Sense of Then

I’ve been reflecting on why families are the way they are. There are a lot of sayings about families — loving the one you have, making your own your way — but not a lot of answers to why things turn out the way they do. As I heal and integrate, I’ve started to understand patterns and past experiences I never had time to sort through when they were happening. One of the patterns I keep circling is how one person gets to be the approved personality, and the other becomes the wrong one.

In a somewhat recent conversation with my mother, I was trying to communicate my healing journey. She told me I needed to get over my past — that parenting is a one-chance-and-then-it’s-over thing, and that she did her best. Forgiveness is the way.

But childhood and parent-child relationships don’t just end when the kid turns 18. At least that is my perspective.

I’ve been thinking about my life between ages 19 and 25, off and on in a relationship with a man who abused alcohol and was domestically violent. He told me what I should or shouldn’t wear, say, do, who I could talk to. He’d make up stories in his head about what I was thinking, then accuse me of them — using his own invention against me, demanding I conform to expectations he never explained, while he kept making whatever choices he wanted for his own life. He raged; he chipped away at my self-esteem; he cheated on me and continued to deny it, gaslighting me every time I mentioned it. Once, he took my youngest and drove him hours away, to another state, and called me from a payphone to tell me I’d never see my child again unless I conformed.

He did bring the baby back. But by then we lived together, and I didn’t have a safety net to leave to, so I became hypervigilant — tracking his behavior, tracking where my kids were, making sure they weren’t alone with him. I stopped having a life outside of parenting, taking the kids to daycare, and going to work. Eventually I got out and started over somewhere else with my children intact. The hypervigilance lasted for a long time.

My mother asked me, after, how this happened. You’ve always had such a strong personality, she said, I’m surprised you allowed this to happen. As if that, too, was my fault. As if I should have known better.