Deep bow. I'm 60 and I've spent a lifetime confused by my relationships with my mom and my older sisters. I've pondered the lives of my aunts and my grandmothers and imagined how and why I'm carrying a mix of love and pain. Your words are profound and helpful. I'm so very ready to put down the pain and blame, integrate the lesson and move forward in love and a version of power that serves me and my remaining sister and my nieces and the next generation of women. Thank you.
I appreciate your perspective here and think it has much application. But it doesn't cover everything. Sometimes people are sadistic and enjoy oppressing others — men *and* women. I grew up with one of each: an actually sadistic mother who enjoyed the power she had over me, hitting me, humiliating me, spreading lies about me, turning me into her scapegoat, teaching my older brother to do the same, and neither of them ever expressed regret for even one of the thousands of horrendous things they did to me, systematically, on a daily basis. Sometimes people choose to do terrible things and sometimes when they are women we can't blame patriarchy for what they chose to do. We are all dealing with patriarchy and not every woman therefore sadistically abuses her daughter.
Patriarchy is a huge factor in many problems. But there are problems of the human heart that go beyond this one huge factor into something even bigger. The concept of wetiko, for example, describes something even bigger of which patriarchy is a subdivision. With my lived experience it doesn't make sense to blame the patriarchy for the entirety of my mother's kind of ruthless behaviour, or that of people like her, whatever sex. Personal responsibility for the way we behave, for owning our stuff, for not bullying others is a thing.
In Australia the official domestic violence model makes survivors like me invisible. I don't exist because I didn't grow up in a family where everyone trembled under the reign of a coercive, controlling, potentially violent male. I grew up in a family with a mother who was disappointed when her second child was a daughter — my aunt told me this (after I went through the body language of some family photographs of the time). She never bonded with me or showed me affection. She neglected and brutalised me and said terrible things to others about me from the time I was a toddler to make it sound like I was the devil's spawn. She also didn't know what to do with a girl who didn't fit her own idiotic model of what girls should be like, which my father, by the way, didn't agree with and remonstrated with her over in my defence. I was "bad" because I didn't like the colour pink, or pointy shoes, or going shopping, and because I liked climbing trees, roaming outdoors, rolling in mud, flying kites, etc; and I was "unnatural" because I was good at maths and science. My mother was the major person attempting to impose gender stereotypes on my brother and me. People can crap on about internalised patriarchy but I take a dim view of women brutalising their own daughters instead of being loving, supportive parents. Her own mother was loving and supportive of me in a way she never was.
My mother was most probably a malignant narcissist. She was emotionally immature and two-faced and constantly created violence and drama in the house. It was my mother who caused me to tremble with her controlling, coercive, actively violent behaviour, who flew into rages and screamed at everyone and hit, kicked, bit, tore out hair, etc, verbally and physically attacking others on a whim, and who held the entire family to ransom with it, teaching my brother, who has a similarly sadistic nature that enjoys control over others and their pain, and who frequently abused animals BTW, to do the same. My father was far from perfect but he never had a sense of sadistic enjoyment like this, and was the least violent of the three by far, and didn't spread pernicious lies about me to other people. He tried to stand up to this stuff and was the only person who ever defended me or came to my aid. Not enough either, sure, but it would be a total nonsense to blame my mother's and brother's behaviour and personal choices on him somehow, as the Australian domestic violence model tries to do; or even on patriarchy directly. We can't make the data fit the models because the models appeal to us or because the models are often a good fit. Sometimes they just aren't all there is to a situation, and sometimes they apply only in the vaguest, background radiation sense.
We had a distant relative come to stay with us once who saw exactly how my mother played her games and was no longer welcome when she spoke out about it. This woman, my step-grandmother essentially, spent a lot of time connecting with me because she could see what was going on; and I realised this in my adulthood, but we migrated overseas halfway through my childhood and I was never given the contact details of my extended family when I asked for them as an adult. Because by gosh would I have liked to have interviewed the extended family I was actively kept away from, about what they knew.
Bit triggering to deal with this stuff. Your essay was decent and will have much application and I know you can't cover everything. I just, this is always a sore point for me, my situation didn't fit that mould and it puts me on the Outer Fringes of Nonexistingland.☠️
ETA:
Would appreciate your thoughts on this thing I stuck my neck out on and wrote yesterday. You already know the main example in the piece because I wrote it on your comments section initially.🙃
Powerful. Personal. Relatable. Thank you for sharing your heart and soul to remind us of what we carry. xo
Thank you Mary. I so appreciate that you took the time to read and comment on my new essay. ♥️
Deep bow. I'm 60 and I've spent a lifetime confused by my relationships with my mom and my older sisters. I've pondered the lives of my aunts and my grandmothers and imagined how and why I'm carrying a mix of love and pain. Your words are profound and helpful. I'm so very ready to put down the pain and blame, integrate the lesson and move forward in love and a version of power that serves me and my remaining sister and my nieces and the next generation of women. Thank you.
I appreciate your perspective here and think it has much application. But it doesn't cover everything. Sometimes people are sadistic and enjoy oppressing others — men *and* women. I grew up with one of each: an actually sadistic mother who enjoyed the power she had over me, hitting me, humiliating me, spreading lies about me, turning me into her scapegoat, teaching my older brother to do the same, and neither of them ever expressed regret for even one of the thousands of horrendous things they did to me, systematically, on a daily basis. Sometimes people choose to do terrible things and sometimes when they are women we can't blame patriarchy for what they chose to do. We are all dealing with patriarchy and not every woman therefore sadistically abuses her daughter.
Patriarchy is a huge factor in many problems. But there are problems of the human heart that go beyond this one huge factor into something even bigger. The concept of wetiko, for example, describes something even bigger of which patriarchy is a subdivision. With my lived experience it doesn't make sense to blame the patriarchy for the entirety of my mother's kind of ruthless behaviour, or that of people like her, whatever sex. Personal responsibility for the way we behave, for owning our stuff, for not bullying others is a thing.
In Australia the official domestic violence model makes survivors like me invisible. I don't exist because I didn't grow up in a family where everyone trembled under the reign of a coercive, controlling, potentially violent male. I grew up in a family with a mother who was disappointed when her second child was a daughter — my aunt told me this (after I went through the body language of some family photographs of the time). She never bonded with me or showed me affection. She neglected and brutalised me and said terrible things to others about me from the time I was a toddler to make it sound like I was the devil's spawn. She also didn't know what to do with a girl who didn't fit her own idiotic model of what girls should be like, which my father, by the way, didn't agree with and remonstrated with her over in my defence. I was "bad" because I didn't like the colour pink, or pointy shoes, or going shopping, and because I liked climbing trees, roaming outdoors, rolling in mud, flying kites, etc; and I was "unnatural" because I was good at maths and science. My mother was the major person attempting to impose gender stereotypes on my brother and me. People can crap on about internalised patriarchy but I take a dim view of women brutalising their own daughters instead of being loving, supportive parents. Her own mother was loving and supportive of me in a way she never was.
My mother was most probably a malignant narcissist. She was emotionally immature and two-faced and constantly created violence and drama in the house. It was my mother who caused me to tremble with her controlling, coercive, actively violent behaviour, who flew into rages and screamed at everyone and hit, kicked, bit, tore out hair, etc, verbally and physically attacking others on a whim, and who held the entire family to ransom with it, teaching my brother, who has a similarly sadistic nature that enjoys control over others and their pain, and who frequently abused animals BTW, to do the same. My father was far from perfect but he never had a sense of sadistic enjoyment like this, and was the least violent of the three by far, and didn't spread pernicious lies about me to other people. He tried to stand up to this stuff and was the only person who ever defended me or came to my aid. Not enough either, sure, but it would be a total nonsense to blame my mother's and brother's behaviour and personal choices on him somehow, as the Australian domestic violence model tries to do; or even on patriarchy directly. We can't make the data fit the models because the models appeal to us or because the models are often a good fit. Sometimes they just aren't all there is to a situation, and sometimes they apply only in the vaguest, background radiation sense.
We had a distant relative come to stay with us once who saw exactly how my mother played her games and was no longer welcome when she spoke out about it. This woman, my step-grandmother essentially, spent a lot of time connecting with me because she could see what was going on; and I realised this in my adulthood, but we migrated overseas halfway through my childhood and I was never given the contact details of my extended family when I asked for them as an adult. Because by gosh would I have liked to have interviewed the extended family I was actively kept away from, about what they knew.
Bit triggering to deal with this stuff. Your essay was decent and will have much application and I know you can't cover everything. I just, this is always a sore point for me, my situation didn't fit that mould and it puts me on the Outer Fringes of Nonexistingland.☠️
ETA:
Would appreciate your thoughts on this thing I stuck my neck out on and wrote yesterday. You already know the main example in the piece because I wrote it on your comments section initially.🙃
https://djitidjiti.substack.com/p/cold-water-diving?r=7zfj9q&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web