Before I continue, I’d like to stop and give you a little more background of the dynamic in the relationship between me and my mother. For many years I watched Jay mistreat my mother. I watched many times as she tried to leave him, to protect her children, and herself, only to be easily wooed back into the relationship each and every time, as if a spell had been put on her will.
I tried in earnest to intervene, and to reason with my mother in private; to get her the hell out of there, but did so to no avail. I knew, mainly by watching the Oprah Winfrey Show that there were programs that helped women leave abusive relationships, but she would not respond or take heed. I also learned through Oprah, this was a part of the abuse.
She was very subservient, which made my fathers’ over-dominate personality the stronghold that was the super-glue of their relationship. It was totally a ‘Me Tarzan you Jane’-type of marriage. I felt sorry for my mother, but it was like she was blinded by that kind of love. The sense of helplessness had an effect on me and on my sister.
No one would believe that a mother would stay with a man who was physically abusive to her children. I spoke out many times about the abuse, only to be let down by my mothers’ dismissals of my outcries. Her denial made me look like I was lying about how Jay treated us. My cries were made to look like the boys’ who cried wolf did. She witnessed, firsthand the abuse; and a mixture of fear, denial and love caused her to reject my calls for help.
This had a great impact on the way I saw her love for me, or, as I often thought, lack thereof. She told me she loved me, she showed her love many ways, ways by which I could not deny that she didn’t love me, except when it came to the relationship between her husband and myself. She was blinded. How could she? How could she allow him to do this to her? To me? To us? I asked myself these questions for many years. It was all so confusing.
It hurt me terribly to know that she would do that. Back then though, I didn’t understand that she thought she was doing it to protect us. Maybe she was, but I sure wished she would have listened to me, I wished she would have had more confidence to take charge, more trust in the system, and most importantly, I wished she had had more love for HERSELF. I think life for all of us would have turned out so much more gorgeous back in those far away days. But it didn’t, and that is ok, but still, I wish.
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