Blogging Against Abuse

Today is Blog Catalog's Blogger's Unite Against Abuse Day. The badge above was created by one of the talented administrators there.

Now, I figure my blog is basically a case against abuse, right? But just in case it isn't clear, here are some tips for the parents out there.

Parents - I know kids can be frustrating. They don't do what you want them to, they don't always behave in public, and sometimes they act out for attention. Your child may not be as good-looking as you, or as smart as you, that's because of one simple fact - they aren't you! Please recognize that each child out there is different from their parents and an individual in their own right. They are not 'mini-me's' cloned for your amusement. They have feelings and emotions separate from you. They like things that are different. And even if they don't yet, they have the ability in them to be a separate entity.

To that end - DO NOT:

• Remind them that you were prettier as a child than they are.
• Constantly tell them that a subject for which you didn't do well in school is 'hard and useless' - you're creating a stigma.
• Tell them that the subject they love is useless and they'll never excel in it anyway
• Call them names.
• Call others names in front of your children.
• Insult specific 'races' or 'peoples' in front of your child.
• Trade affection for chores or other items, "You want dinner honey? You have to hug me."

Of course, there are other items that really shouldn't need to be said, but I will:

• Drag them around the house by their hair then cut it off in chunks for 'being so vain.'
• As 'punishment,' drag them out of bed at 3 am in the morning and throw them in the shower because they didn't remember to put their toys away earlier.
• Force a child to eat something after they throw it up.
• Hit your child. With anything. It's incredibly confusing to kids when that happens.
• Kick your child.
• Tell them, "it hurts me more than it hurts you" as you spank them. It's confusing.
• When they cry, don't say, "I'll hit you until you stop crying," that is wrong on so many levels.
• Threaten your child with bodily harm and especially with sexual acts.

Parents, Please do:

• Love them and watch them grow with that mixture of joy and wistfullness.
• Encourage the differences and get interested in their new lives.
• Pay attention to their behaviours, be open about what abuse is and let them tell you if something is wrong.
• Harbour genuine trust between you and your children.
• Treat your children with respect.
• Have patience.

Now, I know I've never had kids, I've just had cats. But the trust and respect issue goes a long long way. Do not abuse your child, mentally, phsyically, emotionally, sexually. Love them with all your heart and be the guardian's they need you to be.

This is in response to: http://blog.blogcatalog.com/category/community-challenge/

Excuse Me, But Your Issues Are Showing

Portrait of a Woman Suffering from Obsessive Envy by Géricault, Jean Louis Théodore

I know some of my issues, how they carry over in life. One, I’m trying so hard to work on, and that is only liking others that are pained. It’s more a case of, “how can you understand me if you don’t also hurt?”

But, as I come out of that hurt viewpoint of myself, where I see myself as broken and thus think only others that are in pieces can connect with me, I realize what a disservice I’m doing to myself and others.

I became ‘best friends’ with my friend, Xiomara, when we cried over parental issues. In college, I hated those shiny happy people so much. I felt they were vapid, stupid, unaware of the world around them. When someone told me their only concern in life was to be happy I shot them down, “how can you care about just being ‘happy’?” I challenged. “Are you really that shallow that all that matters is fun and happiness?”

It’s a hard one; it really is, wishing to see the cracks in people, to focus on other’s pain kind of as a way to validate your own. “Because everybody hurts, sometimes.” And, because if there is a perfect family out there maybe everything was really my fault.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say. For so long I felt like I couldn’t identify with anyone who wasn’t also troubled, but then we just fed into each other’s insecurities and depression. It’s so easy to think the whole world is just a disaster when you surround yourself with the detritus of the American family, those cast aside, thrown out in the gutter with no loving arms to wrap themselves in. It’s also really easy to think that those who have what you want – those with a chance at love – are beneath you and ‘can’t comprehend the real world’ and live in a delusion. But then, we were living in our own delusion, one that was just a bottomless pit of despair.

I was being discriminatory, not giving anyone a chance, not letting anyone who seemed put together know me because they ‘couldn’t possibly understand’ when I think, honestly, I just didn’t want to be hurt by anyone again. Rejection is easier if you’re the one doing it.

That’s my new directive, to allow people in past these walls that have built up. To give them a chance to love, despite all the scars and scabs I pick at until they bleed all over again. Give someone else a chance to care for me as I am, and in doing so acknowledge that I am a person worthy of affection from ‘the normals’ out there.

And never discount someone’s life just because it is different then your own.

Actually, I think I've succeeded in a lot of this a while ago, as I get along fine with people from all walks of life - nuclear family or no. I can 'connect' with people no matter the 'pain,' and that's what I'm looking for, to recognize that I can (and have) been able to accept people who haven't had a background similiar to mine, and to move forward in the future realizing my worth to society at large, not just the fringes.

The Sexualizing of Children

Here’s something that bugs me, and makes me pause. What are people doing to their children? Because, it seems to me, they are becoming sexualized at a young age. And I don’t just mean the whole JonBenet beauty pageant thing. That has been going on for a long, long time. I mean the clothes and other accouterments of childhood and how they have changed.

In my neighborhood, everyone wore hand-me downs so it was mainly a lifestyle of tee-shirts and ripped pants. But, even as I aged and could afford my own clothes it was mostly the same thing – with perhaps a skirt or two thrown in. Modesty was the key. Now I see these kids on the subways, even in the stroller wearing tube tops and mini-skirts. Why does a two year old need a tube top that bares her belly button (and, professes in silver studs that she is a ‘naughty girl’) and a mini-skirt that her diaper sticks out from?

I really don’t understand this. Sites like watchdog.us and others track sex offenders in America. We have the Amber alert because if we don’t find a child within twenty-four hours they probably aren’t alive. The children are our future and our worry, so why the hell do we dress them up as a pedophile’s dream?

But more troubling I suppose is what they know at a young age and the earlier onset of puberty. Working in the schools, I have heard of children as young as seven I think getting their periods. Can you imagine? The blame now is being laid on processed food, and I’m sure there is a link, but has to be more to it.

Plus, there is sexuality in a lot of children’s programming. Even some cartoons I’ve breezed through show the girls wearing little more than bikini’s (I’m thinking of The Winx Club with this one). I hear kids joking around about sex on the subways, sidewalks, and these are pre-teens and younger. It really is discouraging.

So my question is this – as more and more issues become prevalent in the news with regard to the sexual abuse of children- what is the root cause?

The media loves to blame figures such as Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears for this ‘slut chic’ clothing line and life style that’s out there. But the media only airs what makes them money, so if mothers weren’t buying their three year olds thongs then they wouldn’t be made and advertised on television.

Maybe I this is a chicken and egg question. If television didn’t advertise the glamour of sexualized children and stores didn’t sell baby g-strings that were made by a company, would they still be in style or do the stores make them because people want and do buy them enough that the news can see a moneymaking opportunity and runs with it? Is the media pushing the trend of the people? Which is the mirror at this point?

Part of My Family Tree or What Happens When You Can't Say No

Being young is hard. Being young and female, in a time when a woman’s education is to be in the home arts can’t make things easier at all. Add a good dose of poverty and the dominant feeling that at the time a woman without a man is incomplete, and you have a tough life.

You have my grandmother.

I often fantasized that had she been born in my generation we would have been best of friends. She seemed like she had a lot going on in her mind, but just lacked the words to express it. And she lacked the family to support her. My mother was always one to condemn her and applaud her at the same time. I heard tell that my grandfather controlled her, but I only saw him once or twice so can’t say. I do remember he made me doll furniture and grandma said he loved me very much.

My grandmother was amazing when it came to crafts. She made pillows and dolls and knit and just everything you can imagine. At Christmas time the house was filled with decorations and not one, but three trees that she proudly displayed and showed off to everyone who came in the house. The light in her eyes outshone those from the trees.

It was hard talking to her at times, as she didn’t have the words. When she worked it was usually doing things such as sorting books at a shelter or other such tasks. She was so proud when she was around intelligent women though, and loved telling me those stories as best she could.

“So she went to whatchyoumcallit sweetie, she did. She’s very smart. And she did this thing, you know? And she’s retired from the thingibob and now we work together sorting clothes.” She’d tell me, as she explained her day. At times it seemed like every third word or so was a replacement word – a ‘whatchoo’ or ‘thingie.’ Was it just excitement or did she really just not have the language? Unfortunately, I think it was the latter because even in calm times I just couldn’t understand her.

Yet, I loved listening to her stories. I should clarify that this is my father’s mother. I never met my mother’s mom. My mother reluctantly ‘allowed’ her to baby-sit my brother and I one year, as there was no other option that was affordable. After that summer the visits tapered, even though my grandmother never condemned my mother or blamed anyone for the divorce.

Grandma also loved to cook. Not that she was good at it. Many a time did we have gritty candies and an odd mixture of flavors (think garlic brownies), but her family praised her as the domestic goddess she was taught to be.

When Grandma told stories they were seldom about herself. They were about some relative she was proud of who was wounded in war and ended up with a metal plate in his head. I think he was in a truck that hit a mine. He was her hero, I believe in her story he was riding around saving people when the fighting got in the way of his adventure. Sometimes she spoke of the craft fairs she went too and how people praised her dolls, but usually it focused on the other people in her life – how hard her husband worked, how proud she was of her daughter the butcher (who lived with her as well).

This also led to grandmother never really showing me how to sew, or crochet, or knit as she didn’t want to talk about herself (other than to say she had no choice in the matter when talking about her lack of education) and she encouraged my education. In fact, she paid for a party to celebrate my graduation from highschool. One that, unfortunately, she didn’t attend (she couldn’t drive and I think my mom said she wouldn’t drive her back home). So we had it without her.

But, what is the point of me writing this besides some nostalgia for a woman I once knew? The point is the one story she told my brother and I, a story she had kept bottled up inside for a long time.

It was about my father.

And her father.

Between her sobs she spoke about how she didn’t have the strength to say no when her father wanted to take her son. Through tears we heard little snippets of how she knew what he would do, because her father had done it to her when she was little. But she felt responsible now for what my father had done to my brother, because she didn’t have the strength to stop the cycle from continuing.

It’s a harrowing moment to have happen. All the moments there are- she was taken by her dad and couldn’t say no when he wanted our dad. My brother was taken. And now, there we were, both under the age of ten listening but not quite understanding what she was saying.

We held her hand as she cried, knowing she needed something and not really cognizant of the weight she had carried so long. This was her story – the one she never wanted to revisit but it was eating her up too much not to. She had been taught to always do what her father said. Even though she knew he was wrong, she couldn’t say no.

She just couldn’t say no.

But while she felt that was her legacy, it’s not. She loved me. She loved her entire family and always did what she could to keep them clothed and fed and clean. As powerless as she felt, she still fought hard to love everyone. She was proud of everything anyone accomplished – no matter how others might have viewed it. The problem is now, when I’ve tried to reconnect with her it’s just apologies. I haven’t seen her since I was young, it was forbidden after a time (even though my mother still accepted money). She is sorry she didn’t stand up to my mother more, but was afraid we wouldn’t be allowed to her house anymore as eventually happened. She’s sorry she didn’t talk sooner about things that were going on. I do hope she forgives herself soon as I have. She was an oasis for me. I loved going to grandma’s house. And that one story she did tell of herself, it shows me what I have to face, an evil that goes back a long ways. I’m glad she had the strength to tell us what had happened, and what does happen when you don’t have the strength to say no.

photo from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Emirgan_04589.jpg

Fear

This one is going to be hard to write. Even before the blog I’ve been afraid to talk about the root of my PTSD, about my family life. The more I write, the more I ruminate about it, and the more scared I become that something bad will come out of this, that I’ll end back with my mother for some reason, that’ll she’ll take away the security I’ve created for myself.

I think it’s really hard for me to focus on the ‘whys’ of this. I started this to force myself to be open, to give me a place to face my demons and accountability to do so. Also, to make it real to myself. I can go back to my words and see that I was honest, I was brave, I was strong enough to put out there what happened. And hopefully, I’ve grown.

There were two things my mother said and reinforced in my life. Well, there were more than two, but these are the ones that stick out most often:

1. “I made you.”

By high school I was known in my community. I was in the Key Club, vice president of the honor society, Latin club, anything that kept me away from her. I was a math scholar, in the technical section at school; top some odd percent of the class, singer, band member, etc. I got into a good college. I was a success. People would comment to me about what a great mom I had (which would make my stomach drop) and compliment her on my achievements.

So, my mother realized that I had strength, that despite her efforts I had survived. My therapist says my mother realized my strength when I was young and was jealous, hence her trying to constantly cut me down. But, my mother then decided to take ownership of it all.

“I did this on purpose,” she told me. “If I had coddled you, if I had hugged you and told you everything was good then you wouldn’t be the woman you are today. If I had acted any differently you wouldn’t be strong, you wouldn’t be independent. I did this all for you honey.”

I was aghast- to say that all the abuse for so long was planned? That it was beneficial? That all this praise heaped on her for MY achievements was justified?

But, a part of me still wants to believe it. A part still wants to think that my mother had a plan, that she wasn’t evil, that she loves me.

Yet, she also told me so many times that she didn’t love me because I didn’t need her like my brother. So many times she told me she was jealous, that it wasn’t fair that I had a chance for a future and she never did, that I didn’t deserve it. Which is of course why in the end she took credit for what I created, to own me till the end.

Not that I’ll let her, I’m fighting it with every core of my being and that voice, her voice, emotionless and just dripping with darkness saying “I made you” doesn’t ring as true anymore. There may be times of relapse, but I recognize it as just that – relapse, not the truth. She need not make me. I succeeded in spite of her, not because of.

(Side note, Christina Aguilera’s “Fighter” came on just as I was about to move on to #2, I don’t know how I feel about that. I will never thank my mother for ‘making me stronger’ although I love screaming, “You won’t stop me!” along with Xtina)

2. “If you ever tell anyone about the family, if you ever talk about us, I will deny everything. I will tell them you are mentally ill, that you fantasize, that you can’t recognize reality. If you ever try and write about us I will destroy you. I will sue you for libel.”

That is the reason for my fear. The last two sentences were when I started focusing on writing in high school and getting noted for my abilities to ‘see the world and literature with a great sensitivity and expression.’ But the last thing I want is to have my security threatened, which spirals me down as I’m beginning to realize. At the same time, I have to overcome this mentality. “Just let her try!” I say in my defiant moods. “Let her try and stop the truth from coming out.”

There are instances where she acted on that. I remember one when, I think I was in fourth grade. We lived in a four-unit apartment building with gray siding on a corner lot. At the time I still cried, I still screamed when things happened, I hadn’t fully retreated into myself yet.

After a particularly bad night I was outside with my mother when a neighbor came up to us.

“Is everything all right?” she asked. My mother pushed my gangly body behind her. “I heard a lot of screaming from your place last night.

I tried to peak around my mom’s body, I saw my neighbor arching her head to try and look at me.

“I almost called the police,” the neighbor mentioned casually.

“Don’t mind her,” my mother responded, even-toned. “She’s just dramatic, likes attention. It was nothing.”

I wanted to scream, “Why! Why didn’t you call the police, why was it an almost, why can’t you see?” but said nothing.

“Oh, okay.” The neighbor replied and walked away.

I often wonder, did my neighbor truly believe I was just dramatic? Just wanted attention? Or is it just easier to not care and accept the easy answer, was she really just looking for an out to stop worrying?

That was my mother’s answer- I was dramatic. I was a brat. I was spoiled. She did everything for me, and I was just ungrateful. And people seemed to accept it. The bruises were from ‘kids being kids,’ the fear from watching too many cop shows.

There is more to this I think. My brother and my mother have much in common, and I really don’t know how to approach him in my mind or writing, not quite yet. But he told me many times that it was his mission in life to make sure I have no friends. He’s a couple years older than me, and thus we overlapped in high school. However, I had already attended some classes in high school a year or two before I was officially enrolled. I was the youngest in some of my classes.

When I was bussed just for specific classes, I learned some things. One of the first students that befriended me was surprised to find out who my brother was, as she couldn’t stand him. My brother tried to tell me that she was a liar, a ‘vicious dyke.’ I liked her- she was artistic. We often spent study time doing our homework together and worked in groups. One day I brought butterscotch chips in to class for us to nibble on and she stuck them on her fingernails and pretended she was a cat answering calculus questions. I loved it.

I met some of her friends and was exposed to poets and painters, angsty individuals who spoke out. Of course, this meant I was banned by my mother and brother from speaking to them. He complained that I was spreading rumors about him. Actually, I still defended him, still wanted him to be my hero.

My first official year in high school I was in a biology class in teacher-chosen group projects with students my own age when one of them said something that completely shocked me.

“Geesh, you’re not a bitch,” he said.

I asked what he meant. Apparently my brother had spoken with the brothers and sisters of his peers, thus with my peers, and warned them about me. Told them I was a bitch, a liar. Before I even got there this had spread around people in my peer group.

Why are people so quick to believe the easy answer? The bad opinions of others?

And this leads to my fear. People believed my mother and brother before I even gained my voice. Before I even appeared on the scene I was made out as a liar. There were a lot of lies they told about me before I even walked into a room for the first time.

So as I struggle to find my voice I also struggle with the authority, with the strength. I am afraid that the stronger I become the more my ‘family’ will rear up against me. But the fear isn’t really that they’ll attack, it’s that I’ll fall. I fear that I will go back into my cocoon and that all I think I accomplished is an illusion.

But the more I withdraw into that fear the more it also awakens the fire to fight against it. How dare they even try to deny what happened. THEY are the ones that slandered, not me. THEY are the ones who did wrong, so why do I put the burden of guilt on myself?

Goodness, with every step I feel the fear. But honestly, I think, I hope, it’s morphing into the fear of failing myself more than anything else, of letting them still win. I’m going to be the winner here. Hell, maybe I already am. Wait- let me change that. I am the winner here. Now if only I can gain the strength to not doubt that. I am winning. Indulge me one more time- I need the practice. I’m winning.

Child Abuse in the News or Mothers and the Modern Media II

If you’ve watched the news lately, I’m sure you’ve come across the recent incidences of child abuse. It’s on every channel. Names such as Nixmary and Andrea Yates conjure up gruesome images of horrid conditions and mothers who go so far as to kill their children. But we can’t leave out the fact that even priests, the ultimate in purity and guidance have been coming out left and right as having sexually abused the very children they were meant to nurture and save from such actions. Then there are the teachers. I think the name Mary Kay LeTourneau can still turn a few stomachs. She’s ‘famous’ for sleeping with her twelve-year-old student whom she had known since he was in second grade. They are now married with children (though I don’t think they have custody).

These stories are in the media so much now it makes me sick. Every paper I pick up has a story of a child brain-damaged from being shaken by an angry parent, molested by a day-care worker, or even dead from parents who refuse to feed them until they behave, or other such nonsense.

The case of Andrea Yates goes back to what I was mentioning before about the ‘Cult of the Mother.’ She is in no way the first to kill her children, nor will she be the last. There is a long list of mothers who ended up taking the lives of those they were supposed to hold dear. These include:

Patricia Blackmon was 29 years old when she killed her two-year-old adopted daughter in Dothan, AL in May 1999.

Debra Jean Milke was 25 when she killer her four-year-old son in Arizona in 1989.

Dora Luz Durenrostro killed her two daughters, age four and nine, and her son, age 8, when she was 34 years old in San Jacinto, California in 1994.

Caro Socorro was 42 years old when she killed her three sons, age five, eight and 11, in Santa Rosa Valley, California in 1999.

Susan Eubanks murdered her four sons, ages four, six, seven, and 14, in San Marcos, California, in 1996 when she was 33.

Caroline Young was 49 in Haywood, California when she killed her four-year-old granddaughter and six-year-old grandson.

Robin Lee Row was 35 years old when she killed her husband, her 10-year-old son and her eight-year-old daughter in Boise, Idaho in 1992.

Michelle Sue Tharp was 29 years old in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania when she killed her seven-year-old daughter.

Franic Elaine Newton was 21 when she murdered her husband, seven-year-old son and two-year-old daughter in Houston, Texas.

Darlie Lynn Routier was 26 in Rowlett, Texas when she killed her five-year-old son.

(Note, all the above were taken from http://crime.about.com/od/female_offenders/a/mother_killers.htm )

Even Brooke Shields and Marie Osmond have admitted to having post-partum and not being able to deal with the feelings they have for their children when they found it wasn’t all love and devotion. I mention these because, most notably with Osmond, they are people that have become icons and especially with Marie, darn near infallible in the eyes of society.

I remember one year when I was maybe, seven years old, my brother and I each got a rabbit. His was a gray male that my brother named Johnny, and mine was a white female I named Snuffy, short for Mr. Snuffleupagus, my favorite Sesame Street character. My mother told me that if she were to get pregnant and give birth, we’d have to separate her from her children.

“But why?” I asked. “How can they live without her?”

“Because,” she responded her gray/blue eyes looking into my hazel ones, “Often times rabbits kill their young.”

I didn’t understand this. I couldn’t see how a mother could kill her child (even if the abuse in my house had started already, for the longest time I felt I deserved if for doing something wrong). But it is all too common in the animal world. In college my roommate and I each bought a goldfish. One gave birth, and we watched in amazement as the cute little fry swum around the tank. The next morning they were all gone, eaten. It’s only natural. So who are we, as humans, to think we are above it all?

The thing is, and I don’t know if this is just a phenomenon in America, we hold ourselves above all beings. Despite being in the same genus as chimps, we are better. We are smarter, we use tools, etc. etc.

Yet we are unable to take a critical look at ourselves and rather than be afraid, step back and see how to change things. We are unable to stop ostracizing people for natural feelings. We are unable to accept that mothers, teachers, and even our religious leaders are imperfect.

I really don’t know what to think about such things. As pertains to myself, I mentioned before how no one listened to me, or wanted to listen to me perhaps because of the view that mothers can do no wrong, sometimes I think it was because they had gone through the same thing themselves. It’s so easy to turn away.

But with this notion of perfection comes an incredible burden. People are denied validation of their feelings. They fear what is natural. If a mother begins to think her child is ugly, isn’t perfect, she can begin to become afraid of her own thoughts. Granted, these are symptoms of a treatable illness, but how public is the knowledge? Isn’t it easier to wallow in self-doubt and feelings of worthlessness than to face the fact that something might be wrong? And isn’t it easier because there just isn’t a prominent belief or understanding that even those that are supposed to be infallible are, in fact, human and face the same diseases and demons as the rest of us?

This is becoming a long post, but it’s something that bothers me. With the case of Nixmary what the media showed was shocking. Here was a little girl that had, by all cases, cried out for help. Everyone seemed to realize after the fact that there were signs. Social Services was called. But no one did anything.

Shock. That was the headline, “A City in Shock.”

Shock (as defined by Dictionary.com): A severe offense to one's sense of propriety or decency; an outrage. As in “numb in shock.’

It’s the numbness in that definition that bugs me. People became numb. There was an immediate outcry for help and reform and then – nothing. Society cries for a solution to the immediate problem, not the root disease, and becomes satisfied with band-aids. Nothing is accomplished except that our communities are stuck together with tape and nothing really changes.

What is my solution? Admit things. Admit it if you are afraid. Admit that you’re scared. And recognize that there is nothing wrong with that. Admit how you feel, accept it, then look for the root cause. Admit that things in the world are messed up but instead of dwelling on the surface grab a shovel and dig deeper. But don’t think that everything is bad, just because there is a lot on the news, or in the paper. Realize that in the U.S. at least ‘news’ is an economic venture, and bad news sells better than good. There is a lot of good in the world, and you can be a big part of it.

Also, see what you can do, even if it is just listening to someone. Often, that is such a healing activity. The elderly are so much livelier when they know someone recognizes their existence and the value of their stories. Children glow when you listen to them talk about their day or tell their fantasies. And by truly hearing what someone has to say, who knows what you’ll discover. I know the more I’ve listened the more I realized I’m not alone in my questioning, in my quest. I’m not the only one who is searching for my identity in a world I don’t understand.

Talk to me, I want to know people’s tales. I want the chance to listen to others as I struggle to find my voice. We can help each other out.

Religion and the Abused Child

This is a tough one for me. Long before I could start to hate my mother and realize that what she was doing to my brother and me were wrong, I had to realize God wasn’t who I was brought up believing he was. I had to realize religion was wrong first.

See, we always went to church. When it was the whole nuclear family of ‘mother, father, son, daughter’ we went to a Catholic Church. Sunday school, Christmas parties, the whole thing. We learned the “suffer the little children” line and John 3:16, “For God so loved his son that he gave his only begotten son so that whosoever beleiveth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life in heaven.”

When our family’s cracks began to deepen, and the unit became mother, son, daughter (notice, I still put myself last, I hate that but it’s there.) we went to the Salvation Army. I was a sunbeam, in the children’s band. Later I was in the choir and Girl Guards and going to nursing homes and was a junior soldier and promised to not harm animals or have strong drink and on and on.

My mother was a Sunday school teacher. She drove shut-ins to church. She was in the Home League and all the other stuff. And all that time she was erratic at home; she was throwing hammers at televisions, throwing plates against the walls, at us children. She was threatening to kill herself, to have me raped if I misbehaved (this was a favorite of hers, “you want me to send you to your father so he can rape you?” she’d yell.) I have scars, physical as well as emotional, from her. And I began to hate myself for not being able to see the good in her that God obviously did.

The Bible is a strong weapon, and my mother was smart. That’s the danger of people, intelligence and mental illness. It means doom for the world. She would throw the Ten Commandments at as, to “honor they father and mother, and make them holy.” And I disobeyed God in not wanting to do whatever inane wish she had in her mind. Then there was some line about returning things ten-fold. So that meant if I yelled at her, or disagreed, she or my brother (she seemed to enjoy watching him hit me) would hit me or spank me ten times.

So I was going through the Bible together and found her favorite quote:

Proverbs 13:24 – “Those who spare the rod hate their children, but those who love them are diligent to discipline them.”

I hate that so much, the power it had. There are others of course:

“Do not fear what you are about to suffer: - Revelations 2:9

“I will come like a thief and you will not know at what hour I will come to you” – Revelations 3:2 (This justified those times she’d drag my brother and/or I out of a sound sleep and bang our heads together, throw us under a cold shower, cut out chunks of our hair, spank us, whatever.)

“Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.” Rev. 22:15 (This was why we couldn’t talk to anyone outside of the family about what was going on inside, because they were evil and just wanted to rape us and my mom was our savior.)

See, there was Jesus, the symbol, pure innocence. The picture of Jesus with the children surrounding him was somewhere in the house. He was the goal, you have to suffer to learn, and through that suffering comes redemption. God is good, and if you are in pain it’s because you deserve it, because you did something wrong.

That guilt complex was built into us from an early age. Everything was our fault. If mother was unhappy it was our fault. Did we not understand how much she gave up for her children? That she sacrificed her marriage, her last chance at happiness, to keep us safe? Did we not see that just as Jesus gave up his life on the cross she had given up her life of adulthood and sex to care for us?

Suffer the little children.

So as I aged and was able somehow to free myself from this brainwashing, how could I hate her without hating the God that created her? How could I not be mad at a God that let this happen? When she aligned herself with religion to such a degree that Mother and Jesus were synonymous, how is a child supposed to cope?

I tried, for many years after I left I tried to return to the church, and can’t. I went to a few Salvation Army’s but am still pissed that they couldn’t see her evil, didn’t question our bruises or tear-stained cheeks.

I tried other churches, but haven’t felt God.

However, I still feel him in my heart. I still talk to him, even if it’s arguments at this point. How can I be happy in a creator like that? How can I say that suffering is justified? That we need it to learn, to grow closer to God.

I feel like a failed Job experiment. He had no problems watching Job lose everything and still cry to him, my mother did the same. She admitted that she enjoyed watching us cry and then ask her to kiss the very ‘boo-boo’s she had created. “Dogs are smarter,” she’d say, “you guys keep coming back.”

It’s all so painful to try and figure out.