[Interlude] The love I crave, but can't recall

Photo by Viktor Talashuk on Unsplash

I woke up at 4am this morning to the news my mother is dead.

No one called. I just happened to see the WhatsApp notification when I glanced at my phone. It’s a weird way to find out that one of your parents is gone, but also strangely fitting.

At this point, I hadn’t spoken to mum in years. And the news she was dying did nothing to change that. Not that it would have mattered. By the time she passed, dementia made sure there was almost nothing left.

For most of my life, I’ve not been able to think of her without remembering the day that broke everything. I was fourteen, and had finally found the courage to tell my mum that her boyfriend had tried to SA me. I guess, deep down, I knew something awful would happen, but when my mum started screaming, it still hit like a fist.

I don’t think it even entered her mind to believe me. Not even for a second. Despite the fact I’d never lied in my life. That I was raised that way, under threat of dad’s violence. Even through the shock, I can remember being surprised. Realising for the first time how little she knew me.

The verbal assault went on for over an hour, while I was curled in the foetal position. Sobbing, swearing over and over again that I was telling the truth, while she threw out all the old, familiar insults. I was selfish. Manipulative. Spiteful. She was shaking with rage, blocking the only way out of the room, yelling that I was jealous. Demanding to know why I wanted to ruin her relationship.

It only stopped when the boyfriend finally admitted what he’d done. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t taken pity on me.

I wonder if she’d still be screaming at me now.

That memory is burned all the way through me. The softness of the armchair I was curled in, cradling me like an open hand. The evening rising in the window behind my head.

But when I heard that she’d died, strangely, it wasn’t there. I felt its absence, like a missing tooth in my mind, but the memory that came to the surface was something much older. Not really a memory at all, more like a feeling. The glimmer of old-fashioned Christmas lights. The warmth of someone who loved me.

Because she had loved me once. So long ago that it’s hazy and soft-focus in my mind. I think she loved us all when we were babies. It’s only when we grew into actual people that we became a threat.

In a way, that makes it even harder. Because it’s tough to reconcile those two women: the one who cradled me when I was small, and the one who, once the court proceedings were over, chose to marry the man who’d tried to assault me. A man who, as it turned out, had already assaulted many other children just like me.

It would have been easier if she’d never loved me at all.

At least then I wouldn’t have spent so many years wondering what happened to that first mother. The mother who doted on me. And I wouldn’t have spent so much of my life turning that pain inwards, wondering what I’d done wrong. How awful I must be to have made that gentle woman turn on me, like Lilith devouring her young.

From the vantage point of all these years, it’s getting easier to see her as she really was: a woman who was brutalised, by one man or another, her whole life. Who was beaten savagely by my dad, and stayed for over twenty years because it was better than being alone. Who only left when she already had someone else, and abandoned her children with the husband who’d shattered her bones and dragged her across the floor by her hair.

A person so wretchedly desperate for love that it ensured she never found it.

And who wouldn’t have recognised it, even if she had.

It’s sad, but it’s sad in the same way as when it happens to strangers.

I’ve always been curious how I’d feel when she died. If there’d be some huge rush of buried emotion. If I’d regret carving her out of my bloody, broken life and setting myself free.

In the end, reality was less dramatic and more mundane, as it often is. Maybe I’ll feel different in a week, a month, a year. But for now? I feel almost nothing at all.

So, goodbye, Paula.

You live on in my constant fear, my hypervigilance, and pathological need for control. In my narcissistic tendencies, and the ten-year abusive relationship that I was too scared to leave, because I was just like you: desperate for the same impossible love I’d only ever read about in stories.

The love you gave me, once or twice when I was too young to remember, and never again.

Wherever you are now, I hope you have it.

That love you burned your life down searching for.

Photo by Morgane Le Breton on Unsplash