“I ought to get up and just beat you”

It’s not funny. It never was.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

I grew up hearing my mom consistently called stupid. Fat. Ugly. Everything she ever did was criticized. “I ought to get up and just beat you,” was repeated to both of us, regularly. And we were expected to laugh. And we did. We laughed.

We laughed because this was as good as it got. This meant he was in a good mood. When he said this, it wasn’t a real threat. This was him “teasing.” These were ongoing “jokes.”

I’m not very comfortable sharing certain aspects of my childhood — including (but not limited to) being immersed in this “humor.” For many reasons.

For a long time, I believed stuff like this teasing was normal. So, I believed I wasn’t allowed to be upset by it. And, if I was, the problem was with me for being “too sensitive” (never with anyone else for being utterly insensitive).

Once I recognized the environment I grew up in was mentally and emotionally abusive, I still feared calling it out as such would mean I was being “too dramatic.”

I thought that if I tried to talk — or write — about these parts of my childhood, it was somehow a betrayal to my family. That I would be the one causing and creating problems (never that the actual abusive behavior was the problem).

All my childhood (and most of my adult life), I carried the responsibility of managing everyone else’s emotions and moods, no matter the cost to my own mental health. So, I hesitated to bring up the parts of my upbringing which might upset anyone.

I also avoided talking or writing about my experience because I feared I could never communicate it in a way that would be understood. It’s too complex. There are too many layers. Any one or even handful of instances probably seems innocuous enough, but it is the sum of it that I lived with. And how could I possibly convey the toll of that sum in a single conversation or essay?

Mostly, I wasn’t ready to talk about the mental and emotional abuse of my childhood because I couldn’t bear to have one more person invalidate my experience. I couldn’t stomach another person defending toxic behaviors or dismissively pointing out it wasn’t all bad. I couldn’t stand the thought of one more person telling me…