Dear Mom #2

 Dear Mom,

    It's been over two months since we last spoke. Sometimes, I really miss you. You're not all bad - no one is. I miss your sense of humor and your cooking. There's a lot I don't miss, too. I think about you all of the time, trying to figure out why you are the way you are and unpacking all of the hurt you've caused me. Sometimes I think about the good times, too. This isn't natural. Our relationship isn't supposed to be like this. If anything is proof that adults who cease contact with their parents aren't just ungrateful brats, it's this. It was the hardest decision I've ever made.

    I really just wish I had a mom. Going No Contact basically confirmed what I always knew was true - I don't have a mom, I never did, and I never will. I have a lot of older women in my life who advise me and provide me with emotional support, and I have a husband, a daughter, and friends who all love me, but none of it fills that particular void. There's no going back to my childhood and fixing the fact that I never really knew maternal love and warmth. Even when we used to talk regularly, I felt like I was constantly begging you for something you were incapable of giving me. I kept trying to jump through hoops and figure out what would finally make you love me and accept me. It's such a handicap in life to not have a real mom.

    The only way we could have continued communicating was for me to make myself small, neglect my own emotional needs, and ignore the elephant in the room, like I had been doing for the past 26 years of my life - except, this time, the well-being of my baby daughter was at stake. I knew she deserved better than how I grew up. I needed to be emotionally present for her, not constantly preoccupied with the latest way you've caused me pain and essentially pleading with you to consider respecting a single boundary of mine. I couldn't stomach the idea of her being in the same room as my dad or the woman who enabled him to molest me. I could go on. Enough was enough.

    I've had a couple of dreams about you in the last couple of weeks. In one of the dreams, we were taking a road trip to Washington DC with my daughter, and all was going well until it turned out I didn't pack her bottles and her formula had spoiled and turned brown. In the dream, you weren't exactly sympathetic about this problem - you just sent me back home. I remember calling my godson to come rescue me. It's strange how similar to our real life dynamic this dream was... you were great to be around during the fun part of a road trip, but as soon as I had problems, I was on my own.

    Something I really wish I could tell you is that it hurts my feelings that you didn't even try. It's not that I'm playing hard to get, or that I think you should be chasing me, and I have a feeling you think that's what it is. It's a suspicion I have that comes from the way you've talked about other people my whole life. The reason it hurts me is that it's just another way you've essentially told me that I'm not worth it. I'm not worth the self-reflection, the apology, and the changed behavior that it would take for us to have a relationship. Deep down inside, I knew it. It just hurts to be confronted with the reality of it. It's another reason why I have to leave you in my past, whether I want to or not.

    I still love you. And I hate you at the same time. If this has to go on for the rest of our lives, it's going to break my heart over and over every day, but also feel incredibly relieving when compared to the emotional turmoil that every day with you was. And the only thing that could fix it - a genuine apology and change in your character - is as good as impossible. I guess I have to get used to feeling this way. I'm not happy about it, though...

    Love, that unpleasant tough girl - the one who's always showing off and playing macho.

Quotes #5

Quotes #4

 

Quotes #4

Quotes #3

Quotes #2

Quotes #1

For example, they can remember an assault that never happened. 

Random Memory #1 - Happy Thanksgiving and Sweet Seventeen

    It's difficult for me to find joy in the holiday season. Going forward, I'm going to try my hardest to suck it up for my daughter. The majority of people think this is a magical time of the year, for good reason. Christmas is important in our faith, and my daughter is half-American, so Thanksgiving will be a part of her childhood too. Just because I didn't have good memories of these holidays doesn't mean that she doesn't deserve her own good memories of them.

    That being said, this time of the year is very difficult for me. Every year, I get horrible panic attacks starting in November. Last year, I lost 20 lbs in a very short period of time because I was so anxious I couldn't eat. I feel better after all of the holidays are finally over. This year, I'm just tense. Nothing has objectively changed since a month ago - but I feel awful.

    It all comes from my experiences with my family during this season. Halloween was mostly okay when I was very little, but I can tie several abusive memories to it. My birthday is in fall, and as anyone who grew up in a dysfunctional family knows, your birthday isn't about you when your parents are disordered, self-centered people - it's a show you have to put on to make everyone else happy. We aren't American, so we only "celebrated Thanksgiving" when my mom decided to imitate what she thought Americans did. And Christmas was just the worst... I felt like the "holiday joy" was forced down my throat every year. It was the ultimate "play pretend that you're a happy family" event... more on that later.

    The year I turned 17 years old, my birthday fell two days after Thanksgiving. I remember that at the time, my mom and I were vegetarians - we were going to have Morning Star patties with potato salad for dinner, because my mom had no idea what Americans ate besides turkey, which vegetarians don't eat. This was one of the years where she decided that despite us not having any cultural connection to the holiday, we were going to kinda-sorta "celebrate it". I remember texting a boy I knew at the time about how I just wanted the day to be over, because by then, I had figured out that we just don't have nice, pleasant days in our household. My birthday was in two days - we were texting each other the lyrics to Dancing Queen.

    And of course - we didn't have a nice and pleasant day. For starters, my dad was drunk by noon, as was typical for him. Like I've said in previous posts, by the time he got ready for work there would be 5 empty beer cans in the trash, which got taken out every midnight, and that's not accounting for the vodka he put in his coffee. On days off, he didn't limit himself - he could down a whole case of beer. He drank alcohol the way normal people drink water.

    My dad was always a very impatient, materialistic, and angry person. He always wanted his mindless entertainment immediately. Most days in our home were filled with him throwing little temper tantrums, grumbling, grunting, and yelling out curse words over every minor inconvenience - things that wouldn't even bother normal people. My parents paid for a service that allowed them to stream television from our country, except it wasn't working properly that day.

    Cue a big temper tantrum. I was in the living room, and before I could even look over, I heard him screaming cuss words and throwing things - he managed to break the TV, his phone, and his glasses in one fell swoop. It's hard to even describe how fast it happened.

    Because they're both too lazy and entitled to learn the language of the country they live in, and because my dad was drunk off his ass by this point, I was expected to spend the rest of the day going from store to store with him, replacing the items he broke... with him driving, of course. I was just there to translate. This was in the pre-COVID era, where Black Friday started promptly after most Americans were done eating Thanksgiving dinner.

    What I remember the most vividly from that evening was going to Walmart to replace the TV my dad broke. He was so drunk that he was stumbling around, harassing a young lady who was working in the electronics section, I could see the discomfort in her face as he repeatedly leaned into her while yelling in broken English about the TV he wanted. He'd alternate between yelling at me to translate, and yelling at the workers. I was so embarrassed, I wanted to cry. He was causing a scene and everyone was looking at us. When we went to pay for everything, a cashier scolded me, presumably because I was with the man who had all eyes on him for the worst possible reasons. Guilty by association?

    After we got home, my mom did her usual "pretend nothing happened" routine. I remarked on the fact that she wanted to "celebrate Thanksgiving" in her weird little way that year, and that my dad's behavior ruined the day, and she sarcastically snapped back with "we don't celebrate Thanksgiving" - as if I was the bad person for pointing this out. I never got an apology for having to be being driven around by someone who was too drunk to even walk - much less any recognition that this is unsafe and bad, because as I figured out over the next few years, I wasn't really all that important to them to begin with. I never got an apology for being put in an embarrassing, torturous situation with a drunk, violent man who was yelling at the workers at a store. I never got any recognition from anyone that any of this was abnormal, abusive, wrong... anything. In fact, it was promptly forgotten. Both of them would deny that this ever happened.

    It took me a couple of years to piece together the implications of this incident. I think that at 17, I was still in the "my family has their quirks" mindset, because I never knew anything different, and I hadn't found any support groups for adult children of abusive parents online yet. I felt terrible and uncomfortable, but it wasn't until my mid-20's until I realized that this was because of my surroundings, and not because of myself. And I still vividly remember the crushing anxiety and doom I felt on that Thanksgiving day.