I read a quote years ago by Renita Weems, “I cannot forget my mother. Though she was not as sturdy as others, she is my bridge. When I needed to get across, she steadied herself long enough for me to run across safely.” What bridge, I thought? How jealous that quote made me feel. I have had many years of psychotherapy and don’t know that I will ever understand the unanswerable “whys” of my childhood. I can only guess it was a mixture of my mother’s past abuse and a cocktail of untreated emotional and psychological problems. Suffice it to say that I was significantly abused and though few visible scars remain there are deeply embedded memories I have yet to drive away. In all the years of my mother’s instability, not once did I feel it was safe to run across. I leapt blindly on my own.

My childhood home was a scary place, maybe not often but at times violent and loud; definitely unpredictable. My first husband’s childhood was lonely, with no siblings, a detached unemotional mother and a bullying father. As a result, we sought refuge in each other. Marrying early, I’m convinced in order to create our own safe haven and vision of what we were convinced a family could and should be.

Over the years though, I have healed much of the hurt. My mother loves my children and I don’t mind them spending time with her as long as my father is nearby. I feel like she is stable enough at this point and would never hurt her grandchildren. She has herself sought treatment and apologized for the emotional and physical pain she caused me as a child. I cannot forgive or forget, only move on, and had been doing so thinking maybe she grasped some of the damage she had inflicted upon my sister and I but it was over a recent phone conversation I realized just how much she did not understand. She wanted my daughter to spend two nights at her house but because as a family we had made other plans I told her that it would just be a one-night sleepover. She went off on a rant about her rights as a grandparent, a behavior I hadn’t seen in some time.

I tried to explain to her that since our older son was home from school this particular weekend we had planned some family time. Our mission as a family, based on our own childhoods, has always been to create a safe, warm home for our children. This is the one place they know they can come and be loved, supported and accepted no matter what. They will not be hurt here. I explained, as I have before, that their father and I make a conscious effort to factor in time so that we can have family meals, watch movies, just hang out, or be together and bond. My little yellow frame house is their safe place and when we are all here together everything is right in the world. That really set her off -a direct insult to her parenting style, or lack there of, opposite from the home of my youth.

She commented on what an obnoxious child I had been, I had always tried to provoke her, deserving every beating I had ever gotten. I was a difficult child. Just wait until I had to deal with a teenager. (I have a sixteen year old.) She just did to me what was done to her. It wasn’t all-bad; didn’t I remember the good times? “You think you are the perfect mother,” she screeched. Besides, she’d apologized for all that years ago. I was stunned and taken aback. My first reaction was to attack, my second was to hang up the phone but instead I took a deep breath.

I very calmly told her that nothing ever justifies hurting a child. I appreciated her apology and have accepted and moved on and yes even forgiven her to some extent but that does not mean that I have amnesia, it does not erase memories of wire coat hangers, hard plastic hair brushes and cute knee socks to cover bruises. For better or worse, her actions shaped the woman I became.

I will never have a mother that I call for parenting advice. I will always have boundaries to be aware of and enforce. I will always be on guard. She is my mother and I love her but I do not love what she did to my childhood and though there may have been ice cream cones and afternoons in the park that is not what I dream of that is not what haunts my sleep.

I do not think I am a perfect mother but I am a mother who loves my children. I hold them, I worry about them, I fuss about the overflowing kitchen trash, we read together, bake cookies, I cry when they get hurt, I tell them they are precious, we talk about religion, we very poorly sing Broadway musicals in the car, we argue about clothes, we bicker over chores, we laugh and cry and live an amazing blessed life. I love them so intensely.

I love them just as fiercely as I was beaten.