Confessions Of An Estranged Daughter
I am relieved beyond description to no longer have to navigate the psychological pain of interacting with my abusive mother.
RDNE Stock Project, lekcej, halfpoint | Canva "…and you still speak to her?!"
The question has come in some version from every single person with whom I’ve shared even an abridged bit of my childhood.
For a long time, I held the answer ("Well yes, of course") with pride. A shiny badge of courage I pinned on at certain turns of conversation. An emblem of the forgiveness I convinced myself I’d granted my mother.
The oldest of five, I was anointed "Mama’s Little Helper" by both my parents and the adult-focused society of the early 70s.
Wholly dependent upon two charismatic but clinically insane parents, I bore constant witness to the days and nightmares of my younger siblings. It was my job to keep diapers changed, faces happy, and all kids well-behaved, which meant quiet.
It was also my job to deceive Child Protective Services with charm, articulation, and manners when they inevitably knocked on each new door we moved from state to state to live behind. My mother made it unforgettably clear that if I "told on" her, I would be responsible for each child going into a separate foster home.
Only I, she said, had the power to keep the kids together. "Oh, I wish you had stood over there instead," my mother said after one such visit during which I testified to our happy home while choosing to stand awkwardly atop a warm heating vent in the hardwood floor. "You looked so thin in that dark corner."
More likely, I looked thin — we all did — because she holstered meal deprivation as a favorite weapon. At nine years old — in the same year I potty-trained my sister and learned to run the household — I trained all three of my brothers to steal from the kitchen in the middle of the night without detection.
I showed them which cabinets made too much noise; which floorboards to avoid; and how to take only a little bit each night. A survival course, most of all for me. Better to train up three skilled thieves on things like how to smash flat and hoard Roman Meal bread slices in their pillowcase (to avoid tell-tale crumbs) than to endure the alternative: kids constantly getting caught and punished for trying to ease their hunger.
When the training or shepherding I spent most of my energy on failed, my mother would turn a rage-filled eye at me: "SEE WHAT YOU DID? This is your fault."
My fault, the welts on small, flailing limbs. My responsibility, four minds so shattered they each still sometimes struggle decades later to stay in this world, much less successfully navigate it. And of course my fault, the sexual abuse and blows I received.
Honor thy father and thy mother, we were taught. As a Christian family, we read scripture at every dining table meal and sang Ephesians 6:1 as though it were a joyful song — "Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right." For us, the instruction was confusing.
So much was obviously wrong.
After I left, I didn’t share my story often.
I wasn’t virtue signaling on purpose when I faux-squirmed under real admiration from those who heard it and knew I chose to remain in contact with — even close to — my mother. Still, I tried to offer an emotional balance point to the horror of the story by pointing to the positive (me! so indomitable, right?!).
"Wow," they said. "I don’t think I could have a relationship with her after all that." I would smile serenely, pull from a selection of phrases tucked away for such moments: "In a way I’m grateful… (deep shrug, rueful smile) it made me who I am!"
That was true, but also slippery. Unconsciously, I partly deployed these phrases to guide the listener to the next platform. A cue: now that you’re aware of what I’ve overcome, isn’t "who I am" shiny and impressive?
It was easier to immerse myself in an artificial construct of a positive maternal relationship than to look hard at — or try to change — the distorted reality. Making nice with my mother was a coping mechanism because I couldn’t figure out any other way to navigate life with her in it. But in so doing I was also being operationally dishonest, in ways that served no one.
While I overtly gave off loving, interested daughter vibes, if she wanted to meet me in person I chose visually fascinating restaurants around which to prop easy, distracting interactions.
During periodic calls which felt as compulsory as churchgoing had once been, I modulated my voice into loving tones while holding the phone away from my ear, rolling my eyes, and sighing a lot. For about thirty years, that sufficed. I felt sacrificial, giving. And I felt superior.
Under surface magnanimity, I concealed the truth, especially from myself: I lacked the gumption to do anything else.
But the toxic byproducts of self-deception built up. My self-respect on the topic of my relationship with my mother was low. Beneath the veneer of a righteous, dutiful daughter willing to overlook staggering abuse, boundary-drawing, and truth-telling muscles that I’d never thoroughly developed continued to atrophy.
Lying to ourselves builds opacity in the same way that lying to others does. Eventually, we can’t even find the truth anymore, much less tell it.
At last, the effort to maintain the fiction of caring transcendence became too much. One day, under the high compound stresses of the pandemic lockdown and online schooling of my defiant stepdaughter, I just… stopped taking my mother’s calls. Stopped making my own. At the time I couldn’t even explain to myself why. There was no confrontation, no drama. Only a new gap, a quietude.
As weeks of silence stretched into months and years, I checked in often with myself: Was this right for me? Was this productive for me, in positive ways?
Resoundingly, repeatedly, the answer was a relieved YES.
The new space between my mother and me allowed me to see things previously hidden.
I hadn’t realized choosing to maintain ties with my mother meant stepping over my own needs for years. It had rendered opaque the fundamental impact my childhood was still having on my daily experience. In pursuit of peace, I expended great energy on the effort of a relationship with a former abuser who still deeply, actively triggered me. Diverting that energy from self-care had left little space between my past and present.
As long as I stitched myself to the identity of a dutiful daughter, I could not detach enough to determine what I was carrying around as a result of that identity and all that clung to it. I couldn’t even discern that there was anything to see.
To further confound things, in the mirror, I saw the products of strident genetics: my mother’s features, weight, silhouette, hair color, and facial expressions. Those external indices only increased with age, making it harder for me to individuate.
I hold my mother’s mitochondria in my body, a scientific finding that fascinates me in consideration of potential epigenetic trauma transfer. The reverse is also true. Detaching from a connection so inherent as to be actively cellular — no wonder it’s not easy!
Post-estrangement, I have realized many of the ways I navigate the world as an adult survivor of acute, sustained childhood abuse are common manifestations of Complex PTSD. My newfound ability to identify these issues has created a broad clearing in which I am able to address and ease them.
I’ve moved across the country twice in the last three years without ever picking up the phone in answer to my mother’s dwindling calls. She gets my address from my siblings.
"What did I do?" they report she asks them. "Nothing," they say, though they know the answer as well as I.
Unsolicited letters come every four or five months, filled with scrawls of art, disjointed thoughts, and Bible verses, in the increasingly shaky handwriting that denotes her elderly descent. They read like one-sided prison correspondence: desperately chirpy; disengaged from reality; indirectly begging for the balm of a response. These correspondences lob little bombs into my personal scaffolding. It takes days, each time, to open them; days more to rebuild.
A few months ago I allowed myself the energetic latitude to send a Mother’s Day card. I love you, I wrote inside the otherwise empty white folds. I didn’t receive a responsive note.
Counterintuitively, I find it harder to maintain estrangement than it used to be to feed the lie of having a genuine relationship with my mother.
I miss her, sometimes. She is unalterably a part of me. I am also relieved beyond adequate description to no longer navigate the psychological pain of having to interact with her and patch myself up after every call.
Eventually, my own center may be steady and broad enough to encompass a relationship with my last living parent.
I’m not sure.
What I do find every time I check in with myself is this: I’m OK, even sometimes thriving. For that, I can thank my own tenacity, newly oriented toward psychological health.
Being a child doesn’t have to hurt.
Every year more than 3 million reports of child abuse are made in the United States. According to the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline, 28.3 percent of adults report being physically abused as a child, and 10.6 percent of adults report being emotionally abused as a child.
Physical abuse of a child is when a parent or caregiver causes any non-accidental physical injury to a child, including striking, kicking, burning, biting, hair pulling, choking, throwing, shoving, whipping, or any other action that injures a child. Even if the caregiver didn’t mean to cause injury, when the child is injured it is abuse. When a parent or caregiver harms a child’s mental and social development or causes severe emotional harm, it is considered emotional abuse. While a single incident may be abuse, most often emotional abuse is a pattern of behavior that causes damage over time. There are many physical and behavioral signs of child abuse in both the child and the parent or caretaker.
To learn more about these signs, visit the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline’s website. If you suspect a child you know is being abused physically or emotionally, contact the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline for more resources at 1-800-4-A-CHILD.
Heather Hanslin is a non-fiction writer, trauma researcher, and certified ADR Divorce Coach. A contributing writer to YourTango and Medium, Heather is also completing a memoir: Trigger Happy: Disarming Childhood Trauma in Adulthood.