Worth Writing

No ready comfort

All day I have been revisited by a particular heartbreaking and frightening image of my mother.  It is the picture that comes to my mind when I need to remind myself that my mother was not well when I was very young, that she was terribly tormented even while she tormented me. 

From the family rec room in the basement where I was playing at my chalkboard I could hear my mother shouting angrily in the next room which was the laundry room.  I went to the doorway of the rec room to see who she was arguing with but she was alone.  I was shocked when she reached up and slapped her own face hard and snarled, “Bitch!  You stupid BITCH!”  She then proceeded to pull her hair mercilessly and pinch her hands.  Then she strode over to the washing machine and slammed the lid down hard on her hand.  It was horrifying to watch her face twist with pain when she did it, a face that was red and welted from the slap, her hair a wild mess from the pulling.  Terrified that she might turn on me next I went back into the room and hid behind a chair.  Then I realized I’d get a spanking for sure if she came looking and couldn’t find me so I came out again and tried to carry on as though I didn’t know anything was wrong with my mother. 

It was after that that I was truly scared of my mother, but I always felt sorry for her too, even when I hated her, because I walked in on or overheard similar meltdowns over the years.  I can’t tell you how I processed what I saw, then and other times, because I was too you to know what to think about behaviour so bizarre.  I know that, as I said, I took it as a sign of her being dangerous.  Who wouldn’t fear someone who would even beat themselves up?  It was around that time that she had started talking about killing me.

One of the ways she said she was thinking of doing it was by pushing me down the stairs so that I broke my neck or “bashed my brains in”.  She said people would say it was an accident and I would be gone and she could happily go on with her life and never have to see me again.  Being so young I was still processing what exactly “death” was, but I understood it made you disappear.  And so one of the things that my mother did to me that was not considered terrible by my family but drove me out of my mind because of her death wish on my behalf was that she shoved me. 

She would reach out suddenly when we were walking somewhere in the house and shove me from behind.  Because I never saw it coming I would usually stumble and fall.  If I cried she would get very angry with me.  In front of others she complained that I was moving too slow and was in the way.  I seriously doubt she ever shoved a stranger or a friend in that manner.  I don’t know if she shoved my brother and sister quite so often or rudely, but I don’t remember them on the floor where I so often found myself.  But so it went that my mother would shove me down the hallway, up the hallway, onto the kitchen floor, up the stairs, down the stairs…all over the place. 

The stairs were the worst, though, because that was the way she talked about making my death look like an accident.  For all of the fuss she made in front of others about my not getting in her way all the time, when we were going to go down the stairs she always insisted I go first (again, this is when I was very young).  She would become extremely angry if I tried to run away.  She’d then have to go get me, drag me back, shove me in front of her and shout, “Go!”  Each time there was nothing I could do but reach up for the railing and try to get as firm a grip as possible.  Still, she would reach down and give a mighty shove when I’d gone down a step or two and my feet would be off the tread while one hand clung to the railing for dear life as she slapped at it.  If I let go of the railing I fell flat on my back; if I didn’t I twisted around pulling my shoulder painfully and ended up losing my grip anyway and landing on the stairs on my ribs, something especially painful I assure you.  I “slipped” on the stairs far too many times to count, sometimes from the landing instead of the top and ended up making it all the way to the bottom with a resounding crack of my head on the linoleum covered concrete floor.  The head injuries were only every minor though.  I still won’t go down even the shortest flight of stairs without a firm grip on the banister and am always very careful.

The worst thing about being shoved when you’re holding onto the railing is that when you land on your back and skid down a ways it leaves bruises and scrapes off skin so that you can’t even find comfort lying down curled up with your bears for as long as a week or more afterward.  There’s nothing but the awareness of insult and ache and the knowledge that it wasn’t going to stop happening to you any time soon.  It is no wonder that by age 10 I had become so permanently tense and anxious that the family doctor started prescribing sedatives for me to take during the day to help control panic attacks and soon after adding sleeping pills at night to combat insomnia and night terrors.  He was, of course, a negligent idiot for not sending me to a specialist – or anyone at all – to find out why someone so young was in such a terrible state, but that was many years ago and hopefully not something likely to be overlooked today.