I knew my parents weren’t like other parents. Every celebration, every event,every day included an excuse to drink. They met their friends at a bar the way others met up at a coffee shop and no 8 year old should know the phone numbers of those bars by heart ‘just in case’.

I also knew my mother wasn’t like other mothers. I grew up knowing there was something wrong but I didn’t know how to explain or express what was happening that didn’t sound like me complaining ‘It’s not fair’.

As a toddler my brother regularly bit me. One day I ran to my mother crying and bleeding, she stemmed the blood but showed no care or concern for the wound and said if he tried to bite me again I should bite him back. I was three and a half and took her at her word. My father stopped her beating me but was just as angry when he found out I’d tried to bite my little brother. My mother’s explanation for the marks on my arm, he bit me when I tried to bite him. It is still my first vivid memory of what my childhood would be like.

Like many narcissistic mothers she would spread her poison by expressing her ‘concerns’ about me. When the effect of my toxic home life became apparent to the point it couldn’t be ignored, fobbed off or explained as me just being a teenage girl. My mother arranged counselling. I lived by the spoken and unspoken rules for children in abusive families; keep silent, it’s no one’s business but ours, no one will believe you, if they believe you they will know it’s your fault, only tell the version of the truth that can’t be used against your parents, do not betray the family.

These sessions would be with someone she ‘trusted’ so I knew everything I said would find it’s way back to her. I said what people wanted to hear, despite her best efforts to control the process, it looked good on the outside but would do no good on the inside, it would be the start of her undoing.

‘Everyone’ knew I was stupid and I would never amount to anything until I got my head out of the clouds. At one point I was offered an IQ test, the results confirmed what I had always suspected, I was not stupid, in fact I was very intelligent especially regarding creative, imaginative intelligence. My head was exactly where my intellect needed it to be. From the day I got those results onward, no matter how hard she tried to discredit them, she knew she had lost complete control, would never get it back and would continue to lose what control she had left. Her ending came with my beginning to understand her abusive patterns, what they were and how she practised, refined and then honed them like a blade she used to fillet my very being with just a look, gesture or word.

My father died, my mother crawled deeper into a bottle, my brother realised I wasn’t joking when I said I would stab him if he didn’t leave me alone , I went my own way.

It was a way that included Al Anon, other groups, reading, counseling, self help therapies, marriage, divorce,marriage, children and putting a continent and an ocean between us.

Adult children of abusive parents grow up with so many horrendous emotional and psychological burdens. We’re raised with the idea you should love and respect your parents even when you know they are ,at the least, not fulfilling their roles and duties, at worst making your existence a nightmare. We’re raised knowing we are stupid, useless, ugly, hated, a burden, worthless, it’s all our own fault and it’s our job to fix it. We feel guilty and self shame for being angry, resentful and hating the situation we lived in and the people we lived with. My goal had to be to get myself healthy and break the habits that came with the conditioning I had received and example that had be set for me.

A recurring theme of my getting better was forgiveness. I struggled with other people’s definition of what forgiveness is, the pretend it never happened type of forgiveness, the idea that because she gave birth to me so I owed her my forgiveness. I had to forgive her even if; she never recognised what she had done, she never apologised, while visiting she tried to repeat her abuses with my children.

I learned what forgiveness wasn’t, what it could be and what it became to me.

In the weeks before she died she would ring and say things like;

• she may have been wrong about me

• maybe she didn’t give me the credit I deserved

• it was possible she didn’t know me as well she thought she did

• it could be I wasn’t really just like her I was probably more my own person than she realised.

Every comment was qualified and equivocal and the closest she would ever come to saying ‘I’m sorry’. 10 days after the last conversation she died, it didn’t matter. Did I forgive her? Not really but I had let go of my anger, resentment and even hatred towards her long before that. I’d been over her for a long while knowing she would never love me or I her as we might have.

It took many years for me to understand that my recovery wasn’t just about forgiving her it was also about understanding and internalising the oft repeated phrase, ‘It’s not your fault’.

The hardest lesson to implement was acknowledging I had become my own worst enemy. Perpetuating the the pain and hurt as a self inflicted punishment for betraying my Mother. I had to cultivate a new inner voice, one that spoke calmly, kindly, that didn’t scream and berate with accusations, insults, didn’t minmise, disparage and inflict guilt. A voice that assured me my responses to the cruelty and abuse; anger, a sense of betrayal, resentment, hate, thoughts of vengeance and revenge, was understandable, but, the destructive and/or hurtful behaviours to myself and others weren’t acceptable. Understanding the root of the feelings and how they fueled the actions made it easier to change what I was doing, apologise and mean it where necessary.

Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday and the yesterday you can’t change tomorrow. Forgiving myself has allowed me to value the today I have, no longer overshadowed by my yesterdays and and worrying about my tomorrows.