Disembodied

There is something nearly disembodying

when I think back over the sum total of the years when I was on the receiving end of the physical and psychological abuse meted out by la Narcisse, capably assisted by my mother. Disembodying because, while I know what happened through the experience of living it  day by day, I still struggle to comprehend the enormity of the totality of all of the different elements of that abuse, and how they nested neatly inside one another to create a synergistically more devastating effect than would be suggested by examining the sum of its parts.

It took me years to even start to unpick the tangled mess of warped ideas that had been forced upon me. I was able to language some of the experience as “brainwashing” well before I was able to understand that words like “abuse” and “assault” and “coercion” better applied to the behaviour of those women towards me. Because, as awful as it was, I didn’t know differently. I had to absorb and live with what was happening and to do that I adopted a kind of state of subservient acceptance which was only possible by believing when they told me they did what they did because they loved me. They loved me, they wanted the best for me, they wanted me to be the best person I could be, they wanted to protect me from sin, and guide me in the ways of faith so that my soul would be saved. There was a lot more to it than that, but the driving message behind the many occasions of excessive punishment was that I had let myself down, I had let them down, I had let God down, and it was their duty to punish me to effect an improvement. And each round of punishment was the rationale for new rules or restrictions which they then rigorously enforced. And we’re talking rules about eating, or rather, not eating. Rules about not socialising with friends and classmates, and spending recess and lunchtime studying. Rules about how much water I had to drink, but also rules about not going to the toilet outside allowable times. Being restricted from seeing friends outside of school, and later, uni. Being prevented from using the telephone to call friends or even other family members. Not spending money, even when I had small amounts of money to spend. Not receiving gifts from people, even when they were tiny, symbolic gifts of no monetary worth. And inevitably those rules were broken, not because I actively challenged them but because they were broken by me carrying out the the most normal, essential processes of daily living. And to enforce these rules, they subjected me to constant interrogations, drilling me in minute detail about what I had done, or hadn’t done, and picking whatever I said apart to imply I was lying, or I was contradicting myself, or I had just admitted to doing something wrong, or not doing something I was meant to be doing, or omitting key details in my responses to mislead them. And they imputed a thousand different attitudinal states to my responses - la Narcisse fancied herself to be a perceptive reader of people. (She isn’t. She’s full of bullshit). So I was regularly berated for being disrespectful, lazy, sloppy, selfish, greedy, self-centred, procrastinatory, weak-willed, careless, unloving, disorganised, mentally inferior, and usually sinful. Anything I did that broke one of their rules was declared a sin, a dishonour to my parents, and an offence to God. The Ten Commandments were trotted out, and more than one time la Narcisse ground me down during an extended interrogation until I was weeping and begging to be taken to church so I could go to Confession. That’s not normal. It is not normal for a 11 year old child to ask permission to go to church in their lunch hour to say confession for sins of eating too much food, where “too much food” is a cupcake or some other item of party food that another kid brought to school. (And where the fuck was the child welfare response after that happened?)  

Nearly every aspect of my life was regulated by these rules, and I was utterly conscientious about obeying them. And this meant I had to do a lot of quick-thinking to conceal my rule-keeping actions. It meant I had to make up lies to tell my friends about all the quite abnormal things I had to do when I was in their company. So on some level I understood the abnormality of the “discipline” I was subjected to, but I was also responsible for protecting my family by concealing the abuse at all costs. I still struggle to comprehend how it was that I maintained those duel states of obedient compliance by rationalising and minimising the abuse as a benign act of parental care, and at the same time understanding its severity was so great that I must conceal it to protect my family from scrutiny because it could be deemed a prosecutable criminal offence. 

In hindsight, during those early years after I left home and began examining the abuse and trying to make sense of it, I must have contemplated the possibility of pursuing a criminal prosecution, if for nothing else the acts of physical violence. I remember standing in the bathroom of my first small flat holding the cheap pair of bathers I’d just bought and being absolutely overwhelmed by the awareness of the whip scars on my legs, and not knowing how to even start deciding if I could go out in public with my legs uncovered and the scars showing. But I always hungered for a reconciliation with my mother, and I understood that she, too, was implicated in the crimes that were committed against me. I withstood nearly three more decades of episodic abuse, attempting to salvage that relationship, until the day came when finally, finally it became too much. I needed to be safe, and the only way to do that was by discontinuing contact with my mother. I always held on to the hope that she might leave or outlast la Narcisse, who was the primary abuser, but that wasn’t to be. So my grieving process since I found out Mum died has been one of unspooling the last few yards of hope that I’d kept wound up tightly around my heart, insulating me against the full devastation of losing my mother to la Narcisse and of losing my childhood to her abuse. And I’m finding that the passage of time has done nothing to diminish the pain of that devastation.