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Trigger warnings for child abuse (verbal and physical), general violence, drugs/alcohol, mentions of racism and homophobia.
Although I'm comfortable with English, it isn't my first language so that explains any weird spelling errors and such.
So, my story is kind of a long one. I apologize in advance for the novel. It starts before I can even remember. My parents, although they used to love each other, started to drift apart when I was around 2 or 3 (guessing from a few home videos I have, but this is speculation. It definitely was getting bad when I was 4 though). Of course, none of that happened peacefully. I have a distinct memory of a door being slammed so hard the handle fell off, and of plates flying across the kitchen.
When I was seven, they officially told me they were getting a divorce. I stayed with my mother, as my dad is a musician and often plays concerts on week days. I basically watched her fall apart, and that's when it all really began. She was sad and angry because she'd lost her husband and a whole family she'd found through him, and she only had her one daughter left. You can bet that she wasn't going to let her go.
This led to years of manipulation, being told everyday that my dad was... well, not very nice words, getting yelled at for nothing (she once screamed at me for borrowing a book from a friend ?), and then an apology. Rinse and repeat. Of course, I was a kid, and my mother wouldn't lie to me, right ? Except, you guessed it, she did. A lot. And there was this weird wall she kept building between us and the rest of the world, a true us vs them mentality that kept from realizing what she was doing. She always brought up the racism of the other people in my village (which, well, was true. As Algerians in a mostly right-wing, 99% white village, we weren't exactly fitting in) as a way to bring us closer, and would tear down my dad and his own family because they were French (again, a part of my dad's family is definitely racist; but my dad and my grandparents are very far from that). She also spent a lot of time bringing my dad down, saying he stole my money, destroyed our family, etc, and alternated between saying that I was never allowed to go to his place and saying that I was the worst thing that happened to her and that I should just "go and leave with your father and leave me alone". Understand my confusion.
There wasn't a day I would spend without crying. And, as I got older, things only got worse. Her struggles with cannabis and alcohol fell into downright addiction, and she was becoming more and more vicious with her words. When I was a kid, only one example stuck with me "one day, I'll put a bullet through your head and then kill myself". I was 8. Fun times. But as I got older, very brutal insults like that got more present. One day, that I still remember like it was yesterday, she told me, her voice chillingly calm : "I hope one day, you'll get a husband that will beat you, and I will watch laughing". Knowing that her first husband was incredibly violent with her and put her close to death, let's just say that one hurt a lot. I was 12. She would also make me feel guilty constantly, saying I owed her my life and that I was ungrateful anytime I wanted to stay in my room, she would call me stupid, etc. I got yelled at everyday, she would take the door from my room away, claiming she wanted to "know what the hell I was doing in this goddamn room", she very often took my laptop or phone (which didn't even have an actual phone plan, just a prepaid card) and read my diary regularly before yelling at me for what I'd written in it. Learning English, a language she's never understood, might have actually saved my life. She also burst into my room at random times, always yelling, always demanding to see what I was doing. She'd thankfully never been physically violent (apart from a few occasions), until she was. It started with slamming doors, then smashing my stuff by throwing it against the wall, or throwing everything I had on the ground. My bed was on a sort of small mezzanine above my desk, but she would still go up and bring down my mattress, my lamps, etc. I also didn't have proper shelves, only slabs of wood that I put on bricks and piled up, and she also threw all of that on the floor. She then made me clean up. And each time, she would tell me she was sorry, and I would say "it's okay" because I'd promised her I wouldn't abandon her too. It all culminated one night, where again all my stuff was on the floor. It was a Monday night, October or November 2014, at around 9:30 pm, and she'd been screaming at me for what felt like hours. I'd started talking back a few months prior to it, which had earned me some rough slaps, and I was so done with everything that I lost any filter I might have had. I screamed right back at her, and when she told me to shut up or she would hit me, I found myself yelling "then hit me ! Why should I care ! Go ahead !". So, she did. She gripped my face hard between her fingers, around my jaw, and squeezed so hard I had tears in my eyes (well, I was crying before that, but you get my point). I had braces at the time, and they tore the insides of my cheeks. I don't remember what she was saying, but suddenly she let my face go and gave me the hardest slap of my life. I stumbled back, and saw blood splatters across the floor and on my books. I looked back up at her, and she left. I was so shocked, I mechanically carried my mattress back up the mezzanine (which... isn't easy) and started sobbing. I was so fucking brainwashed I actually sent a text to my dad, insulting HIM. What the hell. She later apologized, again, and I replied the same thing as always. "It's okay. I forgive you. It's not a big deal." Turns out it was a very big deal : the slap left a huge bruise across half of my top lip, and I had great difficulty talking and eating for about two weeks. I never told anyone what had happened at the time, because I didn't want people to think my mother was violent. I just told friends at school that I'd slammed into a door. I remember this kid who joked around in P.E. "Yeah, I bet your mom hit you because you had like a 15/20 or something" (I've always had quite good grades at school, and 15 would have been a pretty low one when I was 13). I just smiled and laughed along because, hey, what was I supposed to do ?
After that, my mother went through a brief period of lucidity. She got in contact with a social worker, and we went there together to talk about our issues first separately then together. I actually have very little memory of the joint talk, only that we had another fight. I learned recently that she actually hit me again in front of the social worker. After that, said worker looked into putting me into foster care. However, my dad swooped in and took me in.
I've been with him for four years now, and fuck, it's such a relief. I haven't gotten yelled at/been insulted in forever, except the rare times I met my mother again. For example, before I came out, I mentionned the subject of same-sex marriage after it had been legalized in the US, and she told that if I ever did fall in love with a girl it meant she'd failed my education (and, after I came out, she told me all sorts of lovely things, like how I didn't deserve my name and should change it to "failure". I'm so, so thankful I didn't have my whole gay awakening crisis while living with her.) But even then, the past still haunts me. I jump and shiver anytime my dad comes up the stairs, whenever someone comes in my room I turn off the screen of my computer, people punching walls or slamming doors give me a rush of panic, I've had reoccuring nightmares were my mother had killed herself and blamed me for it (when I mentionned it to her, she just said "I'm not surprised."), I have great difficulty talking about my issues with authority figures (at least that's what I think it is ? All I know is : I start crying VERY easily whenever I have a serious talk with a parental figure, a teacher, etc) and a lot other things that are way too long to explain (some struggles with food, for example, that are nonetheless connected to all of this). The story I just typed out, although already long, is a heavily watered down version. It's just... I want to let the past go. God, I want to. But I've lived with her until I was 13. You don't just... forget that. I've been doing lots of research about PTSD (complex PTSD in particular) and, well, that just seems to fit, doesn't it ? I'm going to see a psychotherapist in a couple days, but I'm so scared it's not going to amount to anything. I'm genuinely so hopeful for a PTSD diagnosis because it would give a name to all this mess and it would allow me to move on to the next step, you know ? There's this part of me that keeps telling that I'm just making it up and that it's not such a big deal, because I can type this whole thing out without crying so surely I'm fine, right ? But the truth is that it's easier in English, because the words are less emotionnaly connected to me, the truth is that I cope by making light jokes, the truth is that I've told this story so many times I've almost managed to convince myself that it's just a fairy tale.
Now, might I just add before I post this, I don't want to make my mother seem like a bad person. A bit too late for that, yeah, I know. Truth is, she also has her fair share of burdens (we're actually eerily similar in many, many ways) and there were good times. But, bad times too. And I guess I still haven't come to terms with the fact that, yeah, my mother did that ? I don't know. So, I don't know, I'd like your input ? Maybe ? I really wanted to just unload all of this.
