“How can things be okay when you keep making me look bad?” she screeched.
I knew none of the other girls in the troop were being screamed at right now. I thought of the ease with which the girls had leaned into their mothers during that song, how they expected to be held. How they expected to be safe. But at the same time, my mother was right—the other kids didn’t like me. They said I was weird and intense. Maybe I had been overly competitive at Pictionary? Had they really been staring at me? How did I not notice that? How could I know when I was screwing up? Was everything I did a mistake? My eyes welled up.
“Don’t cry,” my mother yelled. “You look hideous when you cry. You look just like your father, with your fat, flat nose. I said, don’t cry!” And she slapped me. I put my hands to my face, and she wrenched them down and slapped me again and again. Then she sat down and sobbed. “You’ve ruined my life. I wish you were never born. All you ever do is make me look bad. All you ever do is humiliate me.”
“I’m sorry, Mommy. I’m sorry,” I said.
* * *
—
I suspect my mother was unfulfilled. She was a meticulous but reluctant housekeeper and a lazy cook, preferring instead to fill her afternoons volunteering part-time as a treasurer for the school district, tapping on her calculator and filling out spreadsheets. Sometimes she asked my father if she could get a job at the bank. He always dismissed her. “You barely graduated from high school! Who would hire you?”
But this is an adult assumption—a theory I’ve pieced together after watching shows about bored housewives and projecting them onto my parents’ marriage. As a child, I knew exactly why my mother was sad all the time. She was very clear on the source of her misery: me.
* * *
—
Here is what I have kept from my childhood: my whippings. My mother whipped me a lot. She whipped me for not looking her in the eye when speaking to her, but if I looked her in the eye with too much indignance, she whipped me again. She beat me for sitting with one leg up on the chair “like a trishaw puller” or for using American slang like “don’t have a cow, man.” Once, she beat me for half an hour with her tennis racket for opening the plastic covering on her People magazine after it arrived in the mail. Sometimes the beatings would be mild—she’d use her hands, chopsticks, my toys. Other times she would whale on me with a plastic ruler or a bamboo cane until it broke, and then she’d blame me for it. “You made me do it because you’re so stupid!” she howled. Then she turned her eyes up to the ceiling and screamed at God: “What did I do to deserve an ungrateful, useless child? She ruined my life. Take her back! I don’t want to look at her ugly face anymore.”
A few times a year, my mother would get so tired of me that she decided God should take me back forever. She grabbed my ponytail at the top of a flight of stairs and used it to hurl me down. She raised a cleaver above my wrist, or she pulled my head back and pushed the blade into my neck, its cold edge pressing into the softness of my skin. I’d apologize frantically, but she’d scream at me that I didn’t mean it, to shut up before she sliced my jugular open. I’d fall silent, but then she said I was never repentant. So I’d start to apologize again, and she said my apologies were worth nothing, plus now my tears made me so ugly she was certain I had to die. So I stayed quiet until she screamed at me to speak again. We’d sit there, trapped in a senseless loop for hours.
My mother’s voice hadn’t always been so warbly. It was high and wispy because it was damaged from screaming at me. The doctor said her vocal cords were shredded, so if she wasn’t careful, she could lose her voice entirely. This did not faze her.
* * *
—
People often ask me what it was like to grow up with this kind of abuse. Therapists, strangers, partners. Editors. You’re telling us the details of what happened to you, they’d write in the margins. But how did it feel?
The question always feels absurd to me. How would I know how I felt? It was so many years ago. I was so young. But if I had to guess, I’d say it probably felt fucking bad.
I probably hated my mother for being impossible to please. But I also loved her, and so I guess I must have felt guilty, too, and frightened. I remember that I cried bitterly when I was beaten, and not because of the pain—I was used to that. I cried because of her words. I bit my lip and dug my nails into my palm, but I could never successfully hold back my tears when she called me stupid, ugly, unwanted. I’d sniffle, which disgusted her, and she’d slap me again.
After the beating was over and the berating stopped, though, it was easy. I just turned off the flow of tears and stared out the window. Or I went back to reading a Baby-Sitters Club book. I put it all behind me and moved on. Once, after a severe beating, I had a harder time—my breath came in quick hiccups and I couldn’t slow it down enough to get air into my lungs. In retrospect, this was probably a panic attack. But I remember watching myself with a strange bemusement. This is so weird, I thought. What’s happening? How funny!
But what was I supposed to do with those feelings? Catalog them? Sit there thinking about them all day long? Tell them to my mommy and expect sympathy? Please. My feelings didn’t matter. They were pointless. If I felt all those soft, mushy feelings, if I really thought about how messed up it was that my mother threatened to kill me on a regular basis, could I wake up and eat breakfast with her every day? Could I sit on the couch at night and cuddle her to keep her warm? No.
If I took up all that space with my feelings, what space could I maintain for hers? Hers were more important. Because hers had greater stakes.
* * *
—
My mother kept a large green bottle of Excedrin on her nightstand. She kept it there for her migraines. She also kept it there as her escape route.
After my mother’s worst panic attacks, after the most vicious beatings, she curled into a ball on the floor and rocked back and forth. Eventually, in the dry, crackling silence, she whispered that I ruined her life, so now it was time to end things, to take all of her pills. “Please, no, Mommy,” I begged, and I tried to give her reasons to keep living, reasons why we appreciated her and all of her sacrifices, reasons why she was a good person who was needed in this world. Sometimes this worked. Other times, she’d ignore me and lock herself in her bedroom. She told me that if I called 911 and she lived, she’d slit my throat. So I sat outside with my ear pressed to the door, straining to hear her breath, trying to decide at what point it would be worth it—at what point I should trade my own life for hers.
I started monitoring my mother every time she took a nap. I’d creep into her room, stand above her, and stare, making sure her eyes moved under their lids, that her breathing seemed regular.