themselves my family. Also, for acknowledging the pandemic. My brother became a Covid anti-vaxxer despite both of us having been fully vaccinated since childhood what did my mother do? Stand by him and label me a lunatic as I pointed out the pandemic had killed high numbers of people in our own city. Some that we knew personally. He would later go on to be fully vaccinated after terrorizing everybody with his nonsense for 3 years. The only feeling I have now when I regard my family is contempt. Contempt for their foolish behavior. Contempt for their abusiveness. Contempt for them.
I wish I could lie and say that I could learn to forgive and forget but the truth is I could never forgive nor forget what has occurred between me and my family inside these four walls.
I truly believe my mother never wanted children or maybe she just didn’t want me. Whatever the case may be I wish I could let her know she was a shit mother to all her children. Outside of providing for me (which she complained about and resented every step of the way), she did not CARE for me. She would regularly age me up depending on how she felt about something. If I was a pre-teen suddenly I was a “big fifteen year old” If I was actually a teen she would add on a few years. I never got to be a kid. Or more accurately I couldn’t fully enjoy my childhood due to all the damn abuse and non-stop family drama. I was always concerned with whatever thing my mother was yelling about. She yelled about how poor we were for YEARS so I felt guilty asking for anything. I never wanted to impose. She would be relentless about my resumé. I was 11 years old with a resumé being quizzed on what I wanted to do with the next 5 years of my life or 10. Yet, nobody ever listened to my opinions or let me know it was okay to have privacy in my own home. It was non-stop. A Queen Bee, a bully, and a hiring manager all rolled into one. I was never allowed to just sit and relax, every second you’re breathing is a second wasted to my mother. I wake up every day at 6 or 7 AM whether I want to or not. Even on the weekends. It. Never. Ends. Not the stress, not the abuse, not the insults, not the manipulative Queen Bee bully behavior. My house is full of horrors that my family curated together. And I hate them for all of it.
