My Mom, The Deceiver (Part 2)

It’s almost Easter, How fitting that I'm writing about this at this time. Easter...a new awakening, rebirth.

I am learning what is true, and what is NOT.

What is betrayal, and how do you move past it?

How do you write about how your own mother betrayed you?

It rips my heart out all over again and drains me to the core. This last week I have dreaded going over this albatross that is my mother’s journal.(Even though its only 30 pages) I have pussy footed around the subject, even avoided it. And yet there is a part of me that says you can face this. You MUST face this.

Writing down my thoughts for my life story has me beating a path to the computer room at all hours of the night.

The worst thing is that the only documented history comes from my  mothers journal. And I don't even know if it’s the truth. In fact, I'm SURE it’s not. There are too many holes.

When I was young she told me to only write positive things in my journal which as  you can imagine, left a LOT of empty pages in my journal. The first thing I see in her journal entries on me is that it’s ENTIRELY negative, and only on me being the problem. Did she tell me not to write anything negative knowing all along she was writing what she did? I believe so. I believe that she was trying to lay the groundwork to cover up the fact that my father was severely beating me in the event that it ever came to light.

Well guess what mom? ITS COMING TO LIGHT.

Even so I'm being tortured by thoughts.

Waking me up in the middle of the night.

Remembering old hurts.

As if my mind is saying "FINALLY!" NOW I can unload! It’s a relief and a torture all in one. Old monsters coming out of the closet, and yet, maybe it’s because I feel protected from those monsters that it feels safe to come out.

But I am looking that monster in the face and saying "Honey....you don't scare me anymore.".

And I am realizing, it’s not a monster at all. It’s just a scared little kid in the closet with a costume wanting to be understood.

My mother’s journal has made many trips  from one side of the state to another, from one box to the next, more than once with me almost throwing the journal away over 20 years, until I finally threw it into a box, shut the lid and didn't look at it. I didn't want to deal with it.

Just last year I was cleaning things out of our garage and putting all our stuff into boxes and labeling them (I can find ANYTHING NOW, at least that’s what I tell myself:p) found the journal again, standing there hovering over the garbage can, thinking about throwing it away. My husband came into the garage, telling me not to throw it away and I'm sure bugging me once AGAIN about how I should write a book.

I'm sure I rolled my eyes and shrugged it off.

This month, I FINALLY decided to dig it out. I looked through every box. All day I did this.

 NOTHING.

Then I had a thought as I was digging through the last box.

Something said "That Journal you’re looking for is in the computer room."

(I have had moments like this, when I KNOW things are somewhere. (Once with something important my daughter was looking for, and suddenly I KNEW where it was. The second time a friend had decided on a name for their little boy. She gave us a clue, said it was a name from the bible, and nobody could guess it, but all of a sudden I knew EXACTLY what his name was. GABRIEL! I exclaimed. "HOLY COW". She said.:p I Every once in a while those kinds of things happen.)

I love those kinds of moments.

So, I looked till I was done with that box, and was getting up to go up the stairs to the computer room when all of a sudden my husband came down the stairs and opened the door. "Guess what I found!" He was holding the "journal" he'd been helping me look for. He had suddenly disappeared, with the same idea to look upstairs in the computer room (I would call it that in the loosest sense of the word, it looks like a copied spiral notebook. One that looks like it could have been done in one day. Even has headings in some places in it. Who writes headings in a journal? My sister Ava brought that up when I sent a file for her with the journal so she could read it)

And whats with the same handwriting through the whole thing? It looks like it’s in the same ink all the way through. Same handwriting. I know when I write in my journal it’s with whatever pen I can find, and I write differently depending on how tired I am.

So why does it all look the same? Was my dad there dictating to her?

There should be a post about the first time I was beaten, when I was 9. My beautiful pink nightgown being splattered with blood as I cowered on the bed, my blood spraying all over the beautiful blue walls of my room. And them making me having to clean up the blood afterword’s off of those walls as if my beatings were my fault. I know this is uncomfortable to read, but I want you to understand there are children out there who deal with this daily. I am not going to pretty this up because that is what we are all supposed to do. This is what is in the mind of a child watching her blood splatter in the walls. This is their reality. MY reality at 9, and I don't want to ever take what happened, to me or to them, and make it more comfortable for anyone.


Where is a post about my dad forcing his foot over the bathroom door where I had barricaded myself every time after a beating where he would try to clean up the mess he had made. Saying he was sorry the whole time but ALWAYS doing it AGAIN. His I'm sorry's were as empty and as phony as he was.

What about a post on my dad bashing my head against the wall until I passed out?

Strangling me?

Throwing a microwave at me?

NOWHERE.

The fact of the matter was, I was being beaten between every week to every month.

The TRUTH is, it’s literally a miracle I made it out of there alive.

I thought my mother was safe to confide in. My mom would always come and sit with me on my bed and talk to me. She even told me how much she hated my dad and then she would make excuses for why he hit me...Work, bad day...anything...She told me how much she hated him yet she would never leave him.

That’s why when my counselor gave me this journal (If you didn't know how I got this journal and why, go back a couple pages;))I was so confused. How could I be her confidant (I thought she was mine) and instead she’s saying I'M the monster here?

An interesting pattern emerges here in every entry where I'm sure there was a beating.. My mom ALWAYS says I hit first.

I don't remember EVER doing that.

I DO remember once, as a senior in high school they taught self-defense for a week. I was dead serious about learning it because I thought for once, maybe I could defend myself against my dad once he started to attack and then maybe he would stop hurting me. Looking back...Having to feel like I had to use it on my own father, I realize how sad that is.

The one time I fought back harder than ever with the tactics I learned from self-defense class while he was beating me was the time I almost lost my life. 

Although things are so serious here, during this whole thing, life is throwing me little intermissions from these horrible things, knowing that I can't handle writing all of this in one LONG drawn out sitting....

There are the times that old memories wake me up, but today the thoughts were funny.

Today I woke up laughing.

What made me laugh?

The phrase "Kicking against the pricks" was in my mind when I woke up. I was kicking against the pricks. Not biblically, but literally, in my mind. HA HA.

Even with all this going on, there’s still that quirky side of me that STILL sees how funny life can be, even when it’s not..

Even better now that I'm looking back seeing how bad it was that I can laugh anyway.

Kind of like giving abuse the finger.

No matter what anyone throws at you, you can just laugh in the face of it, no matter what they do to you, even if you feel like crying.