Abusive Mothers
There was a recent article in the newspaper about a Montreal mother who had, over a period of 20 years, visited horrible abuse upon her three children. This abuse was ongoing and sadistic. A domestic travesty of atrocity, and how it could have gone on without exterior detection, without anyone at the schools these poor children attended at least in their primary years is beyond comprehension. Then, of course, there is the father, where on earth was he while his wife and the mother of their three children visited such unbelievable suffering upon their offspring?During the recently concluded court case the three children testified that their mother, now 56 years old, punched and kicked them on a daily basis; she pushed them down stairs, gave them inedible food, or else neglected to give them anything at all to eat; abandoned them in surroundings other than their home for days at a time withoutout adequate clothing. She would follow them to school to ridicule them before their schoolmates. If they cried their mother would straddle their chests, cover their mouths and noses to cut off their breathing.
The mother denies this abuse ever happened. She plans to appeal the guilty verdict. For this inhumane treatment of her children the mother was sentenced to two years less a day under house arrest. What manner of punishment might be deemed adequate for making children's lives a living hell? To withhold from children emotional support, the kind of unconditional love and attention to their needs that growing children require is unspeakably cruel. Yet it would appear that these children have grown into well-adjusted adulthood, are well educated and have been able to deal with their psychological scars.
It is fairly clear cut that in this case the woman involved was unfit for motherhood. Her children suffered during their most needy periods of growth and adjustment to the world around them. That they emerged from their dreadful ordeal to become meaningful members of a society which clearly failed them in not taking steps to arrest the abuse they suffered is nothing less than a miracle, for it's fairly well accepted that children who have been unwanted and suffered neglect throughout childhood so often turn out to be anti-social, even psychopathic.
I too am an abusive mother. I never thought of myself that way. My husband and I have always loved our three children. We felt we loved them all equally and treated them equally as well, with equal regard and attention. I would be the first to admit that we were always over-protective as parents, and likely still are, although our three children are in their mid-40s. As a young mother I recalled how much I yearned as a child for my mother to love me; perhaps she did in her own way but I found it difficult to accept that she did, for she was possessed of an incendiary temperament and screaming and shouting abuse was a normal part of my upbringing. I vowed my own children would never have their emotional needs neglected by me.
It was natural for me and my husband to lavish love and attention on our children. It simply was just what we did. We wanted nothing other than to shelter them, encourage them to learn about the world and their place in it. We were always there, fluttering in the background, anxious that they come to no harm while establishing their personas, their interests in life. That might have seemed stifling in a sense to sensitive children. We went nowhere without our children, and because their father had a passion for exploring places and I had a passion for the outdoors we were always out and about in the natural world. We wished for nothing less than every opportunity to be open to our children, to expand their minds and their horizons, to reach their full potentials. And we had no doubt about their potentials. Life has proven us right in that regard, and we are proud of them all, of their achievements and their focus in life, their values and their orientations.
Yet, I am to one of our children an abusive mother. I say that because when hard pressed, when feeling her back to the wall, our daughter will regurgitate the same claims over and over again. Not so her brothers, and this being the case I can only conclude they feel otherwise. Our daughter claims, in any event, to have been held to a different standard than her brothers, and to have been treated differently. But it is our recollection that we required the same basic elements of behaviour of all three: that we know where they were when they were in their teens, that they observe a reasonable time to be at home in the evening.
Our daughter, however, zeros in bitterly on the fact that we, and me in particular, made her life miserable by protesting the type of music she listened to. Both she and her older brother played musical instruments, both played in orchestras, both took music lessons. But as she matured into her mid-teens she began listening to other types of music, and I can recall asking her to go through the lyrics of some Alice Cooper songs which I took to be severely misogynistic and to ask her if she agreed with the sentiments expressed. Which she did not. But the type of music and the decibel level continued to be an irritant between us. She chafed under our need to know where she was at all times; if at a friend's home we would require a telephone call informing us of her whereabouts. Our requirement that she be in the house at ten in the evening on a school night was also a source of contention between us.
She began to feel, she told us in later years, as though she was being deprived of oxygen, that her life was too fettered with our needs with no consideration for her own. Throughout her adult life our daughter has had one intimate relationship after another with men whom we always felt did not match her intelligence or background. Her ongoing relationships with these men was always troublesome, always wrought with disagreement and discontent. Her "abusive" relationships, she calls them, while bewailing the fact that she has been unable to meet kind and considerate men who would cherish her as she would wish to do them. Why, she has asked me, did I think she succumbed to such relationships? Well, her response is that because of her abused youth at my hands she is inclined to pair with men who will similarly abuse her. She considers herself to be irremediably burdened with low self esteem, and I believe her. I simply cannot understand why she sells herself so short, though, and have talked about this with her time and again emphasizing her acute intelligence, creativity, physical beauty and capability to excel at anything she puts her mind and hand to.
I don't for one minute doubt her pain. It is genuine. And while I have felt that she continues to shirk responsibility for her own actions, and uses this blame as an excuse, I also now feel that she did suffer trauma, and it has lasted, ensuring she has been unable to become fully adult. Perception, I have no doubt at all, is reality. And the reality is that she was a difficult, complaining and demanding child whom I treated in the same manner as I did her brothers whose personalities were nothing like hers. I thought I was right, perhaps I was not. Perhaps she required a freer rein, but I cannot convince myself of that.
Our family always vigorously debated items in the news, the state of the world, the country's politics, and in so doing our voices might become raised in the excitement of verbal exchange, although we always respected one another's opinions, and encouraged each other to explore, to raise questions, to weigh answers. But our raised voices vexed and frightened her, and to this day should I ever become exasperated sufficiently with her to raise my voice the result is an always-surprising venting of emotions. When one thinks of what parents now have to contend with: drugs, alcohol, tobacco use, I wonder how they cope and remain sane. None of our children ever had the slightest interest in using drugs, alcohol and tobacco.
To sum up: I failed, somehow I became, in my daughter's estimation, an abusive mother. All things being equal, there is no comparison whatever to how I behaved with my beloved children and the manner in which this dreadful woman deprived her children of a loving childhood. But the end result? Her children have survived reasonably intact, and my wonderful child was maimed. That old mantra of mothers' pain: "What did I do wrong?" It's mine.
posted by Pieface @ Friday, December 16, 2005
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