I made a lemon cheesecake with homemade lemon curd and whipped cream for the woman who couldn’t be bothered to feed me as a child.
While you can never truly know what is going on in someone’s life, you can typically recognize a fellow survivor pretty quickly when dialogue around abuse is brought up.
Questions of why someone stayed, why someone “allowed” another to mistreat them, or why the abuser was given so many chances fill the comment sections of news stories about murdered spouses, or a notable figure restarting a relationship with another who hurt them.
You can read the bewilderment from many that a human had consciously put themselves in a position where hurt was as reliable as the sun rising in the Southern Hemisphere. Sometimes you will read a comment from someone so unsettled that they’ll remark the victim had the trauma coming; maybe they even deserved it.
There are many completely unfamiliar with the lifelong mental manipulation it takes to place survivors in the role of savior for their abuser.
I had been reminded my entire life of the humanity of my mother.
My earliest memories with her are no clearer than a dream from childhood.
There are some periods that have clearer substance and recollection. These are from the years I spent living with my grandmother, twin sister, and great-grandmother. I can remember the red truck of the man who lived in the trailer a few spots from our own, the elbow nudge to my sister that he was home so we would be able to score food. Berry picking with my grandma. The blue plastic bins of jam my great-grandma preferred, the window she smoked from, the way she sat down with massive mystery novels and puzzles on the same table in the kitchen… in an odd way, the few years I had lived in that trailer park by the library in the mid-’90s were processed in a way that held clearer memories than even teenage years that included homelessness and narcissistic abuse.
My clouded recollection of time spent with my mom is overshadowed by the intentionality of dissociation. There had always been longing in her presence and her stints of being away. While my heart had known our interactions would be brief and hurtful, I had played the same visions of a reunion that felt like warmth.
My mom was not only beautiful to me in her physical appearance; I had found myself drawn toward the Disney princesses that looked more like her than others… the princesses with brown skin, dark and expressive eyes, dark and thick hair that was so unique compared to the rest of the white-dominated town I had grown up in. While race had yet to be a construct recognized by me, I had found the differences that made my mother my mom breathtaking and elusive. She didn’t look like anyone else; she was so much more beautiful to me in that way. She was also beautiful in her creativity. Her pull toward Mexican folk art that dangled from her charm necklace, her etchings in journals that peaked toward potential not recognized, her love for introspective film and books, and the leather jacket she thrifted that had her particular smell that made me feel hope toward a feeling of nurturing that books often promised from mothers.
I had always claimed an emotional distance from her once I had my firstborn. I had set a boundary that she could not be in our house if drinking, and when broken, I had set the ground rule that babysitting was no longer in the picture. I had spent years in therapy, casually confident that my boundaries showcased an undisturbed adult. I would tell anyone who had asked that I was happy with the biannual contact and visits on the boys’ birthdays that never lasted longer than a few hours. I took on an air of humor when it came to the occasional text and call, laughing off that the occasional contact was her way of pretending to care for the sake of appearance alone. I had given the image to anyone willing to play along that I was a healed human, and that my mother’s lack of love or interest was just another inconsequential chapter of my life. While I had deviated from doting love letters to her online that painted the picture of a devoted mother who sacrificed all for her children’s needs, I had retained the hope that kept me upright my entire life. While I spoke plainly of a woman unable to love due to her own trauma, I also continued the narrative that abstinence from substance abuse and active therapy could help save her and reveal the soul in her interior that always was underneath the near-infrangible exterior she kept up as a guard. If I put up enough boundaries, if I stopped caring, and if I no longer played the role of therapist and caregiver, maybe she would be moved enough to make a change. If she started to realize the absence of my check-ins and public declarations of devotion, maybe she would recognize the disappearance of unconditional love and work to regain it.
The sardonicism of it all was that in order for my mom to recognize my emotional absence, there needed to be that unconditional love as a prerequisite that she was incapable of. My unconscious attempt at manipulating love from my mom was no more possible than earning said love. Either it existed, or it did not. When I laughed about her lack of attempt at saying anything to me on my birthday this year, a usual halfhearted text or call in the years past, I had continuously attempted to shove hurt away as proof that she no longer was going to try to pretend to care, and wasn’t that a relief?
Sadly, and inexplicably, I continued to care, because that was always my role in her life. While others had hurt her, traumatized her, abused her, betrayed her, or misunderstood her, my sisters and I would remain constants. While we all had different openings of access, we had decided that cutting off contact was too cruel, too cynical, too against the core values of generational trauma. While others had given up on my mom, we had spent enough years being trained to excuse her hurt as our doings. Spending a lifetime coddling her anxieties, affirming her strengths, and minimizing our own autonomies as afterthoughts had allowed the cycle of narcissistic abuse to continue. I could never see my mom as anything other than a human who was traumatized or a child who was abandoned. She had been the purpose in my life before my children; the continuous endeavor to help a person heal who didn’t want to be healed.
When a drunken, online, one-sided, carefully orchestrated verbal meltdown had been made public knowledge to me and my sisters by me and my mom, I decided it was exactly the catalyst needed to vocalize boundaries that were justified by direct recent action. Our family had consistently treated the past as events that were only allowed impact at the time they happened. Apologies were unneeded; rather, only time was required to move forward. Acknowledging that trauma was continuing to impact your current adult mental health was a cardinal sin and pushing away personal responsibility. Only what we were currently able to control remained reasoning for choices regarding conversations and actions. Although generational trauma of abuse and neglect ran deeply in our family, cutting a family member off was akin to suggesting amputating your feet because you got a paper cut on your thumb. The nonsensical and wild definitive action wasn’t something we did. If it was done, the family spoke on it as if the family member setting the boundary suffered from incurable superiority. Interactions with my mom were always uncomfortable, awkward, forced, and unnatural. The expectations of my silence and the insatiable allowance for her own narratives on my flaws were established and unable to be questioned. Having an event happen that could be used as a justifiable excuse for not communicating was long awaited, despite the impact of hurt.
The starvation as a child, abandonment, preference for substance abuse while in her care, exposure to sexual abuse by partners, caretaking by random neighbors, and uncommitted approach to ensure beds or housing were a product of her own victimhood. Our hurt was simply a reflection of her greater hurt.
When I communicated with my mother’s husband that I was done, that I would actively choose to no longer entertain her rare communications for social media clout as a doting grandmother, I was again dutifully reminded of my obligation to only make choices based on current events. I was told that she felt guilt for surrounding us with others who caused hurt, her own actions not even so much as being implied. When I responded with the lists of hurt that had been enacted in recent history, there was surprise in the actions by her and words that she spoke that reiterated my feelings of defectiveness. I had enforced strict guidelines to not be rejected if communication was to be regained. No more substances were to be used, and therapy was a non-negotiable stipulation. This was not a plea for self-reflection or a goal of being able to be loved by the woman I always wished could. It was my last attempt at her saving herself. It was a plea to recognize who she could be, how she could recognize her worth behind the trauma she herself had gone through. I did not have aspirations of a changed relationship or trajectory of change in our dynamic, but a last-ditch effort for her to heal in any way she could.
When she called me weeks later, I cannot tell you what made me answer the phone.
I can’t say why, against my better judgment, I decided to listen to the words that I knew would deflect from the boundaries I had placed. When she relayed the passing of my past boss, I noted my knowledge, letting silence hold its space for the briefest of moments. She later relayed that she had not drunk since, that she had hit her rock bottom, and that she had bought a computer with the intent of starting therapy. When I affirmed our intent to move back to our hometown where she resided from the city, she quickly vocalized her plans to buy car seats for her grandchildren, noting that they were not only important to her, but that she knew she was important to them.
Her last attempt at manipulating the situation to reinforce my part as the silent subordinate was contrived perfectly, almost impressively. While she had diligently spent her ten minutes interacting with my children dutifully, I had set her up with a Telehealth appointment that fell under the guidance of her insurance for the following Tuesday. I had evaded the impossibilities of her requests for timeframes that didn’t exist and chose a woman who specialized in trauma and substance-abuse recovery. I taught my mom the ease of writing passwords on a notepad on her phone, explained the differences between a psychiatrist and a therapist, and listened almost optimistically to her promises that she was ready.
What I knew deep down, what I had been told by countless witnesses to her specific flavor of manipulation, was that it was never going to happen.
In the meanwhile, I had decided to celebrate her birthday with a requested lemon cheesecake made by me, preceding a dinner at our new home. My husband was at our townhouse in Seattle, finishing touches to it that would make it a viable option for renting. The current state of the housing market compared to when we bought it ourselves had made selling a non-option financially, and my husband was working away to ensure that we would minimize our loss. I ignored the cut on my finger that protested each lemon I squeezed, relishing the physical pain that took my mind off the fuck-show that was making my negligent mother a cheesecake that is at least a two-day process. I reread my CPS reports over the lemon curd refusing to simmer on the stovetop I was unfamiliar with, I listened to music I was familiar with from living in a trap house as a child while I hand-breaded the chicken for alfredo, and I danced around the living room as I coordinated my children’s safety and needs during this entire process. I bypassed my intent to relax with a movie and popcorn after to ensure the dishes were fully done the second time that day, that counters were washed, that the coffee was prepared, and that my boys were soundly asleep. I had not allowed my body to still until after midnight, completely spent and off into a slumber between my boys within seconds of hitting the bed.
Days after reading how my mother was on “crank,” while my sister and I sought food for ourselves from neighbors, and avoided nails exposed in our apartment couch and a butcher knife sticking out of the wall next to your room, I had spent hours not only being my children’s mother, but being my mother’s as well. I had industriously taken on my role of gratitude-heavy daughter who wanted nothing more than to feel love from a woman who was never capable of loving me.
My father, a brute of a man who had taken advantage of a teenage babysitter that resulted in our conception, was never part of the picture and had not as much admitted our existence to most of his own siblings. While I had feelings that were hard to navigate regarding his existence and nonexistence in my life, I had accepted that his part in my life was only ever supposed to be a forceful figure in our existence. My mother, paradoxically, was harder to pin down as what part she was meant to serve. I had never learned what a parent was supposed to be. I had been told the narrative that parents offer unconditional love while never receiving love from either. My very existence was taught to be a gift that was given against better judgment. The ultimate sacrifice of giving me life at all was the ultimate trump card for yearning of anything resembling affection and true love.
I cannot claim that making my mother cheesecake wasn’t a choice made in false pretense that things were going to change. I cannot lie to you within this writing that my mom ever made the therapy appointment I had signed her up for. I cannot omit that my help was later used to cancel said appointment for financial reasoning and never brought up again. I can’t ignore that I later asked her if she was able to help, not once but twice, only for her to evade the favor by inferring the use of what I had to offer her alone. The labor of ensuring she received a meal and cheesecake for her birthday will remain a source of confusion for me, an embracing admission of an abused rat remaining in his enclosure despite knowing he will be shocked again.
There is a layer of comfort in knowing what to expect, even if you are aware that the expectation is hurt. When your personal story has been entwined with obligation and caretaking the one that hurts you, choosing to relinquish the known establishment of hierarchical rule feels as if you have suddenly come to the realization that water is harmful to your health. What was once integral to your livelihood, what was once all you knew, has been revealed to be the impact of why you could never truly move forward. While the known hurts, while it is painful and unrelenting, it is what you know. Choosing to part with the familiar roles means a completely new life where you are able to learn who you are outside of the lens of who you have always been told you are. If what you have always known is hurt, what would the unknown be like?
If you were taught that you were unable to be loved by the person who gave you life, how could you trust the love of, well, anyone?
A cheesecake represented not only the physical evidence of complacency, but the symbol for adhering to rules that were decided for you while your brain was still developing and learning about its place in the world. The labor of ensuring the meal, dessert, and dishes were completed was the played part of a little girl who knew her place. A girl who knew her space revolved around ensuring the love of her abuser.
Leave a comment