Let It Be Done to Me According to Thy Word.
How becoming a mother prepared me for this time in history
I was raised by a woman who embodies the victim culture. Hers is a life of less than. Her abusive father set the tone for the rest of her life. The other day, while I was sitting in the neurologist’s office listening to my mother speak to the doctor, unable to keep a straight narrative due to cognitive decline, she of course brought up her abusive father, yet again. As she ages, she becomes more like a child, I’d say about nine years of age, and lives fully in the feeling life of her nine-year-old self. Around and around went her dialogue, starting with describing her hearing loss to the doctor and somehow stumbling on to how she was abused as a child. On the surface, the two have nothing to do with each other, but go deeper and it becomes clear that the abuse of her childhood not only shaped her adult life, and our relationship, but it is now defining her cognition at the end of her life as well.
The victim mind is an endless loop of tyrannical thoughts, each one piling on the other, about how unsafe you are, how unfair things are, and how much the rest of the world is at fault. Growing up under the care of an abused woman-child who never outgrew her nine-year-old self means you are also not safe. Such a woman can’t tend to your very intense infant needs. The newborn is completely helpless and must surrender to her surroundings. If the woman responsible for your care thinks she’s helpless and a victim of life, she sees your very real, infant needs as predatory. You have ruined her life. You are an inconvenience. You are not worthy of her care because no one ever cared for her.
Early on, I knew she resented my sister and I because she’d tell us about how much work we were. How much we’d taken from her, just by being born. If only she’d remained single, she would have become something more. Someone important, like Barbara Streisand (I’m not kidding, it’s amazing how many 80 year-old women seem to think they could have been Barbara, or Jackie O, or Pricilla Presley). When I was old enough, I asked her why she ever married my father, a man she obviously hated given the way she treated him. She replied, “Because women had to marry when I was younger. We had no other choice. Don’t make the same mistake I did.”
Um, you had to marry? She had a college degree and a well-paying job. Why did she have to marry?
Regardless, this was her narrative and as she went through life, her victim mentality would follow her everywhere she went—no one liked her, everyone was talking about her, people didn’t understand her, I was too bossy, too talkative, too loud, too smart, not smart enough. Coming home from school, you never knew if she’d be happy or sad. The same circumstances would make her delighted or vicious and I couldn’t ever discern the switch between the two states of being. Once, I got a B on my report card and she said I wasn’t trying hard enough. When I brought back straight A’s, she said I was showing off.
She slapped us around, and often I had to protect my younger sister from her. This went on until I was in the eighth grade. A competitive gymnast, she slapped me for some reason, who knows why, and I looked her in the eye and said, “That is the last time you hit me. Next time, I will hit back, and I’m much stronger than you now.”
Her father died when she was pregnant with me and trust me, she did try to get better. To be different. To break the cycle of abuse. She’s been in therapy since I was born, and still goes every week. She’s even tried Jesus. Yet even now, as the 52 year-old me sits in the neurologist’s office, my mother still plays the victim. It dawns on me that she has dedicated her entire life to her abusive father, he is still haunting her every waking moment. The victim narrative on repeat has eaten away at the brain itself, destroying her cognition, and creating a mind that can no longer string events together. They’ve diagnosed her with executive functioning anxiety disorder. Basically it means that whatever executive reasoning she was able to create as an adult to cope with her traumatic childhood has now faded away. She can no longer hide from her paranoid mind. The hate and fear she has for her father is now all that’s left in there, crowding out any joyful moments she might have collected along the way.
I can’t imagine giving someone that sort of power. Especially a long-dead man.
This same mother said to me recently that she was terrified that Trump would be re-elected. When I asked her why, she said he was going to round her up and put her in a concentration camp. She is not alone in her Trump Derangement Syndrome, I am surrounded by it in my circle of friends, which makes me sad. I thought I’d left such paranoid disillusionment when I left my mother’s house. It’s disheartening to realize that much of society actually thinks like my mother. No wonder feminism is what it is now—most women must have been abused by their fathers as my mother was—and for them, Donald Trump represents that mean, horrible father who will punish them.
I can’t imagine giving someone that sort of power. Especially a stranger with really bad hair.
To be fair, while I may have known my mother’s anxiety and victim mind were not worth imitating, I did absorb part of it, seeing marriage and children as the worst things that could happen to me. I recall being nine years old myself, asking my teacher how I might be able to live on my own (yes, I really did think I was ready to leave my house. I mean, at nine I was already more mature than my mother, who is perpetually stuck at that age). She informed me that I couldn’t live on my own until I was eighteen and until then I had to study hard, get good grades, go to college, and get a job. That would be my ticket out.
Imagine my disappointment when I did the math: I’d have to live another nine years with my mother, double my lifetime at that point. Oh, the first sweet taste of depression. Hence my aversion to sex, even if I was boy crazy. Sex meant babies and babies meant servitude.
So I followed my third grade teacher’s advice—I got good grades, studied computer science, and went to work at a big tech company—only to fall in love at 24 with my boss (it was the 90s, you could date your co-workers back then). Next came marriage and then came baby in the baby carriage.
Becoming a mother was shocking (I was on the pill and determined to never procreate) and at first, I listened to the feminists, including my mother who said all her dreams had died for me when I told her about my pregnancy, and put my infant in daycare at twelve weeks of age. I got a nanny. I did all the right girl-boss things. Yet in my heart, I was in agony. I missed my baby boy. I wanted to be near him. I began to blame others—my work for not being flexible enough, the United States for not having long enough maternity leave, my husband for knocking me up.
One day, it dawned on me—I’d become a victim in my mind. My mother’s narrative had replaced my own. Yet now that I look back, my own narrative at that age was one I’d built in response to my mother’s victim mentality, almost in defiance to her. She was the victim of the world, but I was going to make the world in my own image. Yet holding that sweet, little boy with eyes like the stars in heaven, I realized there was an adult within me waiting to be born. An adult with her own thoughts fueled by the desire to mother and love this child.
That mother could not be a victim, yet she couldn’t cling to plans. If there’s one thing an unexpected pregnancy will teach you, it’s that nothing is certain in this world. By clinging to plans made by my nine-year-old self, I was destroying my chance to live in the now, to be the mother this small person needed. I knew that a new voice was needed inside of my head—not my or my mother’s nine-year-old voices. The woman in me needed to come forth. Unsure of who to turn to, I prayed and prayed and prayed for God to use me, to teach me how to love, how to be a mother, and how to be a wife. In response, I took up the Rosary, for what better mother to model my life upon than Mary?
It was her great “Yes” that entered first my heart and then my mind:
“Behold, I am the handmaiden of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to thy word.”
Not my will, but Christ’s.
I can never be a victim when in the service of the Lord, nor can I control the world around me. Instead, I surrender to the events as they unfold, keeping an open mind, pondering these things in my heart. I seek each day with curiosity, wonder, and awe.
These are interesting times. In the country where I live, there are many victims. It’s an epidemic really. I wish everyone would stop, put down their phones, get off the computer, and seek God in the trees, their children’s smiles, in their lover’s arms. We are not victims. I can’t tell you what is about to happen, but I can tell you that if you surrender and become a handmaiden of the Lord, you will have everything you need to navigate whatever happens.
The victim mind doesn’t age well, trust me.