The following essay was written in response to an online comment about sexual abuse. It is a difficult topic to say the least. In keeping with my ongoing fascination with how race and colour play out in the world, I began to think of my own abuse, in conjunction to my academic studies: how Whiteness and its power plays out in literature and attempting to understand how this same relationship has inadvertently played out in my own life.
First came sleeplessness. My earliest memories are of insomnia. Then came physical torture in the form of being wrapped and pinned into sheets while she jabbed my fingers with pins and needles attempting to rid me of the pus infecting my fingers. Somewhere in this time I climbed to the top of a sewing machine to glance in a mirror and saw, with shock, that I did not look like this blond haired, blue eyed woman that called herself my mother. Me? I had cotton candy brown hair and golden brown skin.
As my body developed prematurely, the onslaught of verbal abuse began; ranting endlessly, it seemed, at my audacity - hidden deep inside; this innate evil- to look ready for sex. These years with her, in those moments, were simply my life. They were not ‘the abused years’, they were my childhood. It all culled into a moment of violence so profound and permanent, resulting in my survival and her having no one now but her own dog to humiliate.
My attempt in this essay is to try and examine what it has meant for me to have been raised by a white woman who carried herself with all the privileges that being white entails and what affect this has had upon my life since. I do this too because as an adult I had a ravenous academic interest in Bi-racial and bi-cultural studies receiving my MA degree examining various relationships between literatures (American/Canadian, Afro-Canadian and Afro-American), ideologies, and what race means to various cultures. I do it too because the fact that my abuser was my mother and racially different from myself has had a lifelong impact upon me. Survivors of abuse have a myriad of triggers and while issues of race are deemed subjects not to be talked about in polite company, her whiteness, coupled with my abuse, has had a profound impact on me. Abuse is abuse and no one comes out of it unscathed. All survivors share the same difficulties and shame; it’s just formed under different circumstances.
I was born in the United States in 1959, only five years after Brown v. Board of Education and in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, I grew up in an atmosphere of ‘race issues’. My own parents were caught up in this atmosphere. My mother, of German descent, the daughter of a Nazi sympathizer, I don’t suppose could think of a better way to upset her parents than to marry a Black man. She never talked to her father again after she married my father and my grandfather, whom I never met, returned to Germany, where he lived out the remainder of his life, presumably to be surrounded by like-minded people. My father, coming from the segregated south and who often recalled stories of childhood friends ‘lynched for looking’ made it his goal to marry nothing but White women. Out of revenge? Because he had a ‘catch me if you can’ attitude? Who knows. Their motivations are for them to explore, not me.
Everyone has their psychological trauma/drama. And while I am not going to address, much further, my parents’ motivations for marriage it needs to be mentioned, and stated clearly, that my parents were married in 1949 and it was my father who was the more educated (Columbia University) one of the union. I need to say this because part of the ongoing trauma that I often experience has to do with White assumptions about my being bi-racial. It always involves imaginary thoughts that me and my four brothers have different fathers (White women who have children with Black men are suspect in American culture. The “One Drop Rule’ was created to enforce and forever keep people segregated). This is separate from me and more a matter of historical (USA) reasons behind the ‘One Drop Rule’. White women who go out in public with their bi-racial children are often asked it the children belong to them. The children hear this and begin to wonder why this question seems never to be asked of their White counterparts. White people think nothing of asking me if my siblings and I have the same father. This is asked under an assumption and the assumption is based upon notions of race and the need to ‘place’ people as soon as possible in the places we need to place them to keep our own internal balances balanced.
Sexual abuse is assumed to be committed by, and we ‘need’ to place it, upon the shoulders of men. When we try and imagine our mothers abusing us we are committed to the belief that men are somehow ‘born’ to be non-nurturers. We imagine worlds run by women as being better places. Some lesbians I have known have gone towards women because of past abuse by men and they imagine safer havens with women. For some, sexual abuse can not be imagined in the hands and arms of mothers. Our ‘mothers’ are the ones that care for us and lay their lives down for their children. But what if this is not always true? Where do we go then? What will happen to the world if we learn that woman are just as capable of the same insanity that we want to attribute to something male? What then?
Much has been written about same sex abuse between males and I have felt over the years that it is even sometimes perceived as a skewed type of ‘normal’ because, again, this is presumably ‘male’ nature to abuse. Often these men struggle with issues of sexual identity because too often the culture of masculinity requires men to be men which really means: be strong, which is a euphemism for ‘don’t say anything’. In religion and a host of other areas, it is women that are seen as able to control themselves whereas men can’t. So it is women that have restrictions placed upon them. Everything a man does wrong is somehow a woman’s fault. In Islam women are separated from the men because of the notion that women will distract men from the business of being noble. Birth control is given to women because men can’t control themselves. Women are advised to wear different clothing otherwise men rape. Sexism knows no boundaries. Notions of mothering and motherhood are universal notions. I can not think of any culture, country or society where mothers are not deemed as the quintessential bearers of unbounded love and the proper gender to be responsible for the care of children. We often hear one can do without a father but one can not do without a mother. I beg to differ.
When I tell people that I have no relationship nor have I talked to my mother in well over 30 years, it is me that is looked upon with suspicion. I am told everyone should love their mother. My own brothers place calls to me telling me she is getting old and I should make amends with her. Let me say right now, that I am long over hating or despising her. After almost half a century of therapy, I am rock solid in my knowledge that she has issues, not me. I was not abused because I was another colour from her or perhaps looked like my father. I was not abused because I began to talk and have notions that differed from hers. I was not abused because I was sinful and had provoked my rapist, at the age of 9, to rape me. It was not my fault that, at the age of 9, that I began to menstruate. I did nothing to warrant her locking me in closets, inserting fingers into my vagina (on Hymen Patrol), or attempting to kill me on numerous occasions. I was abused, and if you were abused, we were abused because our/your abuser - unless certified insane- chose to abuse us.
Abusers have choices too. The language that we use to try and figure things out and the assumptions we make about why some things are, need to be made clear for survivors of any abuse, but most certainly for women who have survived abuse from icons of what ‘love’ looks like and is supposed to be. At 54, and only recently, when declaring that I do not have a relationship with my birth mother, have a finally been asked: What did she do to you? Usually I am scolded for not speaking to my mother. No one who has been asked this question under these circumstances will fail to understand the immediate wrath I feel towards the person posing the question. I, usually, if I care enough to do so, ask the questioner, what circumstances they might deem it ok for a person not to talk to their mothers. What scenario can they come up with where they would find understanding towards a person, such as myself, who refuses to speak to their mother. Each and every time the same answer is given: Well, jeez, if she tried to kill you or abused you in some way. My response is always: I rest my case. Sometimes, if I am not so lucky, I then get a comeback that demands that I explain my abuse so that the questioning party can further determine if I was abused enough to warrant my behaviour. It seems that under special circumstances there is still room to blame me for my mother being provoked into abusing me. I really don’t blame the questioner, I blame the methods by which we as members of society learn to adopt ideologies no matter the cost to self or the society as a whole.
I was abused because a woman, an adult woman, who chose to have children, lost her own control, for whatever reason, and took it out on me. It is not the colour of my skin (how would that be my fault?) that caused her to abuse me. My early menstruation was not a sign of my potential slut-factor- it was biology- (no pun intended), period.
The last letter I received from my biological mother read, in part that she stopped feeling close to me when I was 3 or four years old. I had purposefully taken the unopened letter to a therapy session and demanded that my therapist open it and read it aloud. I wanted proof that I was not making this shit up where it pertained to her. When he read that passage I began to laugh uncontrollably. I blurted out: What could I have possibly done at 3 or 4 to rankle my mother? Poop in my diapers? Spell ‘delicious’ wrong? What in the world could a three year old do so wrong that abusing the child, me, seemed in order? He said: you began to talk. That shut me up. For about 15 seconds. He explained to me that this notion that mothers love their children (all throughout each stage of growth) is a fallacy. Specifically, he meant that some women ‘love’ being pregnant. Others ‘love’ newborns. Yet others still, ‘love’ their children when they are toddlers, or teenagers and so on and so forth. Women are told to love their children and they repeat over and over again that they do. They say things like: I love them all equally. Rarely do you hear women admit that it was all a big mistake on their part. You rarely hear a woman say I loved them only when I was pregnant but after they got here, I hated the job of parenting. They are not allowed to say these things out loud but I am sure they are thinking it. They are not allowed to say these things because they too buy into the notion that they are beacons of hope and all encompassing bearers of love.
I recently Googled ‘Women on death row’ in the United States. Go look for yourselves. A surprisingly high number of women sit on death row because they murdered their children. I can not stay statistically what this means but I can take an educated guess and say that I would bet motherhood is not all it’s cracked up to be.
I have suffered immensely from the tension and trauma that grew inside of me because of my abuse at the hands of my biological mother. In my 20’s and thirties, when I found myself around women that physically resembled my mother, I would begin to shake and sweat. I drank alcoholically before I came to understand what I was trying to deaden with this sort of drinking. I am thankful for cell phones because they allow me to ‘know’ who is calling before I answer the phone. That phone allows me to say: I am in China, if I don’t want to see you. I no longer jump out of my skin when someone comes through the door. I have finally figured out that I am the way I am NOT because I was abused but rather because I have done the absolute best that I could, given my circumstances, and I survived! And I came out the other side a rather whole and remarkable woman. I don’t owe anyone an explanation for anything. I paid my dues and did the work necessary to become whole. I don’t abuse other people and I do my utmost best to not participate in the proliferation of female fallacies that women need to be perfect. I shove books into people’s hands who are suspect of my truths but prefer statistical evidence. I share when it is necessary but I no longer feel a need to tell my truth to every passing stranger.
I have difficulties being around children. Little children. I prefer teenagers because I perceive them to be ‘old enough’ to tell me to fuck-off if they don’t like what I am saying. Anyone wee’er than a teenager feels too vulnerable to me and I can’t stop the thought that I have, that someone so little, like that, I once looked like. I am not comfortable looking at little wee ones and wondering or thinking if someone might eventually, or is presently abusing them. It is too ghastly a thought for me and while I am sure it has to do with subconscious feelings, I just prefer not having little children in my life. It brings up too many feelings belonging to me. I see little kids and I try and understand what is it about them that adults can’t see, that I see, that would cause an adult to harm them. My brain can’t wrap around it. It’s like I loose consciousness.
I was given the task of babysitting once, and I agreed because I knew the parents and liked them and offered to help them out. The three hours I spent watching the kid was so horrendous for me that I refused to do it again. It is funny to me now, but then it was too much. I spent the entire three hours worried to death that my mere presence would cause the child trauma. Why? Because I had this idea in my head that female adults loose their minds and abuse children. I say ‘loose their minds’ because you have to have lost your mind to do such things to a child. And I was scared to death that minds could be lost at any moment. While you are eating a cheese sandwich, or maybe babysitting. When was the moment my own mother looked at me and decided to go from loving me to abusing me? Was she watching The Ed Sullivan Show? Watering plants? When? I suddenly became terrified that in three hours, left with a child, I could morph into my mother. I wanted nothing more than to run home and shut the door. I had to think rationally. Doing so would mean I would abandon the child and possibly put her in danger by leaving her alone in her home. So I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t check on her every five seconds, because that would cause her, like it had me, to feel nervous about someone entering her private room. I couldn’t do that. So I sat on the couch and chewed my fingernails and prayed that I wouldn’t loose my mind before her parents returned. Usually we imagine the children running to doors when their parents return with stories of babysitter abuses but it was me that ran to the door absolutely overjoyed to know they were back and I could escape! These things make no sense to those that were never abused but they are often the internal dialogues that survivors mull over. I am unable to see children in myself. I was never care free or allowed innocence. And when I see it, it confuses me. It stirs in me the only time that I ask myself: Who would I be had I not been abused? This question is impossible to answer, and really not worth the effort to ask, because the answer must include: It might have been worse.
America and Americans are in a perpetual dialogue about race. It is never ending. I imagine that there will be those that read this essay and immediately come to the conclusion that bi-racial children shouldn’t be had because they will read what I have written and apply the ‘tragic mulatto’ notion to me. Don’t bother. You will be wrong, and you will have also abused me even further by placing blame on me for my existence. I am not a tragedy. I am an adult woman that was abused by a white woman who took no responsibility for her actions and decided, despite being offered, to get the help she needed. That is her baggage, not mine. Whiteness has a behaviour in much the same ways as the stereotypes placed upon those of colour. Whiteness is in a position of power and privilege in our society and the concept that it stops when Whiteness parents children that are the offspring of a coupling with a non-white parent, and further presupposes that women, regardless of colour, are immune to abuse, is a fallacy and needs to be addressed from that standpoint. White women are held up as the standards of beauty. If the culture I live in sees me as not as beautiful as my own mother... Where do I go from there? If random strangers, think I don’t belong to my own mother, then who am I? Who do I belong to? If White mother’s are constantly asked if their children were adopted or someone else’s children, when is the breaking moment when parents suddenly see their own children as alien and different? Part of the ‘Tragic Mulatto’ notion is that we, the bi-racial children, are neither black or white and that this somehow leaves us empty and confused. Again, children don’t gather information like this, it is passed to them in subtle messages.
My birth mother once made the comment that: Parents are always right. They are the adults and children will never be believed over the adult. Aside from the fact that this is a very odd comment for a person to make it is also the comment of White privilege. It is the notion of a person who also fully understands that in her country, culture, and society, Black people are second-class citizens. Do not imagine for one moment that I think my abuse is more, or less, horrific than anyone else’s, it is not. But in a culture where race plays such an important part of our history, specifically between Blacks and Whites, it has considerable importance to my ruminative nature as the land where I live does not allow me to say I am the same race as my mother. I am made different by the colour of my skin. Further, it is assumed, that this is my problem but this is where I say: No. My White mother, during a time in American history, when African Americans were being lynched, segregated and harassed within an inch of their lives, emotionally and sexually abused her Black daughter. That has a double ramification and it has profound meaning when that same daughter must go out into the world and face White people and a White culture that thinks it their right to be first in line. A culture that imagines it my place to accept shit the way it is. Who thinks I received a good education because I had a White mother. Or who tell me I speak so well because I was raised by a White woman. Who believes anything good about me comes from her Whiteness. The society I live in, presently, constantly tries to reaffirm what my birth mother tried unsuccessfully to instill into me: that I am a worthless piece of shit that deserves my lot in life. That inherent in Blackness is something bad and wrong. That Blackness (me) can be abused because it is perceived as worthless, or imagined to be the source and cause of your frustration, or current predicament.
My birth mother, when interviewed by my eldest brother, and asked why she had so many children, said: So you all could have someone to talk to who looked like you. If there is ever a reason NOT to have children, that has got to be in the top five. It also tells me that on some level she didn’t want to talk to us, or couldn’t talk to us. That we were somehow different from her.
When you have that kind of emotional distance between yourself and your children, that is the moment, I think, one can loose their mind and begin abusing.
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