If Not For Her

By. Pat LaPointe

Content Warning: Childhood Abuse

Somehow a barely living thing, merely an embryo with a faint beating heart, created a terrible, sad, and angry life for the woman within whose womb she began. That is what the woman told her daughter.

Just weeks after the eighteen- year- old woman, still a girl herself, married, she began to realize the marriage was a mistake. And so she ran away. She felt hopeful, saw a chance to start a new life. But after only a few weeks, those hopes were dashed, her imagined life an impossibility. There was this embryo whose presence left her no choice but to return to a life she no longer wanted. That damn embryo, her miserable future.

In the beginning she quietly accepted her fate. She tended to her daughter’s needs. Her acceptance turned to depression, however, as she bore one, two, three more children.

Everyone considered Vincent, her second child, to be one of the most cheerful and charming of babies. The mother barely smiled at him. The third child, another son, Anthony, seemed to reflect her mood. He rarely smiled and preferred to play quietly by himself. The fourth child, Lizzy, a beautiful girl with sparkling blue eyes and bouncy curls, proved to be too much for the mother to handle. It was left up to the daughter, now eight years old, to tend to her sister’s needs.

Eventually the depression became too much for the mother to bear. With her parents both deceased and no siblings, she felt trapped. There was no one to support and guide the young mother. The depression transformed into anger, first toward the man.

         “Why do you have to work so late? Can’t you finish on time like other men?”

         “If you weren’t such a lazy ass you’d make more money for this family. You can’t even do that right.”

Often her words were accompanied by the mother hurling whatever object was at hand in the direction of the man. He was unfazed by her anger, her outbursts. He would stand quietly with his hands in his pockets, waiting for her rage to abate. And so, her anger grew.

How did she get to this place? The embryo, the girl child. Had it not been for her, life would have been different. Better. Happier. More serene. It would have been different if not for the girl.

So her anger shifted to the one “responsible” for her fate. Every disappointment, whether real or imagined, evoked rage and punishment. And, when the punishment was over, the rage spent, the mother could, at least temporarily, retreat back to her comfortable, familiar depression until the next time she felt her daughter disappointed her.

The cycle was always the same. If the girl disappointed her mother, or tried to be different from her, whether it was by being happy when the mother was not, or being interested in something outside the limited range of experiences allowed by her mother, her mother’s anger built up and turned to rage. Physical attacks, accompanied by harsh words, were used to degrade and humiliate the girl.

The girl loved books and writing in her journal. The mother said books were a waste of time and money; and that reading takes away from your chores.

The girl had found a desk and proudly set out her pens, paper and the only two books she had, and a birthday figurine she had received as a gift. One morning she slept just minutes later than the mother allowed. The mother burst into the girl’s room.

         “Get your lazy ass out of bed.”

And with those words she swept her hand across the desk, strewing the pens, paper and books across the floor, the figurine not merely fragments of glass.

         “Now pick up this crap!” She slapped and slapped the girl, who still lay in bed.

In times such as this, the girl cried, begged her mother to stop and tried to protect herself. This accelerated the mother’s rage and intensified the girl’s physical pain. Often, during the most intense rage and physical assaults, the mother screamed “I shit you out. I can kill you.”

Being out of school for the summer brought more opportunities for the girl to experience her mother’s rage. It seemed like each day the daughter did something that disappointed and angered her mother. Most often it was that the daughter didn’t watch the younger children closely enough while they all played outside. When the other children misbehaved or got hurt, the mother shrieked orders for the girl to come inside.

       “Lizzy fell down and cut her knee. Why the hell weren’t you watching her. You can’t do anything right.”

         “You let Anthony get covered in mud. What? Were you playing with your stupid friends?”

Standing just inside the door of the house, the mother shouted these words, mother and daughter shielded from view by only a thin screen. The mother would slap the girl and throw her against the wall as she shouted these words.

When the rage ended, the mother told the girl, whose welts and tears were smeared across her face, to go back outside.

Lizzy and Anthony seemed oblivious to what was occurring. Vincent, however, often found his sister crying and asked, “Are you OK?”

The father was rarely present during these attacks. However, others, particularly the neighbors who saw and heard the attacks, informed him when they occurred.

         “I’m afraid she’s going to kill that little girl. Can’t you do something?”

         “My hands are tied. She’ll only get angrier.”

Much later the girl began to believe that perhaps he was relieved to no longer be the mother’s victim.

The fear of the next bout of rage, of physical pain, affected every aspect of the girl’s life. She became withdrawn, yet ever vigilant for the signs that the rage was brewing. The young girl’s “mind’s eye” learned to evaluate everything that transpired between her and her mother. Her life was consumed with this task. There was little room for her to discover or develop her own identity, little room to grow.

The mother would not allow the daughter’s friends to enter the house.

         “I don’t want them in here.  They’ll go back to their parents and tell them all of our business.”

The girl would be invited once or twice to a classmate’s house. Since she could not reciprocate, many friendships were lost.

Her tummy hurt all the time. The girl’s eyes blinked rapidly and she chewed her nails until they bled. Nights brought no relief, as she lay rigid in her bed listening for the mother’s footsteps, worrying if she had done something wrong or had forgotten to finish a chore.

The girl had no answer when others asked, “Why don’t you smile? Why do you slump your shoulders like that?” She knew there was safety in being only what the mother wanted, what the mother needed. The message was: “You must be miserable and joyless like me or suffer the consequences.

Still, when the girl reached her teens, she, like all children that age, tried to discover her own identity. For this the mother mocked her:

         “Mom, how does this dress look?”

         “What? Are you fishing for a compliment?”

         “Mom, these new heels are really comfortable.”

         “You sound like a horse when you walk.”

         “I want to take college prep at school. I want to be a teacher.”

         “Just who the hell do you think you are? You’ll stay in the business track. Then when you marry someone who can’t support you at least you won’t starve.”

With no one to support her, this girl should have failed. No one would have been surprised. But it was not to be.

Despite her mother’s cruelty, her father’s blind eye, the girl persisted on a journey to discover her true self. Self-propelled, she pushed through negativity, disregarded the insults, brushed away the loneliness. Her mother could not help but notice the speck she had tried to crush was finding her own way. And she hated her more. No longer were the beatings as effective. Her mother had to use even crueler tactics to keep her daughter in her place.

On one occasion, when her daughter was walking home from school with her friends, she saw her mother approaching from the other direction, wide-eyed, arms flailing, running toward her. When she was in reach, the mother grabbed the girl by her hair, and slapped her over and over again.

         “You damn little bitch. You were supposed to start supper. You never think of anyone but yourself. You want us all to starve?”

The girl’s friends froze, stunned. No one came to her aid before silently slipping away.

For all her young life, there was only one behavior through which the girl could feel a modicum of acceptance. Eating whatever her mother prepared, regardless of how large the portions, or how little hunger she felt, satisfied her mother. Taking a third helping of mashed potatoes floating in butter and cream, brought a satisfied smile to her mother’s face. Her daughter learned to crave that smile, no matter how sinister or destructive. She was just a girl. She needed something, even if she took the smile for a real mother/daughter bond. She did not see it as her mother trying to make her fat, make her less desirable to a man. Her mother did not want to be left alone.

But, again, her daughter’s soul could not be confined to her mother’s desires. Any short-lived bond that food brought grew tiresome. Her daughter needed more. She needed to leave.

She had one escape, the only one available to her. She could hastily marry, have her own children, show her mother what it really meant to be a parent. She would not make the same mistakes as her mother. Surely, her life would be better.

At first, she struggled. She felt joy in having children. But aren’t mothers supposed to be depressed? Aren’t they supposed to blame their children for their sadness? Aren’t children a burden? Aren’t they supposed to make their mother’s life miserable? Isn’t life supposed to be hard, disappointing? Wasn’t she supposed to focus on the negative, to experience little satisfaction?

But when her own children began, as children sometimes do, to disappoint the girl, now a woman, she began to separate herself from the mother’s message. When she felt disappointed by a child, and her first reaction was her mother’s, to become angry and want to cause pain and humiliation, she looked into the eyes, the soul of the little being that was once the embryo she carried, it was as if she was looking into a mirror, seeing her child self. She recognized the fear, saw the child recoil, trying to move away, to escape. How could she harm, destroy someone who only had love for her, someone she loved? These were the feelings she had never experienced, not from another or in herself.

Her mother’s messages, although deeply embedded in her soul,  were no match for the experience of loving a child, for loving herself.      

Pat’s first publication was an anthology of women's stories of having recovered from toxic relationships: "The Woman I've Become: 37 Women Share Their Journey from Toxic Relationships to Self-Empowerment". Pat is currently working on an anthology of stories from women who have been bullied by other women. You can find more of her work at www.changesinlife.com