Part 5 - Isolated With an Emotional Abuser

I remember as a very small child (perhaps around 5 or 6 years old) thinking that the way my mother said my name had changed. She used to say, "Savannah, Savannah!" when I was sick and she would move my hair out of my eyes with compassion. She later used the same intonation, but I realized it was out of disappointment with me. I knew, even as a small child, that I disappointed her. That realization should never come to such a little girl. But again, I thought my family relationships were normal.

As I got older, our bond was broken by her angry spankings and our friendship never blossomed. She made it very clear to me that it was my fault that we didn't have a good mother/daughter relationship. When my parents became missionaries, all the teenage and college age camp girls loved my mom and she seemed to have strong relationships with them. At the end of one summer, she sat down next to me on a bench and asked, "So. Who do you like?" I turned away from her embarrassed  and answered, "Nobody." My mother started crying and accusing me of being the reason we weren't close. She said I hid things from her and she knew she wasn't the problem because the camp staff girls all had good relationships with her. I knew her manipulative tendencies and I saw right through her. You can't expect a 12 year old girl to have a good relationship with you when you ignore her for a summer. And when she did pay attention to me in the off-season, it was negative attention. I'm sure if the camp staff girls had been slapped in the face by her, they wouldn't be particularly close to her either.

Compounding the problem of our negative relationship was my parents' decision to homeschool me. Picture this. We lived about a 30-40 minute drive from town. When camp was in session, I was told not to bother the staff or campers. During the off-season, I was homeschooled (badly! and barely!) and the only way to see people other than my parents and siblings was through church activities. When our family traveled to various churches week after week, I was cut off from my only community. When we weren't traveling to fundraise, I was relieved to go to Sunday morning church, and when I turned 13, Wednesday Bible study and Friday night youth group. My mom and I would often fight, as we were severely cooped up together and various things frustrated us. If I fought with my mother, she would take away my Friday and Wednesday gatherings, saying, "I don't know what else to take away, Savannah." Damn straight she didn't know, by the way, because there was nothing else. They were my only social connection to anyone other than my family.

The isolation was unbearable, but the fact that it was with my mother made it ten times worse. She had good days and bad days, and you never knew which one you were waking up to. She also had spurts of organization that lasted about a week, then she would go for a long time without even checking my schoolwork. I did no  math after Christmas break one year, and she found out only at the end. She made up for it by practicing multiplication tables with me in the summer every now and then. Every year, she grouped my schoolwork with other siblings of higher or lower levels than my own to save money. We did a unit study on Egypt one year, and she gave me all the same projects as my younger siblings. One of them was to go outside, find a blade of grass, and tie it on both ends to make a tiny boat. I refused. It would have been my first year of high school, I believe, and that work was so far beneath what I was supposed to be doing that it was entirely useless to me. I even asked her for a harder project instead, but she chose to knock my "grade" down. She often gave us untimed, "open-book" tests which weren't designed to be open-book at all, knowing that we hadn't studied for them. If ever she did notice we were behind, she chided us, so I believed it was my own fault that I was not educated. Looking back, I was just doing what most children would do. Children need guidance, and most kids would skip doing homework if no one was checking it. It bothers me to this day that I never felt like I earned my high school diploma.

She used various emotional weapons to hurt her children, including showing very obvious favouritism. When one child was her black sheep, she would snap at them. Then, without missing a beat, she would turn to another sibling and intentionally say something oh-so-sweet.

She would also try to twist every situation to make herself look like the victim. One day, the four youngest kids were getting into our Astro van. The door on that vehicle was difficult to close, and my brother was taking an extra second to close it. My mom turned around and began to bully him. I have a very strong protective instinct, and I knew I couldn't let it continue. But I was also afraid of my mother's wrath. I weighed the situation very carefully, then said softly, "Mom? That door is really hard to close." Unfortunately, I was sitting in the front seat, so she swiftly slapped me in the face. It stung physically, but not nearly as much as my heart did. Later that day, the subject at the dinner table was apologies. My father was saying it was everyone's responsibility to apologize when they are wrong. I asked, "Should adults apologize?" He said yes, so I asked through a sudden flow of sobs, "Then I want an apology." My siblings nodded their heads furiously in agreement. I explained the situation through my tears to my father, with affirming comments from my siblings. Surely this would get his attention! As I spoke, my mother quietly set her fork down and stood up from the table. She rushed off into her bedroom and slammed the door. The table went silent. My dad began to lecture us on the hard life my mother had lived and all the horrible, non-specific things she had been through. He then led us into the bedroom. I stood in the doorway, too emotionally beaten to go any further. I watched as all the others gathered around my mother as she sobbed and they patted her on the back, saying she was a good mother in soothing tones. She made everyone comfort her for her choice to slap me, while I never received an apology.

I'm sure if she ever saw this blog post, she would somehow make you feel bad for her, too.