In order to heal, we need to know what we’re healing from.
My pain has always been a source of confusion and bargaining.
Gaslighting requires you to trust another person more than yourself.
A lack of childhood memories, dissociation, and gaslighting have created a perfect canvas for my mother’s narrative to tell a different story from what actually happened.
Imagine feeling excruciating pain. You cannot manage, and it’s not allowing you to function. The pain does not allow you to focus; you cannot have a clear conversation, and you find yourself unable to complete any mundane task. Sometimes, all you can manage is sitting down on the couch and watching the hours tick away as you will yourself to remain conscious.
You mention this pain to the person you’ve always known to have the answers. You mention that the pain is insufferable, that you cannot remember what happened before to cause the pain. Maybe it’s your arm?
The person you’ve trusted, who has taught you the meaning of pain, scoffs and rolls their eyes. Pain? How could you be feeling pain? Do you not remember the day before, when they soaked your arm in a hot saltwater bath? Do you not remember how they bandaged your arm, painstakingly lathering it with pain medication that they could barely afford in the first place? Also, how can you complain about your arm when their arm has always been on fire? Do you not recognize your good fortune in having an arm without a visible ailment?
While they are relaying the lengths they went to heal your arm despite their own pain, the question remains… Why does your arm hurt?
When you eventually go to a doctor, confusingly explaining pain you can’t point to a cause for, they ask where exactly the pain is.
You cannot pinpoint or even explain what the pain feels like. You know it hurts. You know you can no longer function while feeling it. Even still, explaining feels wrong when you cannot explain the cause of the pain or exactly where it’s coming from. The person who helped your arm is in your head; their lack of treatment for their burning arm is etched into your psyche. After they have spent all their time healing your pain despite their own, who are you to complain when they are left without help?
Finding my CPS records feels similar to this, but my mother is the person who bandaged my arm… but has also mangled it.
Suddenly, I was hit with the knowledge that her own actions had left me with internal scars I could not even imagine a mother was capable of inflicting on her own child.
My life has been about acknowledging the symbolic arm in need of treatment without acknowledging—or choosing to avoid—the fact that her nails were still deep within the wound, pushing deeper and daring me to acknowledge her part in causing the pain. After all, she had been there to pick up the pieces.
Our cyclical experience of being unhoused was a result of betrayal done unto her, a reminder that her kindness would always be taken advantage of. The abusive men in our lives were the result of her not having been taught how to choose safe men herself. Her anger and words that cut our souls deep were the result of us forgetting all her sacrifices. Our feelings of being unwanted and unloved were because we were privileged beyond imagination and had naturally failed to acknowledge the lengths she went to ensure our basic needs were met.
There had been a habitual response to anything that suggested otherwise. If we had not backed down from suggesting she had caused our pain, desperation to hold on to the narrative required the amping up of manipulation. “I guess I’m the worst mom ever.” There was no going back at this point. It was only my sisters’ and my turn to turn the conversation back to a place where we were thanking her for reluctantly bandaging up our arms in the first place.
As I read her Facebook posts, which she knew we’d read despite our lack of presence on this social forum, the tactics were still being used to ensure her part as a doting mother was publicly acknowledged and our parts as ungrateful children were established. “My own children hate me,” she bemoaned. “I have never done a single nice thing for them.”
Her flavor of controlling the narrative requires spurious statements concealed as authentic guilt. They are purposefully misleading and false, requiring comfort to avoid genuine accountability. My sisters’ and my history of protecting her image had become a last desperate tactic for owning her role as the heroic mother we had allowed her to play for so long. We could not, in good conscience, claim she had never done a single nice thing. We had been taught the complexity of human behavior and had been educated early on about the nuance of how humans become who they are. No human is simply good or bad; nothing is as simple as right or wrong. Real-world dynamics require context and background information, which are part of an ongoing process too lengthy to summarize.
Our love for our mother was weaponized—a skilled chess move that you both saw coming and hoped, against better judgment, would work. Our empathy for our mother was smugly coordinated to reinstate what had worked in her favor throughout our lives. Knowing our softness toward her and knowing we would always retain hope that she could love us back had been made a public spectacle, with the awareness that our own fidelity toward her would not be met with a responsive rebuttal.
I have chosen to own only my truth.
I do not think of my mother as a villain, nor do I look at her as a hero.
I believe she is a human worthy of love, but I no longer feel that it needs to come at the expense of my own pain.
Because of my dedication and love for my own children, I can no longer choose to bandage her pain at the expense of ensuring their safety and mine. I can no longer allow my husband’s words of love to feel hollow or refuse him the space to be trusted after over a decade together. In order to be his partner, in order to allow him space to trust me, I need to trust him. In order to be my own person, to find my own abilities and potential, I need to remove her grip from my wounded arm and tell my care team where the pain comes from so we can work together on the healing process.
Acknowledging the source of my pain does indeed come with the heartbreaking realization that her actions have caused so much of it in the first place. It is hard to feel orphaned as a middle-aged woman. My lack of a relationship with my father has long been allowed its space for confusion, hurt, and, ultimately, acceptance. I made peace with the knowledge that he was never someone who wanted to be in our space and that I ultimately held that same position. I accepted long ago that his presence would only cause additional hurt and that I had to remain separate from him to know my own identity.
I will always retain a semblance of hope for my mother. I will always love her unconditionally and painfully, and remain her biggest cheerleader in the hope of her healing. I will always be able to picture the little girl she once was, who was not given a hand to hold as she navigated a life of trauma. Giving up on humans has never been my prerogative, nor has seeing dynamics through a lens that simplifies them.
I have now come to a place, though, where that hope is focused solely on her benefit. I no longer hold a place in my heart where I hope my mom will walk through a door, happy to see me. I no longer yearn for the feeling of being hugged by a mother who holds me with unconditional love. I no longer find myself wanting to dial her number when I feel sad, hoping for the unique comfort that so many mothers are capable of providing. I am at a place where I am ready to see what life can look like when you surround yourself with people who offer only acceptance and love.
I’m starting to feel okay with that.
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