I think I’ve been depressed most of my life. I can remember as far back as junior high school there was this boy that always called me “stoneface”. At the time I thought he was making fun of my acne. It was many years later that I came to understand that he gave me this name because I never smiled.
As a very young child, when I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I didn’t answer with the usual, “I want to be a doctor” or “I want to be a teacher”. I always said, “I want to be happy”.
Happy is all I ever wanted to be but keeping my mother happy was so much more important because her other moods were so scary. Her mood would change on a dime, the unpredictability was the scariest part of her illness. One minute she would be calm and the next she would be in a rage. Sometimes I could see the mood change in her face but even then, by the time it showed on her face, it was too late.
Once the physical violence began, she didn’t seem have the control to stop. She would hit until she didn’t have the energy to continue, then she would drag us upstairs by our hair or by our ears to our rooms. We would have to stay in our room until her mood changed and she would remember that she left us there. Sometimes these punishments were for the most minor infractions, something that maybe yesterday was not a big deal.
When one of my siblings was the object of her anger I would have to go outside because the screaming was so upsetting. I can remember thinking that when she would scream I could almost feel the windows shaking. When they would be crying out or laying on the floor with their legs and arms in the air trying to protect themselves from her blows it was horrible. I don’t think it ever became “as usual” for me, it was always terrifying. As I write this now, it still brings up so much emotion.
I grew up with 3 siblings but I’m not going to talk much about them because this is my story and I know we each have a different view of our childhoods. One of the reasons would be that we were all treated very differently. The boys were definitely favored over the girls and the ones that looked more like my mother were definitely favored over the ones that looked like my father. Unfortunately, I was the girl that looked like my father. Even though I was always treated the worst, I was the “lucky one” because I got away and saw the truth of what we’d been living with and began a new, healthy life.
The physical abuse is not what has stayed with me all these years. It’s the mental and emotional abuse that lingers. I’ve had to work so hard to replace all the negative things I was told about myself with positive self talk. The hardest thing of all was getting over never having the mother that I dreamed of having. I’ve had to learn to be that mother to myself and to definitely be that mother to my children.
I may not be the greatest mother in the world but, my children will never, ever wonder whether I love them or not because I have told each one of them every day of their lives how much I love them. They also know that there is nothing in this world that they could ever do or say that would make me stop loving them.
