Mom Was A Victim Too

Today was my mother’s birthday.  Had she lived, she would have been 92.  I have been trying to dig up good memories of her because there really were some.

I remember that she was a talented artist.  She did some amazing charcoal portraits and I wondered why she didn’t go any further with it.  Maybe it was because Deaf people didn’t become mainstream artists in the 50s and 60s?  I wanted to ask her but didn’t.  Communication was a real problem between us when I was young because I didn’t know how to sign and lipreading was frustrating.  When I did learn sign language, our relationship had pretty much deteriorated and it didn’t occur to me to ask then.

She liked to do paint-by-numbers as well and got me interested in it.  I remember she gave me some pointers to help me stay within the lines and advised me where to start my paintings.  I enjoyed it.  She also got me into liquid embroidery.  Parties for that craft were big in the Deaf community.  I loved it and Mom bought an entire set of colors and projects for me.

The whole family loved to swim, whether it was in the ocean, the bay, or at a pool.  For years, we belonged to a swim club.  Mom loved to go there and she took my brother and me and some of his friends to the club almost every day.  My brother would go off with his friends; I would hang out with Mom.  In between swimming, we sunned ourselves and read avidly.

Another favorite family activity was bowling.  My brother and I started bowling in a kids’ league when we were about 12 and 10.  My parents bowled in a Deaf league every Wednesday night.  Mom drove my brother and me to our bowling alley every Saturday morning during the school months for years.  During the summer, we’d all go bowling together.

My parents participated in Deaf bowling tournaments up and down the east coast.  I learned how to be a scorekeeper and frequently kept score for Mom’s team.  Encouraging Mom and her teammates was fun and I basked in their praise of my math skills.  I could add up scores in my head very quickly.

She never complained about taking me to the library every week.  I took out as many books as I was allowed, and sometimes she would borrow extra books for me.  I read so fast sometimes I would go through them all before the week was up.

Before I started junior high and puberty, I was a sought-after tomboy.  I played punch ball, kick ball, and baseball with my brother and his friends.  Mom must have realized I wasn’t going to fit in well in junior high and so we went shopping for clothes that were “in” at the time: miniskirts, fishnet stockings, and cute blouses.  Honestly, the clothes didn’t help.

When I was abandoned by the few girlfriends I had, I asked Mom if she would drive me to school.  She was irritated at the inconvenience and demanded to know why.  I got up the courage to tell her and burst into tears.  She immediately softened and agreed to drive me to school so I wouldn’t have to walk alone.

In 1980, my beloved Grandma died.  Mom and I stayed in her cottage for a couple of weeks while arrangements were made for her funeral and to decide what to do about her things.  I was 25 and my relationship with Mom was on again-off again.  Her drinking and mental illness had already adversely affected me.

I found Grandma’s diary and read it.  Shocked, I realized that Mom, Grandma, uncles and aunt had all been domestic violence victims.  My grandfather used to hit my Grandma.  My uncles would jump in to stop him, and Grandpa would turn on them. 

My mother’s and my aunt’s deafness were a big reason for what happened.  My grandfather didn’t tell Grandma that he, himself, had two deaf sisters in Norway.  He didn’t tell her his own hearing was impaired.  The secret came out when the family learned that both the girls couldn’t hear.  Grandma was heart-broken.  She described Grandpa’s rages against them.  He’d bang their heads against the wall in frustration and struck out physically in other ways.  My breath got caught in my throat reading that diary.  My God, it explained so much about Mom and her behavior.

I showed it to Mom.  After she read it, she told me that she remembered the abuse.  On the other hand, my Aunt Betty, Mom’s older sister, did not.  Mom told me that my aunt always denied any memory of it and Aunt Betty was gob smacked when she read the diary.  I meant to hold onto it but ended up showing it to my Uncle John, Mom’s brother and my godfather.  He wanted to hang on to it, promising we’d work on a family history using some of the information but I never saw it again.  I have a feeling my uncle got rid of it.  When he passed away, I asked Aunt Joyce for it and she looked but couldn’t find it.

What happened to Mom made me realize that domestic abuse passes from generation to generation and that’s why I went for counseling and 12 step meetings, especially after I married and began to have children.  There was no way I was going to pass that horror to my children.  I think I was mostly successful there.

One of the strategies I use when I am having a flashback is, after working through the worst of it, I try to remember the good memories.  I just wish there’d been more of them.

 

Don't Tell Daddy

I remember the last time I felt connected to the child I was supposed to be.  It was a warm summery day after a rain.  I was about 4, wearing a sun suit, and went outdoors to play with my baby brother.  He was still in diapers, the old-fashioned cloth kind, and not much more than a toddler. 

We explored the yard and were delighted to find a small mud hole.  It was still partially filled with water.  Swimming pool!  We took turns plopping ourselves down butt first into the little mud hole, splashing ourselves and giggling with delight.  It was my brother’s turn to sit in the mud hole and I was watching him.  I never saw my enraged mother loom up behind me.

She grabbed my arm and turned me to face her, and I thought a monster had taken my mother’s place.  Her eyes were blazing and bulging; her face a near shade of purple.  Her hand swung back, up and down and the next thing I knew, I was laid out flat out the ground.  Something warm gushed from my nose, tasting of salt.  I was too stunned to move.

Suddenly, Mom was there again.  Picking me up in her arms, she rushed me into the house and put me down on the kitchen table.  She pushed my head back so my chin was in the air and pinched my nose.  Nasty salty stuff went down my throat.  She was saying to me, “Don’t tell Daddy. Don’t tell Daddy.”

That was when I learned the number one family rule:  don’t tell.

Until then, I’d felt safe and surrounded by love.  My grandparents lived across the field and all of my maternal relatives lived within a short drive of each other.

I felt shame.  I must have been such a bad awful girl to have made my mother so angry.  Of course, I wouldn’t tell my Daddy nor Grandma nor anyone else how I’d been so bad and made my mother so angry.

I didn’t realize that my mother wasn’t well emotionally in addition to her deafness.  Looking back, I suppose my father must have suspected because he’d come home from work and frequently took my brother and me elsewhere.  We’d go to the neighborhood beach or to McDonald’s to feed the seagulls fries.  I spent a lot of time with my grandparents during the week and weekends.  It just seemed normal.

Mom had recurrent bouts of rage, totally unexpected and out of the blue.  There was violence.  I remember seeing bruises on my brother’s legs from the broomstick with which she’d hit him.  He must be very bad too.

Was this normal?  When I visited my cousins, aunts and uncles, everyone seemed happy.  Was it only at our house that my brother and I would hide in fear from our mother?  We didn’t have the words or the courage to ask.

I knew I wanted to live with my Grandma.  At the end of a weekend stay, I didn’t want to go home.  Ever.  I would hide, even knowing I would be found and taken home.  And then my mother would come for me, enraged that I’d embarrassed her by hiding.  I remember backing into corners, my arms thrown up in front of my face, cowering.

Sometimes she would reach out to touch me affectionately or give me a hug and I would draw back, terrified she’d turn into the monster again and hit me.  It was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy because pulling away always made her angry.

Still, there were some limits to her violence and I credit the rest of the family around us, particularly my Grandma.  Did she sense something was amiss?  Was that why I spent to much time with her?  She’d pick me up after school, and we’d walk back to her little cottage.  It didn’t matter what we did together.  The important thing was that I felt safe and loved.  I came as close to still growing up the way I was meant to if I’d had that love throughout my childhood.

When I was 9, my dad was laid off.  He was a printer, one of the few jobs open to a Deaf man.  There was nothing available on Long Island and so we moved to Baltimore, MD.  My brother and I were completely removed from all of our extended family. 

For my parents, it was as if restrictions on them had been lifted.  They discovered a thriving Deaf community with an active social club.  They began spending weekends there, drinking and gambling.  With increased drinking, so did domestic violence begin and increase between my parents.  Usually, my father hit my mother but many times it was mutual combat.

Imagine being a little kid with a still growing brain absorbing up close and personal your parents punching, slapping and clawing each other.  It was terrifying.  Were they going to kill each other?  We should stop it!  We would try to put our little bodies between theirs but they would just shove us out of the way.

We lived in a row house.  The fighting would be so noisy sometimes we’d hear our neighbors pound the wall to keep it down.  No one came to the door to check on us; no one called the police.  So, was this normal then?  After a big fight, if we’d see one of the adult neighbors, they always looked away.  Everyone was being too noisy.  Bad.

There was no one ask for help.  There was no such thing as child abuse or trauma or domestic violence in those days, the 1960s.  For days or weeks, the house was cold and silent as my parents gave each other the silent treatment.  My brother and I crept around, trying not to be noticed. Eventually it would be broken, usually by my dad, who would come home with gifts and flowers for my mom.  Life would be good for a month or two and then they’d come home drunk and fighting again.

Another dysfunctional family rule centers on roles.  I became the “hero”, the quiet good girl, non-rebellious and obedient.  By junior high, I’d put on stress weight from trying to keep things on an even keel, keep my parents happy so they wouldn’t drink and fight.  I had some oddball magical thinking routines like this one: if I stayed awake until they got home from the club, they’d arrive safely and in a good mood.  I became reclusive.  When they did fight, I’d lock myself in my room when things got out of control.

My brother became the “black sheep”, the one who was always in trouble at home and at school.  As he grew older, he began skipping school regularly, drinking, fighting, and running with a gang.  He didn’t like to be at home.  Once close, we drifted as teens.  We were polar opposites.

I don’t need to go into any gorier stuff to show how being exposed to frequent, unexpected violence in our home changed us.  I continued my reclusive ways all through high school.  I didn’t date.  The thought of having a boyfriend filled with me horror.  It wasn’t that I wasn’t attracted to boys.  I most certainly was.  I just didn’t want to love someone who would beat me up.

Don’t tell was such a hard fast rule that I was totally tongue-tied when a perceptive teacher reached out to me after class one day.  The words tried to form.  My mouth opened and closed and I tried to speak but my jaws and tongue felt locked.  I couldn’t tell.  A thought crossed my mind as I stuffed my feelings down.  The teacher sensed something was wrong.  Did anyone in the extended family guess?  What about the neighbors who could hear the sounds of war through the walls?  I concluded there was just no help because of the don't tell rule.

I wrote before that I began to have panic attacks, brought on by what I know now was dissociating.  Sometimes things were just so bad, I could feel myself become completely numb.  I felt detached, almost as if I was no longer part of my own body.  The weirdness of the experience brought on the panic attacks.  They occurred spontaneously and unpredictably.  I felt as if I must get up and run or I would die.  But I would force myself to stay still and act as if nothing was happening.

I told my parents I was afraid I was losing my mind and that I needed a doctor.  They wanted no part of that.  It would be embarrassing to them if their friends found out.

It’s no wonder I believed sincerely that I would never marry.  I would never have children.  To live as my parents had seemed a fate worse than death and there’s no way I would curse any child of mine with that legacy.  Besides, I was losing my mind.

Meanwhile, my brother was having his own issues related to trauma.  He suffered too.

Domestic violence is passed generation to generation until someone takes action to stop it.  I did.  I began to seek out psychiatrists, therapists and 12 step meetings to help me work through my dissociations, panic attacks, chronic depression, and codependent behaviors.  It’s not one and done.  This has been a process that has gone on for almost 50 years.

I’m better, yes.  I did marry.  I did have children.  I did not abuse my children.  My husband and I did not hit each other.

And, yet, I still struggle some days with feelings and memories.  I don’t talk about it much because of well meaning people who say, “It’s over”, “think positive”, “it could’ve been worse” to try and help me.  Those words just trigger me more.  It took reading this article to get a better understanding of why: https://themighty.com/topic/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/trauma-cant-let-it-go/

So.  There’s no getting over the injury trauma has done to my brain and personality but I am as close now to being that 4-year-old I once was as I’ll ever be.

 

My Inner Child Rages Against J.D. Vance

 

My insides have been churning like a boiling cauldron about to spill over.  It’s my inner child silently screaming “No, no, no, no more hurting children like that!”  Vance is the Republican candidate for an Ohio Senate seat.  He believes that people should stay in a marriage even if it’s unhappy and, worse, even if there is domestic violence (DV).  He seems to believe that children are better off growing up with DV than they would be if their parents got divorced. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/07/jd-vance-violent-marriages

My inner child screams: How can he say this?  He says he was a witness to domestic violence in his own family.  What is wrong with him?

And: I grew up with domestic violence.  My brother and I saw our parents attack each other physically when they drank.  Trying to intervene didn’t work.  Hiding shut out the sights but not the sounds.  I locked myself in my bedroom and turned up the music as loud as it would go.  My brother took to roaming the neighborhood.

And:  One time the fight was so violent, we both ran from the house and took refuge with our next-door neighbors.  We lived in a row house and we could hear the crashing, punching, slapping and screaming through the wall.  Heads down, we felt fear and shame.  No one spoke about the noise.  The neighbors didn’t call the police.  So, was this normal?

And: I had to call the police during a violent brawl.  Both my parents were bleeding from wounds they’d inflicted on each other.  Two policemen arrived and were instantly uncomfortable when they realized my parents were Deaf.  One turned to me and said: “You don’t want us to arrest them, do you?”

Yes, I did.  But I didn’t say it.  Instead, I asked, “Can’t you make them stop?”

He answered: “Why don’t you leave the house for a while?  They’ll stop eventually.”

So. This explains the effects domestic violence has on children. https://www.marriage.com/advice/domestic-violence-and-abuse/effects-of-domestic-violence-on-children/

My mother had an undiagnosed mental illness.  She could fly into scary rages, turning into a red faced blazing eyed demon right before our very eyes when my brother and I were little.  I was afraid of her.  I would try to hide and that just enraged her even more.  She would hit or punch us.  This would happen when my dad was at work. 

What was wrong with her?  I have no clue because she never received any real help.  Many times, she was depressed in addition to being angry.  She tried to commit suicide a couple of times.  The first time, I called the operator to get help but my dad took the phone away and hung up.  It was too embarrassing to ask for help.  She had taken a bottle of pills so my dad and I dragged her semi-conscious self around the house until she woke up.

When I was much younger, we lived on Long Island.  My beloved Grandma, my safe place to fall, was a short drive away.  We were surrounded by my mother’s loving relatives: my aunts, uncles, and cousins.  I stayed with my Grandma frequently on the weekends and didn’t like to go home.  None of the family realized what was happening with Mom.  We seemed to be the perfect little nuclear family.  It was comforting to know that there were places I could feel safe, even if no one knew what was really happening.

When we moved to Baltimore, my brother and I lost the love and support of our extended family.  We were on our own.  My parents started going to a social club for the Deaf and began drinking excessively.  That’s when the violence between them began.

My brother and I are not who we are supposed to be.  My inner child was left behind when I was still very young.  Our personalities changed.  Both of us developed PTSD although it wasn’t recognized then.  Only soldiers who’d been in combat suffered from recurring memories.  It was a shock to both of us to be diagnosed late in age (50s).  Our therapists had to explain: you’ve been in a combat situation yourselves.

As a teenager, I became reclusive and introverted.  I had friends but did not want to invite them over.  I didn’t want to go out, either.  If I stayed home, maybe I could keep my parents from fighting.  When my dad would come in from work with a case of beer, I’d begin trembling. I couldn’t reach out to anyone because “don’t ever tell” was a family rule.  Don’t think.  Don’t feel.

I was depressed.  I began to have panic attacks and thought I was losing my mind.  I explained to my parents what was happening and asked to see a doctor.  They were horrified.  No way!  Everyone will find out.  Oh, the shame!  I finally got counseling and medication to manage the attacks when I was out of high school and working.

My brother?  He quit school when he was 16.  He began drinking, smoking and running with a neighborhood gang.  He didn’t want to be home at all.  He would be out of the house for hours and hours.  I envied him but I couldn’t do any of it myself.  I had to be the “hero”.

My brother and I have talked about our growing up years a few times.  He has no happy memories of childhood.  I remember my loving Grandma; he doesn’t.  He doesn’t remember our father taking us to the beach to give our unhappy mother a break.  He doesn’t remember the family gatherings we had with our Long Island relatives.  He is angry and bitter.  I feel sad.  I don’t know how to help him other than to keep loving him.  He’s been married three times.  I don’t know what his home life was like and what my niece may or may not have witnessed.

I have been in and out of counseling for years.  I’ve been to 12 step meetings.  These have been enlightening and have helped me change behaviors I witnessed but don’t want to repeat.  I still have memories come up that enrage me.  When I heard about J.D. Vance’s comments, I felt rage building as memories began flashing back.

J.D. Vance, if you were victimized by domestic violence, how were you affected?  Did witnessing what you did normalize it for you?  Is that why you expressed such ignorance and insensitivity with your comments?

My inner child wants you to know she became lost with all that she was forced to see.  My inner child would have preferred to live in a divorced family.  Being poor and hungry would have been preferable to living in fear, wondering when it would happen next.