Grow Yourself Into Something New
Content Guidance: This is a story with references to domestic violence and abuse, disordered eating, self-harm and trauma.
Photo Courtesy | Mary Rothery
BY MARY ROTHERY
I came undone on my kitchen floor. I curled my body into Child’s Pose as my tears soaked into the old wood, wrapping myself around a heart that was breaking. Earlier, my voice cracked as I begged my husband to take my daughter out. She can’t see me like this.
The words peeled away from me and I felt my face sag beneath their absence. I was breaking, but my first instinct was to protect her. Always her, first. When I was alone my lungs burst open, releasing all they'd held in. I screamed into the walls, I howled into the floor, the noise almost inhuman, scaring myself. Tears poured from me, releasing a poison which had built up over weeks, years, decades. Tears of a grief and trauma I was, finally, confronting.
I had been getting worse over the weeks preceding. Waking up in the night screaming, crying in my sleep. My husband held me, sat with me in the darkness and waited until my shaking stopped. I was lost in days when I was meant to be happy. My daughter’s birthday was coming, a daughter I’d had against all odds. I had a good marriage, a good job. A house and friends. Why, when life was good, why now was I falling apart?
Because you’re finally ready to face it, said my brain (and my therapist).
My breakdown came from nowhere. Or so at first it had seemed. I thought I knew what my father had done to my mother, I thought that I remembered it all and had accepted it for what it was: a difficult childhood, all in the past. I could remember nights of muffled shouting, of bumps and screams. The rage and tears. The many, many nights I lay awake worrying that I would find her dead in the morning, tentative steps I took on the dark stairs in the hours after, when silence had fallen, when I would creep down to check she was still alive. So much sleep was lost to me. As a teen, as a young adult, I would sleep as though I was in a coma. It is only now with the distance of time — and a lot of therapy — that I can see that sleep was not rest, it was escape. It was a total shutdown of my being.
“It is normal,” my therapist said, “when you were a child growing up among such violence and emotional neglect, to look at your own child, see all that you never had, and fall apart. It will grow worse, before it gets better.”
As I attended my sessions and dug up more painful memories, the reason for this warning became clear. The more I uncovered, the worse I became. Triggers arrived in the smallest of things and they would catch me and throw me into a state of turmoil as I tried to mother my child. I was disintegrating, a tree, shaken to the core, my leaves falling away from me and disappearing into the sky.
I went to one therapy session convinced that I had nothing to talk about, no major meltdowns, no flashbacks, either emotional or visual. Confidence oozed from me. I was done, healed. My therapist asked me to talk her through my day, and when I came to the part where I’d been making dinner, I mentioned that I’d quickly grown irritable with my daughter who would not do anything I asked.
The more we talked it over the more I saw the stress I almost always feel around meals, how they were the moments I would most likely lose my cool with my child. A trigger I had not known existed, panic I felt (and still often) feel around timings and making sure nothing is late. The need to make sure she is fed, that she will not go hungry. A deeply rooted feeling of ‘if she can eat well and eat lots then all will be well.’ With the help of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy) I remembered the levels of violence that surrounded our meal times when I was a child. The anger, the shouting. Nothing was good enough, no one was ever quiet enough. The only purpose of mealtimes was to eat, and to eat was to survive. There could be no joy, no chatter, no fun. Names thrown at mother and child alike. Knives held in threat. It was all rage and survival.
For years in my teens, I controlled my own life through food. Either with abstinence or minimisation, with chaos and disorder. I controlled how I felt about myself with what I ate and placed my entire value on the size of my body. I had been wired to associate my thinness and beauty with my worth. And mealtimes with stress, rage, and fear. Food equals bad. And so empty felt good. When I was hungry, when I felt the hollow ache inside me, my body feeling as though it had been excavated and I was folding in on myself, that was when I lost all my feelings. The pain and sadness that ran underneath my life lost its edge when I was too hungry and numb to feel it.
The discoveries continued. It was a great glacier melting. The source, the violence of my father, and, gathering speed and weight, my trauma ran and flooded everywhere it touched, ending in the deepest pool of all — the indifference of my mother. There are always two sides to every story. For my entire adult life I had told myself one story: that of the two I had one bad, angry, violent, drunk parent, and one who was good. One who loved us. Who showed up to all the school shows and parents’ evenings. The one who read me Lord of the Rings and got me hooked on books. Bad dad, good mum. It turns out nothing was that simple.
With more EMDR therapy the recollections rolled on, only this time they focussed on the icy way I had been mothered. I started to drown. The realisation that the piece I thought was central — the story of how I had survived the violence of my home — was a false narrative I had told myself to survive was the final straw. Everything I thought I knew about my life, about me and how I had become who I was, turned out to be wrong. It was the cruellest of twists. It was the greatest of floods.
I tried to mother my own child through my own destruction, all the while knowing I myself had been inadequately mothered, terribly parented. All the while realising I had never truly been loved. Not as I deserved. Suddenly my daughter’s tantrums became personal. Every little normal child behaviour of hers undid me in a way that confounded me. Every scream was a personal rejection of me and everything I was, not just as a mother but as a child, a woman, a person. I trembled as I held her, my hands shaking on her face, my nervous system in fight mode. I wanted to run far from my child and my husband and never return. Neither of them deserved the mess that I was. How could I love them as they deserved when I had no idea how? I cried at the smallest thing. I couldn’t watch TV. When she had a meltdown, I felt eruptions inside me so unlike anything I had ever experienced. As the flooding of my mind continued I eventually hit rock bottom. Away from my child, in the privacy of the spare bedroom I slammed my head into a wall, I wanted it to burst open and spill out all the pain I felt within. I howled then. An unearthly sound as the physical pain washed away the torment inside me.
24 hours later, when I uncurled from Child’s Pose on my kitchen floor, my tears still pooled on the boards, it felt as though I had battled through a tornado and walked out the other side, transformed.
The following weekend we took my daughter to see Frozen 2, and I came face to face with my loss, my breakdown and my healing within the space of two hours of animation. I have never cried so much in a film. It was a cathartic shedding of all that I had confronted in the weeks before.
Anyone with a child under ten will likely have seen Frozen 2. During the penultimate song ‘Show Yourself’, I saw myself in a way that I never had before. The tears ran freely down my face as Elsa’s mother sang to her, tears for the little girl who had seen and lived through all that she shouldn’t. Tears for the girl and young woman who never felt the warmth of a mother’s love that Elsa feels. Tears for the adult woman who had to bring herself up and find her own path.
“Grow yourself into something new.”
As a writer it is no surprise that song lyrics, more than the actual instrumental workings of a song, reach into my heart. The words above in Elsa’s song hit me when I was flayed open and bleeding. They sunk into the fibres of my body, still raw and bloody from the battle I had undergone. They were a beam shone into the darkest corner of my mind and, lighting the flame within me, I finally saw that I had been enough all along. That I had been the one I had been waiting for all my life.
In the days following, my therapist called it my breakthrough. An apt word, for I broke, but I came through.
Three years later, my recovery is still, sometimes, a fight. Mothering through an emotional breakdown is a battle I would not wish on anyone. The wiring left in my brain often still misfires. There are hard days but I have been armed with tools to get through them, and with the fire within that knows I am good enough.
My daughter will not know what I have known. I hide from her my darkest self. And the harm her grandparents did. In protecting her, I also protect them when they do not deserve it. To her they are just her Gram and Gramp, her grandparents who love her, who are both funny, and strange, they are not all the shades of darkness and light that they were as parents. There are days when I am still triggered by her cries, by her big emotions, and all that I was not allowed to feel. There are days when the voices in my head offer me only anger, only self-abuse. As I crumble beneath their ghosts I face her and offer her only my love. I am the filter for their rage, their pain, their inadequacies. I remind myself that where I am now is only because of me. And as I mother her, so too do I mother myself. It starts with my love, for her, for myself and it moves with only kindness and compassion. And it ends with me.
It all ends with me.
MARY ROTHERY is a writer of stories about women. She writes with a focus on motherhood and infertility and loss, trauma, hope and love. She is currently working on her first novel and has recently had a short story published in the Friendship Anthology by Pure Slush Books. A mother of one and a Content Manager by day, Mary writes from her home on the Sussex Coast of England, where she lives with her daughter, her husband and her dog.