Abusive Mothers: The Unspoken Side of Domestic Violence
I recently came across this tweet from the ever-insightful Anthony Bradley:
Domestic and Family Violence (DFV) is an endemic scourge in our society. It should be widely known that men are the main perpetrators and women and children are the main victims. It’s bad, it’s terrible, it’s demonic. It happens in churches too, even in ministry families. In Australia, on average, one woman a week is killed by her partner. It is evil!
But if there is one side to DFV that people don’t like to talk about, even DFV advocates seem very reluctant to bring this up. That is, women as perpetrators of violence against their own children.
As a child and teenager, family life was dysfunctional and spasmodically abusive.
My stepfather could be physically abusive, he was a gambling addict, it turned him into a right bastard. But my mother was by far the worst. She was a real Jekyll and Hyde character. She could be the kindest and most affectionate mother a boy could have. However, she was also an angry drunk. She could be physically abusive, emotionally abusive, and a real nasty piece of work. She would do anything to hurt you, slap you in the face, sleep deprivation, or launch a torrent of verbal attacks.
It pains me to say it, but my most vivid memory of my mother was in one of her drunken fits of fury, her face contorted with rage, and screaming in the shrillest voice I’ve heard, “I hate you!” Then there was the time, almost comical as I think about it now, that I took a knife to her cask wine, and she chased me around the house, armed with a rolling pin, stumbling mostly, and yelling all sorts of nonsensical profanities.
There’s an old Afghan proverb, the axe never remembers the tree, but the tree always remembers the axe. We remember the pain of people who hurt us, we store it in our bodies, as it is said, “the body keeps the score.”
This abuse had a deep and detrimental effect upon me. For the first twenty years of my life I was convinced that most women hated me or were at least coldly indifferent to me. When I joined the army, this gynophobia was translated into a form of misogyny where women were somewhere between damsels to be protected and objects of sexual conquest. When I joined the church, I gravitated towards a very strict form religious conservatism on gender roles which was only undone by marrying a wonderful woman, raising two fantastic daughters, and realizing that white middle-class suburban life combined with 1970s sitcom patriarchy was not the lens through which to read Holy Scripture.
Every child must wrestle with the fact that his or her parents are fallible. I’ve had to accept that much of mother’s personality and behaviour is because she herself was a victim of abuse and trauma. I try to remember her best and not her worst. And then, in the fullness of time, learn to forgive her.
I know it is not popular, I know it doesn’t fit the narrative, I know it is the exception and not the majority of the problem in relation DFV. But can we please at least acknowledge women as perpetrators of DFV, especially against children, in the various ad campaigns and on the professional development circuit?
I’m sorry you had to go through that.
Abuse comes in many forms. My mother had paranoid breaks from reality, but otherwise was an upright Christian woman. The result was that sometimes I was greeted with love and sometimes with accusation of an imaginary evil. As a teen we boys tended to retreat to my oldest brother's room, the farthest from my parents, when mom was having one of her "spells" as we called them. (My undergraduate degree is in psychology and I have plenty of graduate study in counseling - it was a form of self-healing) I never saw physical abuse, only anger and accusation, although I hear through the wall at night such speech and accusations of my father as to live in fear that she might take out that anger in physical violence, such as a knife in the night. The church (in which Dad was the leading elder) did not, to my knowledge, know. The world did not know. Dad did not name it to me until just before my marriage (early in their marriage he had been advised by a psychiatrist to commit her to an institution). I would only have names for and understanding starting during university. I honor Dad for his commitment over the years, coping as best he could. And I honor Mom for how she was my first catechist in the faith and generally loving and tolerant (especially of strange pets I would get) and supportive during my study and later career. She (as well as Dad) is at rest, now, and had been and is healed of the "demons" which oppressed her (and seem to have run in her family). Jesus has spoken peace to her soul over that which she could not control. We who still live are still working through the results, but it is one reason why, although my career has been in biblical scholarship, I have been involved in counseling and family emotional systems and probably why I married a woman who would later become a professional counselor. One seeks to bring the healing to others for which did not exist to be brought to you and yours at that time.