Knitting Pretty

It was at this point that she took to verbally abusing me for hours on end. She would scream, and I mean scream, until she was so hoarse, she could no longer talk. This took about two hours. She would scream at me that moving to this town was the only thing she had ever done for her, and that I couldn't give her that, that I was so selfish. She would tell me that the world didn't revolve around me, that I was a lazy bitch. That I did more around the house when I was five than I did when I was eleven. She did this in front of my friend, one day, and then drove a knife into the chopping block, telling me to get out.

My friend and I walked out of the house - her not even in shoes - and walked the three or so kilometers to my other aunts house, who my mother had of course had a falling out with. I called my mother some time later to tell her where I was, she was angry with me for going there, for letting them know of her dirty little secret. Oh they knew, my uncle would take me to a weekly youth group purely as a means to get me away from her for a few hours a week. Though everyone said it was 'because we needed time away from each other' ... 'we both had very strong personalities'.

That last line makes my stomach do a nauseating flip. Strong personality. Bollocks, that's what that is. When someone screams at you, for hours on end, the one person you have in the world, the one person who is supposed to protect, love, and nurture you... something happens inside. When she would do this, I wouldn't say anything, because on the few occasions that I did, she would use those few words against me over and over. When she did this, I became small inside. I became a shadow, a ghost. I was not whole, not real, not really there. This wasn't really happening... It was surreal... I put all this in a part of my brain, and let it sit there for a very long time.

The only person in this world who knows all of it is my fiance, the only person I trust to lay it all out before and see what really went on. It was abuse. Psychological and verbal abuse. When I finally stood up to her - with much encouragement from my fiance - the backlash was so extreme... she told me at one stage she wished I wasn't her daughter... I havne't spoken with her in about a year and a half, and haven't seen her for more like four.

Some days I forgive her, some days I can't even say out loud that I love her. I am still coming back from all this, and it stopped close to a decade ago. Some days I just want to cry and beat my hand on the ground, other days I feel at peace because I understand that she is a product of her own childhood.

Coming back from being so tiny inside, so unsafe, alone, is a lengthy process. It is a battle, with yourself, to let yourself grow. To not allow the past to dictate what happens in the future. It is hard, to rebuild that which was so felled when I was so young, but with love, warmth, and a sense of safety, it can and will be done.

I feel that something soft and warm is in order, for a pattern tonight, so here, have something nice to snuggle up with. ^-^

We are all different. We all handle each and every situation that life throws in our direction in unique ways. We all cope, handle, or buckle and break in our own, personal, way. Tonight I am a little down, so I will write of something sad.

When I was growing up, it was just my mother and I. No father in the picture, and my mother didn't have very good luck with men, so there wasn't really anyone else about. Oh she had friends, for a while, but they would come and go nearly with the seasons. She didn't keep friends, she was the black sheep of the family too, so they weren't close. The only person who stayed around was her sister, my beloved aunt, who lived about a ninety-minute drive away. They weren't really super close, either, because my mother didn't really respect her sister.

You see, my mother has rage issues. She had a very, very, awful childhood, and hasn't really processed it properly. She believes that her anger is a defense against all the ills of the world, that she is protected by being angry, she believes it makes her strong. With what she has been through, feeling like a victim is always close on her heels, and she uses anger as a way to keep that feeling at bay.

When I was very young, I was mostly safe from this rage. A few times she was violent with me, breaking wooden spoons over my backside when I had been naughty. She justifies this action to this day, saying she deliberately bought spoons that would break. She stopped, though, when I was four or five.

I suppose the rageful outbursts became directed towards me when I was about nine. It could be the most trivial of things, I had forgotten where I had placed my shoes, and she tore my room apart looking for them. Only to realise she had them all along in her own room. She didn't apologise, or help me right my room. She would become so enraged with me, should she ask something that I would have trouble doing. Finding some crafting items she kept in a cupboard, so she stormed in and got them herself, and shoved me against a wall with the craft items in my face, as if to show it wasn't difficult to find them.

When I was eleven or so, it became much worse. We moved a lot - she always made poor friendships that turned very nasty, so she fled from them - and at that point, we moved into a very run down horrid house, in a town I didn't care for. I hated it, I was so very unhappy. This made her very angry with me. Now mind you, I woulnd't change it at all, because it is in that town that I met my fiance, but at that point, I didn't know him, and I was not well liked in the area. I was short, fat, strange, shy, self-conscious, poor, and the daughter of someone the town assumed was a witch - of all things!? - and was generally an outcast. Her rageful outbursts at my school didn't help, either.