Holding onto pain from the past

In a previous blog I speculated that I am holding onto the pain of my past because it is the last tie I have to my family, the last thing that I have that connects me to my Mother. Since starting my blog I have dug up repressed memories of sexual abuse that occurred when I was aged between 7-9, I have written about the physical mental and emotional abuse that went on from age 11-25, I have written about the feelings of betrayal and abandonment I have towards my Mother because not only did she let these things happen to me but she chose the abuser over me and edged me out of her family, she had three children with him within three years and effectively started a new family in which I had no place, I was too difficult and didn’t fit her picture perfect family unit anymore.

My Mother and I were very close before she met her two husbands, we lived on and off with my Grandparents but she treated me very much like a best friend. She married a man out of the blue when I was 7, it wasn’t a happy household and he took great advantage of me when my Mother was working long hours. Somehow she met a much younger man and we moved in with him, she didn’t explain anything to me, we just left one day after a ballet class. I’m still not sure what she knows of the abuse that happened in that house, but I’ve assumed she knows something…based on how she left, but it’s entirely possible she has no idea and she left because she was unhappy in the marriage and had found a new boyfriend.

After her boyfriend left for a job on an island off the north coast of australia, she and I became best friends again. There was a revolving door of men she would date but no one stuck around too long. It was she and I, she would often pull me out of school and we would go on little adventures, staying at beach side cabins mainly.

She left her well paying high stress job for a part time job at the local video store, I think her depression had gotten out of hand and she needed less responsibility. She met a tradesman who was working on the video store and within a few months they were practically living together. He had a penchant for excessive drinking, and she started to ignore me in favour of her new man.

Within six months of meeting she fell pregnant to this man, and he was actively abusing me. I was a chubby teen and he would call me a fat fuck and throw me around, then things got more intense and the verbal and physical abuse escalated. She would yell at him to stop and then tell me the next day things would change, but they never did, and I ended up moving in with my grandparents. They followed a little while after as he would piss all their money up a wall, he drank a great deal and they just didn’t have the money to pay for rent and expenses.

When I started writing my blog I started healing, facing these issues head on was incredibly liberating, but I fear I went too far too quickly, I think I delved too far down.

I cut my family off a few years ago, they are incredibly passive aggressive, always nasty behind each others backs and bitching about each other but then nice to each others faces, my Mother and I always had a strained relationship and my cousin who i grew up with more as a sister always turned our past pain into a competition, discounting my trauma as an exaggeration. I’ve heard through mutual friends and what not, that they all think I’m in the wrong and they did nothing wrong, that I simply went ‘off my head’ and stopped seeing them all. This has bothered me greatly for the few years it’s been since I have seen them. So I decided to write a letter to my Mother, outlining the facts of the past and what i felt actually happened, my mother is a perpetual victim, nothing that ever happens is her fault, it’s always someone or something happening TO her, she never accepts blame or fault. So i wrote this four page letter telling her how it harmed me that not only did she let me be abused for years but she let me down whenever i needed her. that every time in my life when i hit rock bottom and needed her, not only was she not there but she made me feel unwelcome and crazy. An example is when I was in an abusive relationship in new zealand and i managed to sell a painting and get my fare back to australia, i turned up on the doorstep of my grandparents home, my grandparents had always made me welcome there, but the look on her face when she saw me, oh my. She made it clear that i wasn’t welcome there, that i could only stay briefly and had to find somewhere else. I mean, it wasn’t even her house, I had just been through a really traumatic experience and instead of offering me any form of comfort, she made me feel like an absolute piece of shit. Due to this, I kept moving around, relationship after relationship, i would hang onto my partner and often live with them prematurely because i couldn’t live in the family home without causing my mother grief because she knew her husband would get drunk and abuse me, and she’d let it happen, instead of holding him accountable for this she forced me out.

I thought writing this letter would be cathartic, but it’s been over a week and it remains unsent. I want to send it, I want to send it and have her know what she’s done and move on. But after I wrote it i spiraled into a depression that caused me to not write or blog for a week. I’ve barely seen friends, i’ve just been ‘functioning’ not interacting or really living or creating, just being.

Now i wonder if the letter is a mistake, or if it was just traumatic to face and write down all the things she’d done and let happen to me. Will i find peace in sending it to her and closing the chapter? Will it in fact close the chapter? I’m so unsure.

I know that i will never have a relationship with this woman if she doesn’t change dramatically, and honestly i can’t see it happening. So it’s not like i’m holding out hope of a reconciliation. She contacted me just before christmas via facebook and told me she missed her family and wanted to put things back together, we sent a few messages back and forth, I said that i had made some mistakes and there were things i would do differently, and instead of saying sorry or admitting any fault of her own, she said ‘yes you have, i guess i could have been a better role model’. I told her it wasn’t the role model factor that was the issue, and that if we were to have a relationship it had to be positive, that i couldn’t handle the backstabbing and the toxicity of the way the family interacted. She ignored this, and on christmas day sent a message saying ‘merry christmas, your sister will drop some presents by for the girls’ – that was it. It broke my heart all over again.

So, if anyone has had a similar experience with moving past things then let me know. A lot of people say just let go, and believe me i’ve tried, but i need her to know my side of the story, i need her to feel some kind of responsibility, or at least read the letter and know that I think she should feel some kind of responsibility. I’m a grown woman who can barely function most of the time and it’s because of the broken way i grew up. I take responsibility for my mistakes, of which i’ve made many, but now i’m just trying to find some peace.

---