eaglesnest

As a toddler, I called my mother by her first name, L, & created interferences (I would wake my baby sister up) to prevent my mother from being beaten by her first husband. From the tender age of 2 or 3, I looked out for her much more than she looked out for me. Instead of leaving an abusive man to protect the two of us, L “schemed” to get pregnant again.

“Then someone would need me to take care of them. That would be enough of a reason to leave him.”

That was 36 years ago. My little sister is currently pregnant with her second child, a daughter and has a 14-month-old son. Many things L did messed my sister up enough that she had to allow herself to be fired from her “very important corporate career” before she’d allow herself to de-stress enough to get pregnant. There is much more to that story, too. However, I am not my sister & this is not her story. Her life is only pertinent when it affects mine.

Then again, her very existence affects every aspect of my life.

As L’s child, I was not important, not needy enough; not dependent on her for her to make the important steps to leave abuse. I was not enough.

Until today, I have couched this little gem of a family story in as much “positive” spin as I could to stomach it, to not let it get under my skin, itch up into my eyes, twist my guts about like a macramé plant holder. I tried to create a sense of self-sufficiency, self-dependency. “See? I was so self- assured I didn’t need anyone to take care of me, to look out for my best interests.”

Forget that I was only 3 and she was supposed to be mothering me. Her lack of self-esteem & confidence AND more importantly self-worth were so overpowering and I was so mature, so “independent” that she NEVER mothered me. I had to be my mother, her mother, and later my sister & my brother’s mother.

As I said, until today, I didn’t allow myself to accept that what she was saying with her actions and later her words — she told us these things, like you might tell her girlfriends over margaritas, when we were very young — was that I was not important enough.

Nevertheless, somewhere, some how I internalized that fact and it has not only coloured my relationship with L and my sister but with the men in my life, as well. I allowed myself to struggle through a decade of emotional abuse & neglect in order to provide my daughters a good life, and in order to NOT be L & end up divorced. I put the emotional needs of my son’s father ahead of my emotional needs for almost another ten years, in order to NOT be L & leave another man when my oldest daughter was preparing to leave the nest.

Here I am — divorced from the father of my daughters, as was L {well, my sister’s father anyway} and about to take my son away from his father when my oldest child enters adulthood as L had done when I got married at 20 and she packed up my sister & brother and divorced her 2nd husband.

The difference is I waited until my daughter no longer needed me to provide a support structure and so I would not yank her out of her senior year and move her around. L did that to my sister — she moved away during my sister’s last year of high school. My sister retaliated by moving in with a friend’s family. Moreover, just to be crystal clear, L did not wait until I married because I no longer needed her; she waited because then I was no longer there to take care of her, & my siblings.

I was not going to be her mother anymore.

I was about to have my own children.

There were times I did in fact mother L again, of course.

There was the next boyfriend, who was abusive physically, emotionally and who abused drugs & alcohol. There was the “big fight” they had that involved the police. I had to sit her down and explain that there was no excuse EVER for a man to hit a woman. NEVER.

L moved back in with her parents for a few weeks. I was 25 and she was 42. I was very angry off because I did not, never had, never would have parents, Mom & Dad, to run home to if I ever needed.

There was the brain tumor.

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