Broken Bough.

TW: sexual abuse, emotional abuse, generational trauma

Alright, kids, let’s talk about it.

In the tender year of 2018, I went and saw Lady Bird with my ex-husband. I cried through the whole movie, and continued crying for two hours afterward. I was wrecked.

Something about that movie touched every open “mom” wound I had, and I realized I had never actually confronted any of them. (My old boss also had the perfect touch for finger-blasting all of my open “mom” wounds.)

I had spent many years after high school, after I had run away from home, toying with the idea of “getting help.”

I sought it the same way people who had “fixed themselves” seemed to: self-help books, “self-care” (aka bath bombs and face masks, or worse—TREAT YOURSELF), rant sessions, internal monologues, guided journals.

None of these were the tools I needed.

I just kept reopening old wounds, salting them, and declaring them fixed. I’d convince myself I had some new understanding when, really, I was looking at the same things from the same angle with maybe a new philosophical quote attached.

I would bargain with myself and make excuses and, all around, just really hurt myself.

And everyone else.

Growing up abused can fuck with your relationship with anger.

When I grew up—as in, freshly grown up—I was pissed off all the time. About anything. It felt great. It felt justified, even though it was exhausting.

I told myself I had earned my anger.

I used to describe myself as PB&J: petty, bitter, and jealous.

I used to find so much beauty in being a piece of shit. The entire “this is just how I am” vibe.

Which, by the way, as a fully formed adult with my big juicy brain all developed, let me tell you how fucking gross living like that is.

There is a REASON I struggled to maintain and create healthy relationships in my early twenties.

(See: my entire life as well, but at least a few of those survived and are actually FANTASTIC.)

Nobody wants to be friends with a negative piece of shit.

For example: go watch BoJack Horseman on Netflix.

BoJack as a “person” and old Beef are two very similar beasts. The relationship he has with his mom is also a common denominator with my own.

As you’ve already gathered: my mom did the best she could.

I’m writing this from my “now” perspective.

If I had written and published this at the age of eighteen, I would’ve told you that she was evil. I would never go to her funeral. I hated her for everything she ever did to me.

Now, I can see more than that.

My mom’s story isn’t really my place to tell, but it’s part of my story, so I’ll do my best to explain it as objectively as I can.

My mom’s dad died when she was five in a factory accident. She was one of seven children, the third oldest.

My grandma was abusive: physically, mentally, emotionally.

When my mom had an allergic reaction and went into anaphylactic shock, my grandma was willing to let her die. When the paramedics arrived, she told them my mom was faking it.

That’s one of many delightful family anecdotes I got to hear from a young age, growing up in the same house my mom had been abused in.

And then there’s my grandma.

My grandma is a hoarder. She had three paramours, two of whom she married. One was my mom’s dad. Another was an alcoholic who beat her. The third is someone I never really heard about.

And, as far as I know, my grandma was abused too. She grew up in foster care.

We have a long-running family history of trauma, mental illness, and the complicated wounds that can come from adoption and abandonment.

My mom never got what she needed from her mom, which meant she didn’t know how to be a mom.

I feel like if I had been born a boy, my mom could have loved me better.

Broken mother-daughter bonds beget more broken mother-daughter bonds.

It makes me sad.

You hear the term “walking on eggshells.”

That was my entire childhood.

(The phrase is also, ironically, used to describe navigating a relationship with someone who has BPD.)

It started when my mom went back to work. The first seven years of my life, she was a stay-at-home mom.

I won’t say I was a good or bad kid. That’s unfair to myself.

I could’ve done more, sure. I should’ve just done my chores.

But I got good grades and didn’t really cause any trouble.

However, as I grew, from ages eight to eighteen, my mom and I had almost daily screaming matches.

Everything she did irritated me.

Everything felt unfair.

She would go through my personal belongings: notes from school, journals, drawings. She’d find things she didn’t like and yell at me about them.

I had no place to vent honestly because I knew she would find it.

I was a prisoner because I couldn’t be honest with her without repercussions.

I had a secret.

And honestly, I think this is what affected my relationship with my mom so much.

I was molested.

When she went back to work and I began the slew of babysitters that so many kids experience growing up, I was one of the unlucky ones.

I didn’t tell my parents until I was twenty-one.

And my mom didn’t know how to process it.

She was apologetic, but she also said:

“You were an easy target.”

That’s my mom.

And that sentence stayed with me.

Because when you’re a child, you don’t necessarily hear someone took advantage of you.

You hear there was something about you that made you an easy target.

And that is a really fucking awful thing to carry.

I feel like all of this came to a head in tenth grade, when my aunt told me my cousin was being raped by her stepdad—and that her dad knew about it.

This event found the last stable piece of my armor and shattered it.

This was the year my family fell apart.

The last thing I had.

After my aunt told me, and after a summer of her calling daily to unload her problems for hours, I shut down.

I had been away with her for a week to have a garage sale, which definitely isn’t weird when you grow up in [redacted].

In the middle of the week, I told my dad what I had found out.

My parents obviously didn’t know why this was so soul-wrenching for me.

They didn’t know about my own abuse.

My mom did the best she could by taking me away from my aunt.

My favorite aunt.

The aunt whose house I visited every year with my cousins.

My aunt—the alcoholic and drug addict.

This was the year I was shut out and excommunicated from the family because my mom finally tried to protect me from them after so many years.

I have cried many tears since this worst point of my life.

It was only the worst point so far.

But I still look back on it with so much sadness.

I never got closure for this situation, and I never will.

It kills me to think that someday I will have kids and they won’t get to experience a big family.

But I can at least protect them from what I had to go through.

That kind of fuckery is where I sat, explaining to my therapist that I wasn’t sure the first time I was molested was really molestation.

And then, a couple years later, I was molested again by a different person.

And there was the guilt.

And the shame.

And the shit my mom said.

My mom has always caused a lot of pain regarding my self-image.

She always said my thighs were too big. My breasts were too large.

She told me I was a slut if I wore anything revealing, which is hard when you have the body of a woman from the age of eight.

I got my period in the third grade, around the same time my mom and I became increasingly at odds.

I had been molested at that age, too.

Everyone looking into their life has pillars of significant events.

That was one of mine.

It led to years of broken self-image.

Disgust with my body.

Hatred for my reproductive organs and my gender.

Guilt.

Any time we’d watch Law & Order: SVU, I’d have hot flashes when there was a case involving child sexual abuse.

I had to swallow it down when I went to karate to “learn how to defend myself against the bad guys.”

I had to pretend it hadn’t already happened to me.

I couldn’t do it.

I was too meek.

Too eager to be liked.

At least in the first case.

The second time I was molested, I did tell an adult.

I told my assaulter’s mom—my babysitter.

She never told my parents.

This was a stamp of assurance on my “you’re alone in this” card.

I locked away this memory until I was twenty-one.

When I remembered, and worked up the kahonies to finally tell my parents, I was met with:

“You were an easy target.”

And I added another stamp to my collection of being alone.

In my mom’s defense, when she later ran into my assaulter’s mom working in town and was met with the old friend’s cheerful “How are you?!”, she ripped her a new one.

She championed for me in my absence.

She cussed their family name for defiling me and covering it up.

That was my mom, too.

And I think that’s part of what makes this so difficult to write.

My mom hurt me.

My mom also loved me.

My mom failed me.

My mom also tried to protect me.

My mom was hurt.

And then, in ways she probably never intended, she hurt me too.

None of these things cancel each other out.

When I would tell these very painful things to my therapist, I’d usually do so with a smile on my face.

And then she’d have me sit in it.

She’d mention how I wasn’t having the “proper” reaction.

How it was okay to process sadness.

Anger.

Guilt.

Disgust.

Guys, it was hard.

That meant I had to take ownership of these stories.

Not responsibility for them.

Ownership.

I had to accept the pain that came with these memories.

I couldn’t detach myself from it and act like it was okay.

I couldn’t smile through it anymore.

She told me after our first session, when I came in with a list and vomited it all over her:

“Your life is so sad.”

Then she asked me how I coped with all of these terrible things.

And that’s when I felt the validation that my life was sad.

That sounds strange to say.

But I think I needed someone to acknowledge it.

Not to tell me I was broken.

Not to tell me I should feel sorry for myself.

Just to say:

Yeah.

Some really terrible things happened to you.

And that’s when I had to learn how to properly deal with them.

Because smiling through the pain and burying it wasn’t cutting it.

I was poisoning myself.

I went through half a year of VERY intensive therapy, and she told me each session what good work I was doing.

And I strive for praise, so I worked hard because I wanted to get better.

And I did.

Until I didn’t.

But that’s the thing about healing, isn’t it?

You don’t get to complete the tutorial and unlock the achievement for being a perfectly healed human being.

You carry things.

You process them.

You backslide.

You learn something new.

You realize something you thought you had healed was actually just buried really fucking deep.

And then you dig it back up.

Not because you failed.

Because you’re still here.

Because these things happened to you, but they don’t have to be the only things you become.

I don’t know if I’ll ever have the big, happy, uncomplicated family I once imagined.

I don’t know if I’ll ever completely untangle every thread of trauma that was handed down to me.

But I do know this:

I can stop passing some of it along.

That matters.

If you were a victim of childhood sexual abuse, you can still get help.

Even if you can’t get justice for the crime, you can work to undo some of the pain associated with it.

It’s unfair that you should have to be the one to put in the work, especially since you had no choice in the matter.

But you are not what happened to you.

You are not an “easy target.”

You are not dirty.

You are not broken.

And you are not alone.

It gets better.