What do you do when your abuser is the abused? What do you do you do when you're a broken child in the form of an adult who is parenting your parent?
Rewind to 2016. At 2 am I got the call that I was expecting to get any day for 35 years. It was my sister, and my mom is being taken by the police to the emergency room after a suicide attempt. Fortunately 3 months prior I had taken her to that same hospital with a migraine and added myself as her contact so I was able to go in and talk with the nurses. She was doing something behind everyone's back, it had been clear for months. She was beside herself. Her lover had another woman at his house and wouldn't answer his phone, so she took a handful of her medication after drinking all day. She was incoherent and suicidal. Over a man that convinced her he loved her and then dropped her like she was trash.
I barely recognized her. It was jarring. My brothers showed up. My step dad showed up. She refused to see him, he was angry. I called my brothers to go to the house and remove the guns from the house. In their search for the gun and bullets that weren't stored together, they found pill bottles of various medications squirreled throughout the house.
My mother, the woman who shamed me relentlessly for even needing so much as an Advil for cramps as a kid.
The memories started crashing over me like a Tsunami. Trying to make it coherently clear to the crisis worker that this was not new behavior. Explaining to my brothers and my sister how I remember when my brothers were babies in carseats, going out in the middle of the night with my stepfather in our jammies to find her at whatever place he found her after she left us. Recalling her standing there screaming at us, beating me over something that made her angry on a whim. The crisis worker blue papered her.
In nothing short of 36 hours, I was exhausted and drowing because the waves would not stop. More meetings, still no tears. Take care of it and move on with the day. That's my programming. It was nothing short of terrifying to see her laying there on the bed, broken. The roll down metal door to the closet where her purse was stored was dented, those were not there the day before. She had dismantled the bed rail trying to rig something to get into it. My grandmother and aunt came to visit. All of us agreeing that she needed to stay there. My grandmother verifying the memories that kept hitting me in the face like a baseball bat. After it was determined that she was going to be transferred, I am not going to lie that I was feeling nothing short of joy because maybe, finally, she was going to get the help that she has needed her entire life.
I drove, in my half awake stupor I drove on autopilot to my aunt's house in Searsport. As I was crossing the bridge this song that I posted above came across the radio. And it hit me like a bottle in a bar fight.
I managed to keep it together long enough not to crash. The second I walked through the door and saw her face, I started sobbing from somewhere that I can't even describe.
She was transferred. She didn't stay. She lied to get out. My stepfather lied for her. He brought her home. My sister flew to Maine by herself and jumped into action as the glue holding everyone together.
That didn't last. Mom left for the jackass she tried killing herself for. My parents that had been together since I was 6 years old were divorced. I had another trauma happen to me shortly after this catastrophe so I didn't really take the time to process everything until I had a complete breakdown 9 months later.
The only thing I have ever wanted - with every atom of my being - was a mother. Instead, I've spent my life a people pleasing pain in the ass. Trying to take what's bruised and broke and make it right. My mother turned from someone that I talked to every day, and go shopping with at least once a month, changed to someone that I saw four times in a year.
And that, even someone who abused me the way that she did, is not something that goes away from your life quietly.
