Mourning a Loss

I’m at a point of mourning. Its been two weeks since the “loss” of my mother. Even though it was my choice and she is very much living, I feel in my heart this is absolute. Therapy has become intense and we have reached a core, it’s brought up these feelings I have been covering for far too many years. Your made to believe “blood is thicker than water” and that no matter what your family does to you, you suck it up and deal with it because it’s family and no one will love you like family. Frankly all of that is a bunch of bull shit. My mother was supposed to love me unconditionally and she couldn’t ,her love only comes with conditions for me. A mother is supposed to protect her young and care for them and she couldn’t do that either. I am so incredibly angry, hurt and sad about everything. Yes it’s my choice not to have her in my life, maybe that makes me selfish because I know there are people in this world that would do anything to have their mom in their lives. I don’t regret my decision in fact after hearing a fight between my mother and brother this past week over though phone while I was talking to my brother I KNOW I made the right choice for my family and I but it doesn’t make it any easier.

After all that I have been through I thought nothing really could affect me anymore but I was wrong. This whole thing has damaged me. I feel like damaged goods. I feel so broken, and while I try to glue the pieces of me back together I have no one to hold the pieces up for me. It’s all on me. I have never been so hurt by one person in my life. Through the sexual and physical torment by others I have always powered through some how. I remember thinking at the age of 12 “God” had only put me on this earth for the sick use of mens pleasure, that I was worth nothing else because every man I should have been able to trust broke it by laying their hands on me as a child, but yet here I sit at the age of 20 and I feel nothing. I’ve dealt with it. It wasn’t easy and it landed me in the hospitals many times but today it no longer bothers me. Yet my mother is what consumes my life while putting these toxins in my life.

I can’t even tell you how many times I have apologized to my husband for treating him the way my mother treated me. Every time he tells me its okay and that we’re going to make it through this. It’s not fair to him, he is this amazing man that deserves no less than to be treated the way he has showed me kindness and understanding. It’s so hard to break this cycle because while I would never in a million years treat my son the way my mother treated me I find myself doing it to one of the people I love the most. I will break this cycle one day some how. I know I am bigger and stronger than this.

I’m hoping one day soon, I’ll find peace and tranquility in everything I do. I can’t even remember the last time I felt peace over my mind, my life and inside me. How long is it okay to grieve this loss of mine? Death or no death this IS a loss and it hurts. I know nothing besides death is absolute but I feel it deep inside me that my mother’s and I’s non-existent relationship now IS absolute. I have never been unable to forgive but this time it’s just not inside me. I am tired of being damaged goods and hurt all the time. I am sick of being disappointed I can no longer bare this pain any more.

I remember going to church as a teen sitting in the pew in tears because I didn’t understand how this spirit who I didn’t “know” could love me unconditionally yet my mother could not. She always used the devil and her religion against me. To her I was this demon possessed Satan’s daughter that needed to be “rebuked” I now can no longer sit in a church without being completely and utterly disgusted. I can’t even have peace with my faith, whether I am an Atheist or a Christian or whatever I find no comfort in anything. I hope one day sooner than later preferably I find comfort in something because I really would like *something* to lean against.

While I close a chapter in my life and start writing a new one this is one chapter thats difficult to transition from. I’ve been sucked in for so long something has to give and this time it won’t be me. I won’t put up with it anymore.

I promise to love myself unconditionally even if no one else will.

I promise to love my children unconditionally because I can do nothing short of that.

I promise to only search for my approval from now on.

I promise to cry when I need to because it does myself good.

I promise to keep the toxins out of my life not only for myself but for my son and husband.

I promise to break this cycle one day, and take it one day at a time because it’s just like an addiction.

I promise to do the best I can for my son

I promise to mourn my loss and take it one day at a time.

Child Abuse Awareness month

In honor of Child Abuse Awareness Month (April) I thought I would write a different blog post.

I am sure some will say that this blog is “too much information” or even vulgar. How dare I speak of the things that happened in my home and in my childhood. Though we do hear of many child abuse cases it is still unbelievable how many children’s lives right now, were very much like my childhood. How it’s shameful to yourself to speak out and tell someone. How other family members are to turn their heads and just ignore what is going on in their own houses or within their family. It is impossible for no one to know that child abuse is taking place. There is always at least one other adult that knows. It is not just physical abuse that can kill a child. Their souls can die from emotional and verbal abuse. No matter the kind of abuse whether physical, emotional, verbal, mental, nonverbal and sexual, it is still abuse and can kill someone. Their body may be physically alive, however the inside of them are dead. Their souls are darkened their joyful spirits are gone. Some are survivors after a more difficult road that only one couldn’t even begin to imagine. The healing process some how kills you inside, over and over until it just doesn’t anymore. It’s a daily struggle to deal with and affects your every day life. You fight daily to break the cycle because it is a very vicious cycle to get caught in. You become so angry with yourself, with others, and even with people that had nothing to do with what happened to you. Some become abusers to go on and abuse others they way they have been abused. The rest of the victims aren’t here today to tell you what category they would be in because wether someone else took their life or if they took their life it was still from the abuse they endured. Someone that has been abused is also looking at mental health problems as well. So please if you know a child is being abused or even suspect it, you can save their life. I know how it feels not wanting to get involved but imagine how you would feel if something happened all because you didn’t call, because of not wanting to get “involved” it take less than 10 minutes of your day to give a child a lifetime.

Dear Mother

This is an ACTUAL e-mail I sent to my mother this morning

Dear Mother,

I am writing this email to tell you I am done. I am so sorry since the day I was born I never was good enough. I am so sorry I never made you proud or ever got your approval for anything. It doesn't matter to me anymore, I am done looking for your approval because the only approval I am looking for anymore is MY approval. I never got the love and support I needed from you. I am so sorry I had to look for other mother figures because you BEAT me and verbally and mentally abused me. I have absolutely no respect for you except for the only one thing you did right and that was not aborting me.
I am so sorry that I can't forgive you. What you did and the way you have treated me my entire life is just unforgivable. I could NEVER treat Nolan like that. I hope you don't treat anyone else as badly as you have treated me. You never accepted me for who I was and you were the one who always wanted me to be someone else. Sorry you got stuck with a drop out child bride bisexual daughter. If I am not good enough it doesn't even bother me anymore. I am tired of you dragging me down. This "relationship" we have is horrible for me and so toxic. I find myself treating Chris the way you treat me and it's not fair to him. I gave you your chance to fix this. All it would have taken is one phone call. You have to much pride to even muster an " I am sorry!" but maybe you can't even muster it up because you really aren't. The way I am isn't because of all those men that abused me, I am the way I am because of YOU. Your so toxic, that I refuse to have it around my son or I. I want absolutely no contact with you anymore. Consider this my bow out, my resignation of being your daughter. I hope you have a wonderful life but I refuse to be apart of it.

Amanda

An Abusive Home (Part III)

My stepfather one night decided it was a good idea to photograph my sister and I. She was 13 I was 11. Not just your average pictures, I am talking child pornography. We were only babies still. We were afraid if we didn’t listen to what he told us to do we would be beaten, my mother was only in the next room sleeping.

By the time I had reached the age of 12 I was deeply disturbed by everything that had happened to me thus far in my life. No child should ever go through what I did. I had tried to commit suicide 3 times (that I really did want to die) had cuts and scars on my arm from cutting, because I was so numb from the pain I needed to know that I somehow was still alive, if not emotionally at least physically. I had been hospitalized (medical) for one major suicide attempt thinking there was no other way out, because I felt so much pain inside it was unbearable. My soul was so wounded and scared that I felt like everything was beyond repair and that I had nothing to live for. I felt as if I didn’t have a mother that loved me, the only person in this world that understood me had died when I was only 10. My sister and I always fought, my brother and I were never close due to age and gender differences. My step father was physically abusive, he had even given my sister a black eye. My mother after everything came out even entertained the idea of taking him back, that was the night my sister got a black eye from him. I tried to call 911 for help but she (my mother) took the phone from me. I knew what they were doing was wrong and was child abuse.

I had a brand new prescription for Wellbutrin and Tegretol. I took ever single pill got up in my bed and prayed to God I would never wake, because my life was too much for my little soul to handle. I was tired of the abuse and being questioned by police about what happened with my step father. I remember easily drifting off thinking my soul would finally take flight and become peaceful. I remember waking up at some point and puking and then laying right back in my vomit, I didn’t even care I just needed to be at peace. My mother found me just in the nick of time to save my life. It took 5 EMT’s and firefighters to hold me down to get on the gurney, I don’t even remember this. Even in my medicated induced coma I still knew I wanted to die. How very sad (and preventable!) this was. I stayed in a medicated induced coma for 5 days, I had tubes to breath for me as I had stopped breathing on my own, a tube down my nose to pump my stomach, the stickies on your chest to monitor your heart. I remember my first breath of my “second” life. I took in my first breath and I realized I couldn’t breath that something was fighting against it. I apparently had my arms tied down from trying to take out the tubes and what not in my unconscious state. I easily lifted my left arm and tore the tube out of my mouth (and down my throat) so I could breath and then back into the medicated induced coma I slipped. I remember waking up at some point looking over my shoulder looking for my mother, only to see my step father one of the major reasons I had done this to myself. I slipped in and out of my coma a few times before fully waking. How could she let someone that had physically, sexually and emotionally abuse me and one of the main reasons I had ended up in this state come into MY room?! I will never pretended to understand why my mother did the things she did or allowed what she did, nor do I really care to.

An Abusive Home (Part II)

From the age of 5 she had been trying to get doctors to diagnose me with SOMETHING so she could get an SSI check for me (well really for her) I was diagnosed with ADHD first (yes at the age of 5!) I was put on every medication in the book, because there must be something wrong with me.

I remember everything so clearly this one day. I was only 11 and I was cleaning the bathroom. I had finished and had asked my 6 year old brother to go get me the mop water so I could mop the bathroom floor. My mother had just steam cleaned the carpets and he accidentally spilled the mop water all over her floors. When asked who spilled it, he lied and said it was me. I told them it was him. I remember the sun still up and standing in the kitchen our backs faced to them. My mother had this long 15” paddle that was thin green plastic in the shape of a rectangle and it was the worst paddle she had. We were hit on our bare asses until the sun was long gone. Their arms had gotten tired with no regard that we were in tears from the pain so they decided it was finally time to stop. My brother still refused to tell the truth. Then we were forced to have dawn dish soap in our mouths and hold it there for a few minutes and then swallow it. I couldn’t keep it down, ran to the bathroom puked and was made to go back and put more in my mouth. Again my brother still wouldn’t tell the truth, though I don’t blame him he was terrified as was I. We had these hard mexican red tile floors in the kitchen that we were forced to kneel on and I remember us both crying, we hurt, we were so scared but they didn’t seem to care. Finally the torture stopped. HOURS LATER! Our asses were black and blue we couldn’t even sit down. It stayed like that for weeks. People knew but no one dared to speak a word.

After everything had happened to me by the age of 12, my home life started to get worse. I realized that I was bisexual and I had no where to turn but my mother, I was confused and a little scared of my own sexuality. My mother rejected me, she refused to hug me or kiss me or tell me that she loved me, she actually told one of her friends it was because “She was afraid it would turn me on!” REALLY?! Who the fuck does that?! Do you not hug, kiss or say “ I love you” to your straight son because your “afraid of turning them on”? I felt so rejected by the one person who should have accepted me most, my own mother who carried me and gave birth to me. I don’t care whether my son is straight, gay, or bisexual. I will love him no matter who he is or his sexual orientation. I feel such a bond with him, I never could have imagined feeling such strong emotions for someone I have known for such little time. I bonded with him through my pregnancy, through his birth and after he was born, how could I NOT love him?! I couldn’t even fathom treating him this way. My mother disregarded me and all of my feelings, for some reason she was so selfish when it came to me.

An Abusive Home (Part I)

I wasn’t sure where to start this blog or even how, but I will start with my home life first, the blogs will be out of order of which it happened in my life, but here I feel is where I need to start first as this is what I am dealing with now as a mother myself.

I am the middle child out of my mothers children. There are three of us. My older sister and I have the same mom and dad, my younger brother has the same mom but different dad. My father left when I was 8 months old, he seemed to love his alcohol more than my sister and I. When he drank he was severally abusive. I couldn’t even crawl yet and while he was beating my mother my sister only 2 years older than I would pull me under the bed to protect us. I am sure some how she saved my life, with all the physical abuse that went on. He would get so angry when he had been drinking, you couldn’t even recognize him. He was a good man when he was sober and he loved us girls, just not enough to put down the bottle and pick us up instead. My mother became a single mom of two girls and some how we made it. My mother got knocked up by some other guy when I was about 4 and after having my brother when I was 5 for some reason she never could show me love the way she showed it to my sister and brother. I was always the odd ball out. I never got the attention I needed, I never even got the love I needed. I struggled with school, with everything actually because I didn’t *feel* loved. I never got hugs and kisses like they did I was always the bad child, the demon child. I was always being punished.

When I was only a year and a half I got spanked for walking across my mothers freshly mopped floors. I was just a baby! Somethings had happened to me (that I will later explain in another blog post) that was hard for me to cope with on top of the way my mother treated me. I acted out because I was too young to tell her what was going on. At the young age of 7 my mother told me she was going to sign me away to the state because I was too horrible of a child and too much for her to deal with.

Could you as a mother EVER tell your child that?! If you could/have I will tell you right now you must not love your child/ren the way a mother should. I could never ever in my life say something so horrible and so damaging to my son. Do you really care? Do you really love them? How do you speak to your child in such a manner?!

She threatened to give me away to the state uncountable times. Never once did she ever peep a word to my brother or sister about such things or ever talk to them the way she talked to me. I was always treated different like there was something about me or in some way resented me for something completely out of my control.

The reason for this blog

I am a 20 year-old woman. I am a wife, mother, daughter, sister, best friend, and a survivor. I have started this blog to tell my story and to start healing. This blog will be filled with heartbreak, raw emotions, child abuse but more important healing. I have had no easy life but I am determined to make it easier the next 20 years.