When you are physically abused, it is easy to point to the
bruises and bumps as proof of that abuse…even to yourself. Emotional abuse,
being something done covertly and leaving no obvious evidence, can be a lot
more difficult to acknowledge.
As far back as I can remember, I was afraid of her. She had
a volatile temper, she was spiteful, and she had a mean streak. As a kid, I always
thought she enjoyed finding things wrong just so she could punish me. And,
being a child and lacking sophistication, I was unaware of the emotional abuse
I was getting---I was just too focussed on the physical.
Looking back, I think I believed she had boundaries. She
would go out bar-hopping while my father was at his second job in the evenings,
but she always cautioned my brother and I not to say anything to my father
about it. From a child’s perspective, I believed it was because my father was her authority figure, just as she was
mine. And I think I derived a certain amount of security knowing that my father
had the authority to control her.
My mother used beatings as a way of venting the anger she
always carried around with her. Looking back, I can see my mother was always a
brittle, tense woman, always ready to rise to the attack, almost chomping at
the bit to get into a fray with someone. She released the constant tension by
yelling at me (and occasionally my brother) and by physically striking out. I
am still not sure of the mechanism, but the pattern was to find something “wrong,”
blame me, yell at me about it, and if I didn’t respond appropriately (and I was
never given a head’s up as to what was appropriate this time), give me a
beating. And regardless of whether my transgression was great or small, real or
trumped up, the beating continued until she purged her rage, at least for the
moment.
I was afraid of her, I was afraid of displeasing her, I was
afraid to speak to her for fear of saying the wrong thing, being in the wrong
mood, or simply being where she didn’t want me to be…but until I was about 8 or
9, I did not fear for my life. I was confident she would not go that far
because my father would not let that happen. And then one morning that changed.
I have some big gaps in my memory of my childhood. When I
was around eight years old, my father moved out of the family home at my mother’s
request and, according to family sources, he was gone for more than six months.
This whole part of my life is a complete blank. I don’t remember him moving
out, the months he was gone, or him coming back home. Occasionally I get a
tantalizing glimpse of something from that period, but before I can grab hold
and hang on and ride the memory out into the light of day, it slips away. One
recurring little glimpse has to do with my mother’s handbag and this week I was
able to squeeze a little more of the memory out of my brain.
I grew up in the 50s and my mother was quite young when I
was born…by the time I was 8, she was only 25 and, like a lot of women that
age, she was very wrapped up in looking good. She played with hair colour,
lipstick colours, and was very big on having the flashiest clothes…her taste
was atrocious and she couldn’t tell flashy and trashy from fashionable and
trendy. One of the trendy little accoutrements of the period were “box purses,”
hard little boxes with handles on them. She had one nearly identical to the one
on the right. I remember it clearly because I coveted it—not for myself, mind
you, but as luggage for one of my dolls!
The purse was made of a rigid base, pieces of brass-coloured
rods welded to the base, and then strips of metal woven through the brass rods
to give a basket-effect. The lid was also rigid, and the whole thing had a
substantial weight to it.
I got up on a weekend morning, while everyone else was still
asleep, and went out to the kitchen for a glass of water. There, on the green
tile of the counter-top, sat my mother’s box purse and beside, was a
handkerchief…a man’s handkerchief. And it was bloody. Very bloody. This alarmed
me…there was also blood on the edge of the purse. I might only have been eight
years old, but it was pretty clear that my father had been hit with the purse
and it had broken the skin and he used the hankie to stanch the bleeding. I had
to use the toilet, which was in the opposite end of the house, so I put down
the glass and left the kitchen, pondering what I had seen. I planned to go back
to the kitchen and examine everything more closely because it would never do to
ask outright…that was the kind of thing my mother would interpret as being
nosey or “too big for my britches” and could easily escalate into one of her
rage-fuelled beatings. The safest route for me was to gather as much
information as possible, figure out what I could, then watch to see how things
played out and adjust my deductions accordingly.
I just read that last paragraph back…I was eight years old,
for heaven’s sake…what a horrible way for a child to live, afraid to ask her
parents questions for fear of a beating, measuring her life not in what was fun
and entertaining but in what was safe and the least threatening!
Anyway, I finished my bathroom visit and quietly made my way
back to the kitchen…and they were gone! Both the purse and the hanky were gone, as
if they had never been there. I remember a chill going down my spine and a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach—somebody knew
I had been out in the kitchen and if that someone was my mother, I was in
mortal danger! If she would hit my father with something as potentially deadly
as a metal box with a handle on it, if she would hit the household authority
figure hard enough to make him bleed…if she would hit him even though he was
bigger and stronger and could fight back and maybe even hurt her…what might she
do to me?!?
Petrified, I hurried back to my room, climbed into my bed
and curled up into a tiny ball, shaking with fright. I had no idea my mother
was that dangerous, that she could even hit Daddy. Not only had she hit him,
she hit him with something more lethal than a wooden spoon and she had drawn
blood…if she was capable of that with a grown man and the authority figure of
the household, what might she do to a puny little kid who had no power at all
and wasn’t big enough to fight back?
I did not see my father the entire day. He worked a full day
on Saturday, so he was seldom home. We had dinner without him that night…my
mother’s favourite opportunity to serve liver because he didn’t like it and she
didn’t cook it when he was home for dinner. Pushing a piece of liver around my
plate, I decided to test the waters and asked my mother if my father had cut
himself shaving that morning. She looked puzzled and said “No, why would you
ask that?” I replied with something like I had seen his hanky in the kitchen
that morning when I came out to get a drink of water. It had blood all over it
and it was on the counter next to her purse.
She stared at me very hard for a moment and while her
expression did not change, she became shuttered and guarded and cold…I could
feel the hostility emanating from her and suddenly I was afraid. But it was too
late…I had spoken and I couldn’t take the words back. All I could do was wait
for her to respond. My brother sat between us at the table and watched avidly,
like a fan at a sporting event.
“You must have been sleepwalking,” she finally said. “Your
father always puts hankies in the wash and I always put my purse on the dresser
in my room when I get home.”
She gaslighted me! Of course, at that age I had no idea what
gaslighting was but I felt the disbelief and outrage just the same. But I kept
my face impassive…the wrong expression could generate “wipe that
smile/smirk/look off your face or I’ll wipe it off for you,” from her which was
inevitably followed up with a slap (if she was in an unusually good mood) or a
whipping with The Strap (a thin leather dog leash from with the metal clip had
been removed) if she wasn’t feeling particularly benevolent that day.
“Oh,” I replied. It was the only safe answer. “Okay,” and
went back to pushing the piece of liver around my plate.
I knew what I saw. And because she had sneaked out to the
kitchen and spirited away the evidence and then she lied to me about it, I was convinced my deductions were correct…why
else would she lie to me? And so I sat there, trying to choke down a piece of
liver, one of my most un-favourite foods on the planet, trying not to stare at
the person I now realized could very easily kill me. She flew into
uncontrollable rages and the one person I counted on to be able to control and
restrain her and never allow her to go that far had now been shown to be no more
capable of protecting himself from her than I was. I was horrified.
I went to bed that night scared. I had to close my bedroom
door at night, but I was not allowed to lock it. I was afraid to go to sleep. I
was afraid that she knew that I knew and that she would come in during the
night, when there were no witnesses, and hurt me. I didn’t think she would
murder me in cold blood, but I now feared each “spanking” in a different way:
where I had previously been afraid of the pain she inflicted, now I was afraid
that she wouldn’t stop until I was dead. The fear this struck into my heart was
more devastating than any beating she had given me, more emotionally shattering
than all of the indignities and injustices she had heaped on me up to that
time: I now had a foretaste as to what kind of potential she had for violence
and it was intensely disturbing, especially since I was the person she most
regularly took out her rages on.
I never spoke of it again. I forgot about it, quite
literally. But every so often I would have a brief snapshot flash in my brain:
dim early morning light, green ceramic tiles, a metallic “box purse” sitting on
the tile beside a folded white man’s handkerchief, stained with blood…but it
would be gone so quickly I could only occasionally grab a tiny bit more of the
picture. But today it is back and I am not surprised that I blocked it all
these years. I have always known I was afraid of my mother, and I thought I
knew why…but this casts a whole new light on it all.
