My mother, my monster - Page 5
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 22: MoneySexPower
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Sydney Smith
DURING MANY YEARS OF THERAPY, I did not read books on abusive parents. I was unwilling to follow that particular route to health. I wanted to find my own language for what had happened to me, not borrow someone else's – even if it was invented by learned observers of mental sickness and suffering. Then, rather late in the day, my last therapist recommended I read a book called Toxic Parents, by Susan Forward (Bantam, 1990). I read the cases in search of my experience with Mother, and didn't find it. I was only a little disappointed. It reassured me I had been right to keep away.
The author included a list of twenty-seven possible indicators of abuse: my mother met sixteen of them. I was disappointed that she came up to scratch on only sixteen counts. My therapist said this was a high rating, which pleased me. Yet the book's measure of her harmfulness continued to fall short of my sense of having been occupied by a hostile foreign force throughout my childhood and young womanhood, a force that clamped down on every thought and action of my own.
‘You don't belong to yourself,' Mother told me. ‘You belong to me. You're like my arm. You don't have thoughts of your own. You don't do anything I haven't said you can do.' By the time she voiced her statement of ownership, I was moving away from her. It had always been there under the surface, unspoken, like so much that bound us to each other. Voicing her authority was a sign of desperation. I understood that and felt a thrill of frightening power, then a spasm of disgust and pity. She did everything she could to keep me. Her statement of ownership was only one tactic. Another was to shrink before me, to stammer and appear too scared to leave the house – to act, in other words, the way I had acted during my childhood and adolescence. By doing so, she invited me to be her abuser. Our relationship would still be going on if I had accepted her invitation.
Here is the paradox: I knew she had been bad for me, yet she didn't seem that bad – she hadn't broken my bones, she hadn't burned me with cigarettes, she hadn't invited my father and brothers to rape me. Towards the end, she seemed pathetic and lonely. She had tried to protect me in the way she understood and I repaid her with abandonment and rejection. I knew she had been extremely abusive, and no external measures could adequately gauge how terrible it had been. I didn't see her in Toxic Parents, a book designed specifically to help people like me. I saw her in a cheap reality show on TV.
I use the word ‘abuse' just as my therapists have used it; it doesn't match my experience, though, or my understanding. It has been bandied around too often and, in being passed from therapist to victim in thousands of consulting rooms across the world, it has lost its jet-black brilliance and potency, becoming smudged, limp and weary.
Many years ago, I wrote a story called ‘Another Name for Orange'. In this story, a young girl has to suck her grandfather's penis. He paints it vermilion so that, if she describes what he makes her do, nobody will believe she sucked an orange penis. The other word for orange, the word she doesn't know though she has experienced it many times, is incest.
I propose to rename abuse as I felt it. This label will have marvellous powers to describe not only what happened to me but my recovery. It will stand for my unique relationship with my mother; it will stand for her inability to relax her grip and for my own resilience; it will stand for the Tasman Sea that stretches between us – a sea she can never cross, not by ship or plane – and it will stand as my tribute to her from the frightened child who could never grow up. It will be my phrase alone, not a word I must share with the many thousands of other victims of harmful adults. The phrase will be Wife Swap USA. ♦