I have been trying to get out another post for months. I started like three. Nothing feels right. I tried starting one on making amends, but I think that needs to handled in private first. Or at least attempted. I still need to work through some things as well. I then wanted to do Part Two to be on the pain and memories. I’m not ready for that because of the fear that Nina will find a way to take those things from me. And the pain of never grieving and not sharing my coveted memories feels like the last things that I have that are mine. I understand that I said I wasn’t going to make this all about Nina. But guess what? That’s what this is about. She is The Antagonist in this narrative. My own personal bubble was burst last night in a dream. I woke up this morning with a stark realization that I’ve been gaslighting myself, again. Some habits are hard to break. Writing this has been and will continue to be therapeutic and an immensely helpful coping mechanism for me. Sometimes, hearing myself say it, describe it, talk about it, all of it; makes it more real. I’ve had all of these things in my head for so long, that they became something that happened to someone else, making the abuse feel less real. I don’t know if I’m making sense.
The self-gaslighting came in to play about the “why” of this blog. I started this blog to tell my story, to talk about the things that I went through, that happened to me. The main thing I keep telling the world in order to convince myself (this is self-gaslighting), is that I do this to tell others that they are not alone. And that if the Maternal Figure saw it, I didn’t care. That is the lie. I do care. When I write, I’m telling her all the things I was never allowed to say. If I “complained”, it would be turned on me. I would be told that she punished me the way she did because I was disobedient. Rebellious. That I need to learn the proper way to behave. Spare the rod, spoil the child. FUCK YOU! And all of the Biblical justifications you stood behind. I was told that if I thought I was being abused, then I should call the police. She would hand me the receiver and tell me she would dial them for me. Then tell me if they came, she would tell them all the bad things I had done, and they would take me away to live in a foster home. Oh, and she knew most of the police in the department because she went to school with them. This was absolutely true. Fucking small town bullshit. Yes, she absolutely reads these posts. She spends up to an hour on a new post. Probably reading and repeatedly rereading them. Throwing her typical tantrum of shaking her arms, kicking her legs and screaming like a banshee.
As far as I’m concerned, she wrote the book “How to Fuck Up Your Kids”. And this is the moment I sit down at the interrogation table and slide the crime scene photos across. Look at what you did. First, there is denial. Then as more evidence is slid across, the denial turns into pride and gloating. But the acknowledgement of guilt of what she did never comes. She will die feeling justified. Just like every other cult leader, because she did what was righteous and godly. This is the only way I will ever get closure, by writing about my experiences. It’s not a story, it’s a first-hand account. I said I wasn’t going to sugar-coat anything, but that’s what I’ve been doing. I didn’t want to trigger anyone, hurt feelings, or upset her. FEAR. I know I’ve been fighting a lot of demons. The biggest of those is not feeling safe talking about this, afraid of not being believed, and afraid of the Maternal Figure (or her followers) will come after me. I got called out, though. When have I ever been afraid of telling the truth or hurting someone by calling out the bullshit. And, if I unintentionally trigger someone, think about this… you are here reading this because you are looking for something. If you get triggered by what I’m writing, look inside and figure out why. Being triggered is your body and mind letting you know that something external is reminding you of your past traumatic experiences. Being triggered is a trauma response. Please reach out to someone you trust. A therapist, a close friend, a PCM, the Suicide Hotline (call/text 988), anyone! This is my coping, my dealing with my trauma, me letting the world (HER) know that even though my experience feels unique, I cannot be alone. With that being said, I need to unpack more so that I can continue to move forward on my path and get to the moments where I can make amends and share my memories.
I’ve talked about some of the following things previously. This time, I want to go into as much detail as I can remember. I have that infamous outline in front of me, edited and added to, and I want to start breaking it down. Instead of a long essay-style letter, I want to write one post at time with the amends and memories mixed in. I just want to talk to the page, where my comfort is. I have an image of her in my mind’s eye. Throwing her “I’m the victim” tantrum. So many things I wanted to say, but I couldn’t… because of fear. I’m not afraid anymore and Fuck anyone who gets pissed. I put on my Armor of Scars and Pain this morning. I’m ready for battle. So, let’s jump in:
Since I was little, as long as I can remember, Nina would tell me her side of the story about Eddie. She had me alone at the hospital in Galveston. She doesn’t remember any details about it. Only that Eddie dropped her off at the ER door and left. According to her, he abandoned her. Later, I would hear his story, without ever telling him hers, and it was so different. That was the beginning of realizing my life was built on lies. She would tell me all kinds of horrible things about him, everything from DV, abandonment, cheating, and more. There were no redeeming qualities about him according to her. It annoyed her that I laughed like him and told “bad jokes” like he did. She would tell me all the time that I look like him. But it never felt like it was in a good way. She would always get upset at divorced parents that “bashed the other parent in front of their kids”. All the time, doing it to me. It was ok though, because what she was telling me was the truth. (Hint: sarcasm) Then when I was divorced from my first husband, she would tell me not to talk bad about him when the kids were around. My whole life I’ve thought the same thing, “Bitch, stop being hypocritical”. I was always told, “you’re just like your father”. It was NEVER in a good way. Like genetically I was doomed to fail. Later as an adult, this would allow me to justify to myself my addictive, damaging behavior. She would tell me all the time how he locked her in a small house in Louisiana when I was a baby until she agreed to a divorce. She had no car, wasn’t allowed to go to the store, wasn’t allowed to leave the house, he locked the door. And I’m sure that now she would deny ever saying any of this. This story does not match the story Eddie told me. Again, I have never told him the shit she told me growing up. Seeing this on paper, part of my brain is screaming no one is going to believe this but the other side is just sitting there dumbfounded thinking “you can’t make this shit up!”. That’s why it sounds so unbelievable.
On to the stories of her childhood. She never shared a lot, but the little she did talk about… I’m questioning. In a way, I always have. She talks about how she would sit in the window of the apartment the family lived in, watching everyone get to play outside. She was too sick to go outside. How her father (my Papa) would make a promise to come get her and would never show up. This just happened to her, not her brother or sisters. She was always terribly, chronically sick as a child. Exaggerations? Questions…. She never talked about the time that my grandmother (Mo) spent married to my youngest Aunt’s dad. Nothing. She talked about how Papa spent time with other people’s kids and never her. How he picked everyone else over her. It’s just another story of how a man wronged her and had no redeeming qualities. I don’t know how much of this is true. I know nothing about my family, except through her version. And her version does not match my experiences and some things others have talked about. If you ask her, NOTHING good happened to her… EVER. It was all bad. I’ve seen her use these things to get other people to have sympathy for her. To draw them in. And I now see how she did the same terrible things to me.
She was the mom all the kids in the neighbor said they wished they had. I would stand there, bewildered., thinking to myself, “Was I missing something? Was I that evil that I really did deserve the punishments? What was wrong with me?”
Kinda bouncing back to her health. She says she had asthma and bronchitis as a child. Nothing supports this in medical records. I agree she did get bronchitis frequently when I was growing up but did not go to the doctor regularly and often treated it at home. She would often go to the small-town doctor where we lived. I describe him as an old country doctor. She was never hospitalized for the several times she said she had pneumonia or bronchitis. I’m not completely doubting these things, I’m just questioning the severity. She had high blood pressure, anxiety, constant pain, headaches… there was always something going on with her and it was always bad. By the time I was in my mid-teens, we were all seeing the new doctor in town. At one point, when I was around 17, he asked about how my mother was doing, I told him she was feeling pretty good lately, but she did complain about being stressed. He asked me if I could keep an eye on her and if I had ever heard of the term Munchausen. I told him I didn’t know what it was, he said OK, and asked me just to keep an eye on her. Looking back and now knowing what it is… yeah, some shit makes sense. She and Dad were in a horrible accident with an intoxicated driver around this time. They were both hurt pretty bad, but I think she used it to her advantage. She was in constant pain but didn’t want to take anything. She had trouble with blood flow or breathing (it always changed), and she needed a lot of Xanax to make it easier. And for the chronic headaches that she kept now. She took a few other common meds for someone her age, but never a lot. I get it and don’t doubt that she was permanently injured, that is to be expected after what happened to them. From my viewpoint though, it feels exaggerated. As she gets older, she does take more medication. In the grand scheme of things, nothing out of the ordinary. I say all of this, because she makes it seem like she’s dying. When I looked deeper into it before going no contact, it wasn’t that bad. She’s actually fairly healthy. One of the things that pushed me to the brink and realizing she was either making it up or exaggerating much of it, was the day I went over and she threw a three-year-old tantrum because her new doctor would not give her the Xanax any more. She was advised she needed to see mental health to get treatment to continue taking it. It was a full-on meltdown. My eyes started opening. I started asking questions to myself. She kept saying that there are five stages to fibromyalgia. And she was worse than stage five. Curiously, I looked it up, spoke with some doctors and a few people I met that also had fibro. All said the same thing, there were not five stages to fibro. Everything I found showed that what she told me about her fibro didn’t match the information I was learning. So how am I supposed to help her if she can’t even tell me the truth but a version to make it look worse than it really is? Never question the cult leader, that was the answer.
Some might think I’m out to smear her or tear her down or that I have no sympathy for her. On the contrary. I spent so much of my life and energy being sympathetic, compassionate, loving, giving… to the point that I almost died. It was like the life-force was being sucked out of me. The more I gave, the more she needed and the more she took. There were no boundaries and NO was never an option. If I pushed back and said that I had responsibilities to my husband or kids or other prior obligations, I was made to feel guilty for not loving her, that it was my duty to care for my parents, or (my favorite) tell everyone else “No” or that “you can’t” so I could be free to do what I needed for her. I was always expected to drop everything at a moment’s notice for her, yet I was made to feel like an inconvenience if I needed anything. Where was the “it all comes out in wash”, or the “if you help me, I’ll make it up to you”? The shit just goes on. She would give and give to everyone else, but I had to argue with her to get the Dodge truck that Dad wanted me to have, while we were getting her new SUV on the lot of a Ford dealership. And that’s all I was worth, “that damn truck”. Her words, not mine. And you better believe that that truck and every truck after it has been dear to my heart. Every time I get in, I say a silent “I love you, Daddy”.
I’m sitting here, swallowing my grief again. Joss keeps saying it’s ok, everybody grieves differently. But I never grieved. I just keep swallowing it back. Never allowing myself or taking the time to FEEL it. When Dad died, she played the grieving widow as long as it suited her, and she could get something from it. No one was there but maybe two people, to hold me as a part of me died, too. “You should be with your mother, it’s very hard on her right now”. What about me? He was my dad for 30 years! Am I not allowed to grieve and hurt, too? I stayed with Dad till the very end when they loaded him in the hearse to take him to the cemetery. Nina didn’t pay for a graveside service, so he went alone. They offered me to go with him, but I told them “mother needed me”. Mainly, I couldn’t bear to see him covered with the earth he loved so much. Conveniently, she stopped grieving all the time when she received the settlement from his second-hand asbestos claim. This is how I got the red Dodge MegaCab 1500. Dad even showed me a picture of one, in red, in a magazine and said, “That’s what you need, the one I want you to get.” And damnit, I did. She went to Dallas and spent a week or so with a cousin, spoiling her. I continued to live my life. He was my Dad, not my cousin’s. Jealous? Absolutely! And I think I have a right to be. She never even bought a headstone or grave marker for Dad. Years later his brother, I’m told, finally did. She could never afford it, and it didn’t matter. When I asked for information so that Ihnzo and I could do it, she told me not to bother, she wasn’t married to him anymore because she was married to Eddie… again… and it wasn’t our responsibility. I now had the dad I was supposed to have. You can’t make this shit up! You just can’t.
I hold my grief close to my heart, I guess. Thinking about it, it reminds me that I can feel and that I am human after all. It was hard at first, and I still cry, just not as often anymore.
I’m not ready to get deep into Dad right now. So I’ll go more into the hypocritical bullshit I was taught growing up. Again, she would say one thing but do something else. She would get angry over parents treating their kids as things to be seen and not heard. Kids should be allowed to be kids, she would say. Absolutely! But… her idea of me being seen or heard was to be up her ass when she was home. My toys were slowly moved outside to a storage building where I could play. Not even a cool playhouse. Just a place to haphazardly store them in hoarder fashion, sometimes with her extra crap she didn’t want other people to see. Eventually she told me that Billy didn’t want any of my toys in the house because I didn’t pick them up and I was messy. This was not true. When she was gone, I was allowed to bring in toys and play in the living room. Leve would help me clean up and take everything back outside. Nina would say one thing, but my grandparents would let me do the complete opposite. When she was home, I was more than likely with her, up her ass, playing go-for. If I wasn’t fast enough or “smarted off” or said no, I was backhanded. Until I was in the fifth grade when I got my first pair of glasses. Within the first month, she slapped me and broke them. Guess who got punished for that? It was my fault. The problem came in because they were donated through an organization, and she couldn’t just ask for a new pair because she broke them. Somehow, she got me a new pair. After that, she would tell me to take my glasses off so she could slap me. I was not stupid; I knew those glasses would forever be my shield.
When she was home, I was not allowed to be a child most of the time. I was her servant. I tried to make the best of it. I would laugh and tell her Igor was at her service. Yeah, I was being a smart-ass, but I needed to find humor sometimes in order to survive and not break. I had to put my library books up, I wasn’t allowed to read while I was with her. She would constantly complain about how she wasn’t very smart and had to work extra hard in school. Then turn around and bitch because I was doing more homework, reading a book, writing an essay, whatever, instead of helping her. She would “help” me do my homework up till I was in about the third grade. Every time she “helped”; I failed the assignment. My teacher knew I was smarter than that and convinced me and helped me make arrangements to either stay after school or go to the public library to do my homework. My grades immediately began improving. I think the Maternal Figure may have been jealous that I was actually intelligent. Or maybe it was fear. That’s not for me to figure out. After that, if I brought home a failing grade (a C or below) I was punished. I will go into that later. My apologies.
I understand if some of this seems unreal, exaggerated, or like lies. I promise it’s not. I stayed in a state of confusion. By the fourth grade, I started to figure out that if I kept the bar low, I would get in less trouble for fucking up. There were extra credit projects that I knew I could do, but I didn’t do them… because that would mean that she would raise the bar and begin to expect more out of me. This leads to self-sabotaging behavior. By doing the bare minimum, even though I was strongly encouraged by most of my teachers that I was not applying myself to my full abilities, and I knew I could do it… I simply didn’t. This led to more self-gaslighting. I wasn’t very smart, I was too lazy to do the work, I was a dreamer and lacked concentration, etcetera. I knew that if I faltered, the consequences would be too great. Therefore, in my mind today, I sabotaged my own future.
I’m gonna end this here. It’s already too long. Thank you for reading. It’s just therapeutic to talk to the page. It’s also liberating to finally admit to myself and the world, that I hope she sees this. What she does with it after that, I don’t care. This was all over the place, and I apologize. These are just my thoughts as they come. I find that sitting down and just letting the words flow in one sitting is best. Please be patient. HUGS to all who see this. Blessed Be and keep Graceful Dancing.
I Want It by Blue October
So I raise my hand in grace
Pray for the ones I wish I could erase
‘Cause we are who we are and we’ll be who we’ll be
Live for the moment and the mystery of everybody owns a scar
To show us how we got this far
‘Cause we are who we are and we’ll be who we’ll be
Don’t ever think you’ll take away the fight in me
I want it, I want it
I, I, I want it
I want it
I want it more and more than you ever did
I want it, I want it
I, I, I want it
I want it
I want it more and more than you ever did
Songwriters: Justin Furstenfeld
First published July 8, 2024