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kayla's picture

mother narrative

Submitted by kayla on Tue, 12/08/2009 - 7:48pm.
I told Anne that I would post the actual narrative that I wrote today for our presentation and that I intended to read through...it was a bit long, however:
 
So.
What about my mother?
My mother was born August 18, 1969, and since her 25th birthday, she has remained 25 years-old. She has six children; she would have had eight. She grew up in central Ohio with two sisters, her mother and, of course, father. They lived down the street from a church. Mother and father were preoccupied with hating each other and drinking with their neighborhood friends. The neighborhood men were preoccupied with my young mother.
My mother was smart, but school was tortuous. And home was a nightmare. Abuse and neglect, neglect and abuse and that church was not the escape my mother and her sisters sought. Those men too overstepped their boundaries.
In her young teen years, my mother fell for a black young man. At 15, she was pregnant with his little black baby. My grandmother, always quick to try to do the “right thing” for the sake of appearances had always assured my mother that if something like this happened, she did not have to be afraid to tell her—and her father never had to know about it. My grandmother told her she would be there for her, because she is her mother after all, and she loves her daughter no matter what. Naturally, my young mother confessed and promptly her angry, racist, drunk father gave her two frightening options and neither involved keeping that child.
“You abort that bastard or I’ll beat it out of you, you little whore!”
At 15, my mother had an abortion. And the rich little white girl from an “upstanding” family couldn’t be seen with a poor black man from the slums, so soon after that she met another man: a poor white guy from the very same slums. This was okay with her father, who obviously cared so much about her well-being.
And it was this man, my father, who knocked her up when she was 18 years-old and drunkenly beat her in their new home when she was pregnant with me. He was out of control, and she escaped the house only to walk through the streets barefoot in the snow to get away from the man who was so preferable to her first love.
So that’s where I come from: sexual abuse, molestation, racism and violent male dominance.
And it would be over 20 years after my birth until she could escape these misfortunes, all the while making it her one priority as a mother to protect her children from the monsters she faced growing up.
In doing so, however, she was still unable to protect herself.
After the birth of my brothers, twins, in 1991, she became involved with another monster who would wait to show his dark side until after she was mentally and financially dependent on him, and too scared to dare leave. My earliest memory of him was when my brothers were two or three; they were crawling all over him and wrestling with him, calling him “daddy.” And for over ten years, he was our daddy—our biological father being too damn drunk to even buy diapers. Our new daddy was caring and loving and physically violent. At first my siblings and I only heard his loud roar from our bedrooms, but after he was fully integrated into our lives he got more confident. He moved us to central Pennsylvania, away from our family and friends, and our lives got a little bit scarier. During her third pregnancy with her fourth child, he beat her more violently than I had ever witnessed, punching her in her stomach and dragging her around by her hair. It happened that as I aged, I became more aware of the horror of his actions and became more willing to try to put a stop to this abuse. My mother had put a telephone in my bedroom at some point, but he pulled the cord out of the wall before I could call the police. Later, I had the audacity to try to escape the house while he was hurting her to get help. But he chased me back up the stairs with his clenched fist and I stopped trying. The neighbors never did anything when they heard him; his brother never stopped him even when he witnessed it happening, so I quickly learned that any chance of survival had to come from within ourselves.
And eventually we did manage to escape him, but the next man who had my mother secretly hooked on OxyContin followed in his footsteps; that man followed by the father of her last child who blamed her cancer for his compulsive cheating. A long series of lovers and friends kept her in the place, her place, that she’d been in all of her life until some magic moment that I missed because I was away at college doing what she never had the chance to do.
Through all of this, one thing always remained steady: this was not the life she wanted for her baby girl. These were not the men she wanted her sons to emulate. And by the time I was in high school, I understood the lesson she was in the process of learning herself, and teaching me at the same time.
The whole point of her getting involved with the men she loved and depended on despite their violence and hatred was to be able to provide something for herself and her children. It was to give us all the gift of “The Brady Bunch,” to be able to put a pile of gifts under the Christmas tree. She never felt like she had the option or the capacity to do this on her own. So, she sought out men who owned their own businesses, or men who were local athletes—providers, as they appeared on the outside. But in each and every case, George Michael’s message rang true: sometimes the clothes do not make the man. And sometimes, an eccentric woman covered in tattoos and scars can do it all on her own.
That is where I come from.

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