Not sure why this has suddenly come back to haunt me but the sense of having been completely betrayed by my mother kept me awake last night.
I've thought about it factually many times over the years but haven't experienced this level of emotional response since I was a teenager. Although I've never discussed it with anyone, I assumed that I'd processed the experience and successfully moved on but evidently it's not so simple. I also know that other people experience far worse. (I hate being vulnerable or seeming to be looking for sympathy IRL when others are in worse situations.) But last night I was in tears in 4am over this which isn't like me at all.
It's possibly re-emerged because I now have my own DD and perhaps sparked by some recent threads on here where some brave mothers have defended their daughters from physical, sexual or psychological abuse.
I have one brother a couple of years older than me. When we were children he was very competitive and used to get angry when I did anything better than him. We sometimes fought physically when we were small but there was usually an adult around to put a stop to it before any damage was done.
By our teens the physical fights had stopped and his behaviour turned into very unpleasant name calling, swearing and threats.
I know this doesn't sound like much but I actually found a cassette I recorded when I was 12-13 (with the intention of showing it to my parents as proof) of him chanting over and over again at me "You stupid, fucking bitch, disgusting cow etc..". He would do this for long periods of time in an attempt to provoke me into losing my temper or make me cry. When I told my parents, my mother dismissed it as "just copying Blackadder"! I learned to completely blank him, no matter how I felt, and to this day am very good at keeping cool under pressure and dealing evenly with bullies.
One day when we were in our mid-teens (think that I was 15 and he was 17), I was babysitting a neighbour's little boy (~6) for a few hours after school. My parents weren't yet home from work so it was just the three of us in the house.
My brother began bullying the little lad and scared him so much that he locked himself in the upstairs bathroom with my brother threatening to break the door down. I was obviously extremely angry and shouted at my brother to leave him alone. He then turned around and shoved me so hard that I fell over, hit my head (and nearly fell down the stairs). He knew he had gone too far and left. I persuaded the younger boy to come out and luckily he was fine once he saw that my brother was gone. We walked around the block until I saw my parents' car and then the neighbours' car arrive home. I walked him back and then went into the house.
I was still totally shocked and shaking as I told my parents what had happened. My Dad was angrier at my brother than I have ever seen him, shouting that he didn't want men who hit women living under his roof and threatening to throw him out, change the locks and call the police. My mum calmed him down, spoke to my brother and then came to my room to speak to me.
In brief, she blamed me for the whole episode, for making my brother lose his temper, for making my dad lose his temper and running the risk of splitting up the family.
Even at that age I was feminist and well-read enough to know that she was talking crap but it didn't make it any less hurtful, especially after she had dismissed the earlier verbal abuse in the same way. I told her that she should have taken my brother to a child psychologist years ago. (I'd been suggesting this since I was about 12.) She just said not to be so silly, that it was too late now anyway (he was over 16 and she could hardly make him go etc..) and to pull myself together.
We're now in our mid-thirties and I see my brother once a year at christmas. We're usually civil and distant with each other for the duration of the holiday. My mother keeps pushing us to build a closer sibling relationship on the grounds that we'll "need each other later in life". If I mention the conflicts of our teens as a reason I have no interest in this, she dismisses it with a "you were children then, don't be so immature" kind of response.
Does it always come back like this in the end?
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Resentment resurfacing years later of mother who didn't defend me from my brother
10 replies
anonyma · 12/11/2010 13:15
OP posts:
dittany ·
14/11/2010 16:01
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