Emotional Abuse: My Experience

About the 'My Experience' series: http://www.ueadrop.co.uk/en/photos/breaking-news/2012-05-02/1171/the-my-experience-series.html

I have lived my life always wondering who I am because, until January of this year, I had managed to almost forget every detail about my childhood. I didn’t remember anything from the first ten years of my life. I always knew that my childhood had been different because my Mum wasn’t there- I always knew there was something missing from my life, but I never knew, or even understood, why! I knew that my Dad had left for a year when things with my Mum got really bad, and that he came back for me, but, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t work out why everyone else remembered times when they played in the paddling pool in their back gardens, or went shopping with their mums when they were six. Every time I tried to remember, I was confronted with the same black wall.

Then I found, in my adviser, someone I could trust. It’s weird because, as we sat discussing an essay I was in the process of planning, she saw in me the desperation, the feeling of entrapment and hurt that lay within me. All it took was for her to show me some kindness – and she did – and she still does. But, as soon as I began talking about how much I missed my Mum, I began to remember why she wasn’t there.
 

Let me take you back to my childhood.

I was always quite introverted, and I always knew that my life was different to other children’s lives, because I looked after my younger sibling; I cared for my Mother who was mentally ill and who often couldn’t get out of bed. I cared for myself when it should have been her that cared for me. It was when she began to tell me how useless I was and how much she wished she’d never had me that I began to learn to put up a shield. Her comments sliced through me like a knife, and even as a child, I learnt to hide away from those comments. Before he left, my Dad had always taught me that ‘sticks and stones may break your bones, but names will never hurt you’- and that was the motto I lived by. And it was fine. For a while. My time to let it out came when I hid under the covers of my bed- where the tears would silently run down my cheeks, one after the other. Sometimes, I couldn’t control them and those were the worst days- I felt weak when I cried.

And then things got worse after Christmas of that year. I missed my Dad so much; we had shared a bond that nobody would ever have been able to break. I couldn’t understand why he’d left me with someone who evidently didn’t love me. I couldn’t understand why my comfort blanket had been pulled from under my feet. There was no one there to let me out when my own Mother locked me in the cupboard; sometimes, I’d be there for a few minutes, other times it would be all day. The first time it happened, I cried and screamed because being in there was like having the breath sucked out of my body. Being in there was horrific. But, the more I went in there, the less I cared, because being in there was better than being outside where she could hurt me even more than she already was doing.

I remembered all of these memories only six months ago. If it was just that on its own, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad. But, then I remembered the time when she cut my hand with a piece of broken glass, the countless times that she left me standing at the school gate because she ‘forgot’ to get me, the time when she left me outside for half of the night because ‘I was in her way’. In many ways, I am still failing to understand how this could have happened to me and I was so confused about why I was just remembering it now. Maybe it’s because, as a young adult, I’m supposed to be able to move on from these things. Maybe it’s because, as a young adult, I’m meant to be able to cope with this better.

But you see I’d grown up without a mother. But I’d grown up believing that she at least loved me. Those memories stole that away from me. For the entirety of this academic year, I’ve struggled to understand how I was that child. That child who was emotionally abused. That child who wasn’t loved by their parent.

And then, one day, not long ago from now, I remembered a time, when I was even younger than I was in the above mentioned memories, when my mum sang me to sleep. And, to most people, it’s a given that, as a young child, their mother’s sing them to sleep. To me, it was the best moment of my life. Because, if she sang me to sleep one time, she must have loved me one time.

I guess I will always live my life with the burden of emotional abuse- those are the scars we can never see. I will always live my life wondering what I could have done differently, and what I could have said to make her love me a little bit more. But, I’m learning to stop looking over my shoulder- to stop living in the past. I have so much to give, and my adviser has taught me that. She has given me, whether she knows it or not, a second chance. I was so close to dropping out of uni because of what I remembered this year, and if she hadn’t been there, propping me up every time I began to fall, goodness knows where I’d be now.

I know, and I’m crying writing this, that I am not the only person in the world, or even at UEA, who has suffered at the hands of someone who was meant to love us, and I want you to know, if you’re one of them, you’re not alone. I know how it feels to feel worthless and useless and like everything that happened to you was your fault. But it wasn’t. My adviser taught me that, no matter how much I’d tried to stop her, she would still have hurt me, and I am now learning to make my way through it. I am still having bad days, but my bad days are getting more and more outweighed by the good days. My bad days come when I remember that, despite all of it, I still love my mum and she’ll always have a special place in my heart. But now, now is my time to shine. Now is my time to move forward and claim every dream I’ve ever had. I won’t let her ruin my life anymore!

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