Child Abuse Survivors Make Mountains Out of Molehills

Because every molehill truly is a mountain

“Have fun spending time with your family,” my colleague chirped happily before I left two days early for one of the worst weeks of my life. Though I’d let her know I was taking sick leave to help move my emotionally unstable, dementia addled mother from a somewhat hoarded house she’d been living in for over thirty years an hour away to a new one my brother and I purchased for her closer to where he lives, she couldn’t help but use that old adage so many of us offer when colleagues leave for the holidays.

I was taking sick leave for a reason. My brother and I were raised by our mother alone beneath the terrible weight of some kind of undiagnosed mental illness that would catapult her into rages and tirades that would last for weeks, sometimes. Our whole universe was unstable, all the time, because of these rages.

A friend who’s read much of my writing and heard descriptions of these episodes suggested a book called, “Stop Walking on Eggshells,” which holds a potential diagnosis for whatever it is she carries, but the diagnosis doesn’t really matter. At this point, she also carries the heavy weight of short-term memory loss so profound, sometimes she forgets there’s food in her mouth as she grows confused with the sensation on her tongue as her jaw reflexively chews.

Parents with undiagnosed mental illness are twice as likely to neglect or abuse their children.

This was true for me and may have been for many of you. Like that book, which describes my mother’s condition to a shockingly accurate degree, most of the literature about dealing with mental illness in the family is targeted towards adults or those who choose to remain with loved ones coping with it.

This information helps me process the impact of the experience on my life and helps me understand the kind of profound empathy I need to cultivate and maintain in order to keep loving my mother. However, virtually none of the literature is targeted towards those who were thrust into the situation and whose minds had to develop around the illness.

What I’ve discovered is that my mother’s mental illness, the struggles that led her to lock herself in her room for weeks at a time, led her to rage and lash out at her very young children, led her to threaten to kill herself and us, is this massive tumor I had to learn to grow around. I had to grow despite the illness, and I had no idea what was going on, no idea how far from “normal” my reality lay.

We make mountains out of molehills, those of us who survived the trauma of being raised by mentally ill parents, especially those of us who were severely neglected as a result of it.

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, neglect far outweighs all other forms of abuse on children. Furthermore, it leads to a whole host of developmental disturbances, including disrupting the way a child’s brain develops and processes information, and can negatively alter a child’s biological stress response system.

According to Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child, “Science tells us that young children who experience significantly limited caregiver responsiveness may sustain a range of adverse physical and mental health consequences that actually produce more widespread developmental impairments than overt physical abuse.”

We are raised in a bath of toxic stress and hormones intended to teach us when to flee, which in turn teaches us we must flee all the time, constantly. Everything is a struggle. Our brains are wired to perceive the world as a threat.

It’s bad, and we know it’s bad.

We know that abused and neglected children suffer, but what do those of us who’ve lived through it, whose brains and lives are inextricably intertwined with these traumatic experiences none of us asked for, what do we do with these memories?

Some of us choose to cut toxic parents out of our lives forever. The option of this choice fills me with nothing but longing and emptiness. Though my father was married six times and had nine children spread among them, he abandoned my full brother and me to live with our mother alone.

“A child’s place is with the mother,” he is reported to have said, and while this kind of abandonment meets the literal definition of child neglect, there are mountains of research pointing to the importance of both parents to the developing child.

For me, then, cutting ties with my mother means severing the one family member besides my full brother who has always been present, despite the fact that this presence has been volatile, neglectful, and emotionally abusive. The thought of losing her brings with it a stabbing sense of loneliness and isolation, highlighting the pain the suggestion I, “enjoy time with” my family brings.

Because every molehill really is a mountain, those of us who survive fundamentally understand what strength is.

Our blood is full of perseverance, one of the far less toxic byproducts of that horrific hormonal soup we’ve swum in our whole lives. Hope lies in research on resilience, the fact that those raised in abusive households can thrive despite the obstacles and may have increased capacity to do so, given time and patience. Furthermore, though it’s widely accepted as truth that abused children typically grow up to become abusers themselves, research indicates the opposite.

If you are not a survivor of childhood abuse or trauma or otherwise lucky enough to have a supportive, intact, and loving family, understand why those of us who do not will make a mountain out of the molehill of a suggestion we enjoy the holidays or spend time with our families. These comments and those like them sting us to the core.

We are not “normal” and never will be and while we can learn and cultivate resilience, our grief is a fundamental part of who we are. The tumor of our parent’s mental illness, that thing our skins and bodies had to thwart and grow unevenly and grotesquely around, doesn’t need to be cancerous, but I suspect it can never be fully removed.

There are too many veins and vital organs that developed alongside it and so we carry it, we grow and persevere and learn and hopefully come one day to understand and know healthy love and boundaries.

We learn to carry that horrific, painful tumor around with us all the time, everywhere we go and some of us grow and learn so much, so well, that it almost looks easy, but it’s not.

Just because we carry it well doesn’t mean it’s not the heaviest thing in the world to us.

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