Maggie’s Story
The following account includes descriptions of physical abuse and may be triggering for some readers.
Dear Mom, it’s me again, your wayward child…
Hello Mother, remember me? I’m your gay kid that you haven’t spoken to in years because of my “lifestyle choices”…
Hey Mama, just your willfully disobedient adult daughter here, I wanted to reach out to…
I’ve started these letters and notes what feels like a thousand times, but I know I’ll never send them. It’s not Mother’s Day, it’s not her birthday, it’s not the anniversary of her passing. She’s still alive and doing well, as far as I know. It’s just that she lives in her world, and I live in mine.
These days our worlds are pretty different, and diverging more and more each day. Sometimes it feels like I share nothing in common with her anymore besides our genetic tendency to gray early. Sometimes it feels like she’s just a hazy character from a past life. It doesn’t help that she remembers that past life very differently than I do. Some memories from that life feel like they’re straight out of a sitcom.
Scene 1:
Mother stands at the bottom of the stairs one hand on her hip and the other hand vigorously wagging a finger as she stumbles through each of my siblings’ names (and the dog’s too for good measure) before finally getting to mine. With each incorrect name, the uproarious laugh track grows louder. She finally shouts my name, but by this time she has forgotten what she wanted me for in the first place. Tossing her hands in the air for dramatic effect, she gives up and trudges away in defeat mumbling that she’ll just do it herself.
Other memories are not as charming.
Scene 2:
Mother corners me, my back literally against the wall. She is in my face and shouting about some chore undone, some household task incomplete, some childcare/parenting responsibility she assigned me not managed appropriately because I am also a child with a mere 9 years of existence to work with. I am already so afraid of what comes next that I can barely comprehend what she is saying. She grabs me by the shirt and tosses my little body towards the designated spanking area.Mother furiously points at the laminated chart pinned to our refrigerator door by alphabet magnets with baby teeth marks in them. Still shouting, she asks me how many swats I should deserve for my offense based on the sins listed on the chart. I look past her, pretending to examine the chart, but my eyes won’t focus and my thoughts won’t collect themselves. I regain control of my eyes only to make the mistake of looking down and discovering she somehow already has the paddle/ wooden spoon/ rod/ belt in her hand. In the abruptness of the chaos I didn’t see her grab it and I am tense with fear of the pain to come.
I stutter a low-ball guess at how many swats this spanking session might deserve knowing my mother will always haggle her way into a higher price for me to pay in the end. She tallies up my perceived misdeeds as disobedience (2 swats), willfulness (2 more), and even though there is no evidence of deceit, she adds lying and a sinful heart to my crimes (2-3 more swats each). I am in tears, still unclear about what I actually did to deserve this punishment, and I hesitantly ask how many times she’s going to hit me so I can prepare my little body for the blows. She smiles menacingly and tells me, “Oh no, I’m not going to spank you right now. No, you’re going to sit here thinking about what you’ve done to the family and wait until your father gets home. And you know he hits harder than I do.”
“The ax forgets; the tree remembers.” I didn’t know this old African proverb until I was much older, but it has grounded me on many occasions when I’ve been told I’m not remembering things correctly or it wasn’t that bad and I should just get over it. The abuser has the luxury of forgetting, but I still carry the ax’s scars as reminders.
There was a time when one of my little brothers told my mom he really, really had to pee just before she was about to beat him. Having been peed on before by one of us older kids during an over-the-lap hand-spanking session, she agreed to let him go to the bathroom. He never came back to receive his punishment and she got busy with some other task in the meantime and forgot all about it. The older kids were floored. He was a genius. Why hadn’t we ever thought of that?
But then again, she treated us differently when we were little. Maybe we really were more difficult children, or maybe we were just meant to be more afraid. After all, we were meant to be the examples for these younger kids to watch. One thing my mother instilled in me from a young age is that there was always an audience, and what they saw and thought was far more important than any cost to me.
The ladies at church adored my mother. “How do you find time for such devoted service with all those kids?” they would say.
Me. I was how. Quiverfull families come at a cost and the children are always the ones who pay for it. Even though I was just a child myself, I was taking care of the other kids so she could go out and put on a show of selflessly and effortlessly taking care of everyone else. Me and my inexperienced time and energy were the price for her service. On many occasions, my public humiliation was the price she paid to look like a good parent in everyone else’s eyes. My continuing battle with social anxiety was the exchange for all that praise my parents received about having “such well-behaved kids!” But my mother would tell them it was all about hard work, sacrificing it all for Jesus’ calling daily, and being firm and consistent with all her manipulative little monsters - I mean, blessings. My achievements were actually their achievements. The rewards for my hard work were actually their benefits to reap. I was just a tool. An extension of them.
When I talk about my experiences with being mothered in this way, I quickly find that a lot of people are not ready to address the harm that mothers can cause. Mothers are supposed to be nurturing and sweet and generous and self-sacrificing and how dare I question the methods of such a selfless ethereal being. It’s hard to acknowledge that your mother couldn't or wouldn't love you the way you needed to be loved.
“I’m sure she was just doing her best.”
I’m sure her own lifestyle choices got in the way of her best more often than not. My mother would have had the time and capacity to be a more balanced person if she wasn’t homeschooling a busload of kids and striving endlessly to maintain a flawless image to the public.
“I’m sure she did it because she loved you.”
She certainly told me she was doing it because she loved me each and every time she hit me. It was a line in her script that she often delivered through angry gritted teeth. Even as a child, the mixed signals in her message were not lost on me: her love is conditional. I was loved as long as I did what she wanted. As long as I was useful to her.
When I chose to prioritize the things that I wanted for my life and that were best for me over the things that served her, I was called selfish, and all but entirely shunned. She lives in her world, and I live in mine. She has chosen her world and herself over me many times.
You could say that my relationship with my mother is complicated. But it can be summed up pretty simply. She doesn’t want to relate to me. She just expects me to always put in the work to relate to her.
It's the lifelong price a child should have to pay for the nine months she carried me, and the 18 or so years she abused me while I lived in her house. In her world, I owe her. No matter what it costs me, her world dictates that I will always owe her. That's the price you have to pay for being born into a Quiverfull family.
So every time I start writing those letters to her, I stop myself because I know she won’t hear it from my perspective anyway. She can’t. Her world won’t let her. It doesn’t stop me from writing, but these days the letters are for me. Maybe I am selfish like she says, but I live my life for me now.
