My Soul

Every day, she screamed reminders inside my head.

“You’re so demanding.”

“You always need something.”

But the fact was, all I needed was her love.

A day or two later, she would present me with money, as if somehow the dollar bills would soak up the terrible things that came out of her mouth.

A week or two later, she would yell again, using the money as an excuse to call me ungrateful when I lost patience and fought back.

And then she would call me a bitch, and a slut, and I would tell her to go fuck herself, throw things at her and push her.

And then my dad would start yelling at us, and I would cower in the corner and cry as my mother explained to him that it was my fault – that I started it all, that I was a little troublemaker who wanted to make them fight. 

like a flash

i have these snippets of memories. they appear and disappear in an instant. like the flash of an old slr camera. *poof* i can not really make sense of them, as in, i can not string them together with eloquent words to tell a story or depict a picture. my mind, my body, is not ready to do so. to see it all in a full light. so they remain little flashes of images etched in my mind. like the time i did not understand my math so i was hit repeatedly in the head and tossed up the stairs with the words 'idiot' ringing in my ears at the age of 9. or when my father asked me where those marks came from on my back as i bathed one night. the time i stepped between her and my little sister who was being pushed into the dresser only to be screamed at and shoved myself. or the time that same sister called the police because of the fighting in our home. i remember the phone calls to my older sister to come and get me because she 'could not fucking stand the sight of me anymore!'. *poof-poof-poof* i see these flashes and i am grateful in a way that they do not haunt me. that the violence in our relationship is so far removed now that it is hard to believe it was there at all. but i do still have these snippets. like a flash, i see them. and as quickly as they come ... they disappear.
~Whytelash

How My Mother Shows Her “Love”

My mother says she loves me, more than anything else in the world, more than even herself.

Over the years, she’s shown just how much she loves me by:

• repeatedly telling me that I am fat, and that even though I might not like to hear it, she needs to say it because she’s concerned about my health;

• repeatedly telling me that “boys don’t like girls who are so stubborn and opinionated”, and that I need to “tone it down” if I ever wanted to find someone;

• expressing how surprised she was to find that my life was full of loving friends who actually loved me just the way I was;

• suggesting that I drop out of university so I could be a better wife to my husband (which revealed to me that the entire lifetime of stressing the importance of education turned out to just be her back-up plan for me in case I couldn’t find a man);

• asking, when I told her my marriage was ending, what I did wrong;

• telling me that my marriage ended because “you’re too much like your father, there’s something wrong with your personality”;

• telling me that I was cruel for not speaking to her for a year, which I did to protect my own mental health as a result of the extremely hurtful things she said to/about me when I ended my marriage;

• telling me that the reason she had me was because she thought it would make my father hang around the house more often (for those wondering, this did not work);

• threatening suicide when I didn’t do what she wanted;

• excusing every abusive word and behaviour under “I say/do this because I love you.”

People ask me what my family thinks about me being in an interracial relationship (I’m Asian, my partners have always happened to be White). I tell them my mother is just relieved that anybody wants to be with me. People laugh, but it’s not a joke.

In my life, I recall my mother slapping me in the face twice; those were the only instances where it got physical.

But the emotional and psychological blows were constant.

Too often, I find myself disturbed by the internalized version of her that lives inside my head; the voice that tells me that I shouldn’t be surprised to be treated poorly; that my needs and wants should come after those of others; that I am “lucky” that people put up with me.

This is how my mother shows how much she “loves” me.

~L.K.T.

Wronged

I think the first time I felt she'd wronged me, really wronged me in a way a mother just should not wrong her daughter, was when she had all my hair cut off. Long long auburn hair cut so short I was often mistaken for a young boy. I'd felt wronged when she asked my father to leave or when I received a punishment I didn't understand, sure. As an adult, as a single-mother now myself, however, I've come to gain an understanding for those things.  Those events I could not grasp merely due to age, life experience and a lack of such encounters personally. But the Hair? Though I have my suspicions as to why, have my own idea's ... they still leave me feeling wronged. They do not excuse the act. They do not provide comfort for the self identity that was stolen. That is the first time I felt wronged by her, by my Mother.

~ Whytelash