Bye Toxic Mom: NIGHT

As a child, I was like Marcel Proust: there was no way I could sleep soundly before my mother went to bed. However, while Proust wished with all his might that his mother would come into his room, I wanted the opposite.

I didn’t try to keep her out, though, because that would have made her mad—which would have woken my father. The slightest noise disturbed his incredibly light sleep.

If I needed to use the bathroom at night, I wasn’t afraid of the dark; I was afraid of waking my father, that the door of the little room where he slept alone would open to reveal his concerned face, pale and crumpled with sleep.

I was worried about him having a heart attack the next day due to fatigue. He might die, and then we would be left entirely to her, with our limited financial resources squandered on alcohol. We would no longer be able to keep up with our schoolwork, the key to future freedom, because of a total lack of structure and schedules—even the concept of night and day—and a persistent sense of danger.

She watched TV until two or three in the morning, and when she came upstairs, drunk, my internal alarm would waken me. I froze, barely daring to breathe, and listened: she was liable to make good on her death threats any night.

Sometimes she stopped outside my door, probably debating whether to enter.

When she did come in, she threw the door wide open, which made plenty of noise. It didn’t seem to wake anyone up, though, because no one ever came to check on what was happening.

She climbed into my bed.

That body that she forced me to stare at in the bathroom

White limbs attached to the bulging belly

Dark, abundant hair over the genitals

Browned, bloodstained sanitary napkins lying around on the radiator all day

That body about which she snapped, “Don’t look so disgusted.”

(fear, not disgust)

“This is what being a woman is all about. You won’t escape it.”

Indeed, when she entered my bed, I could not escape from that body. She pressed herself against my back and I pretended to be asleep, eyes wide open, waiting for it to end. Sometimes she fell asleep, which made it last even longer.

"All moms sneak into their children’s bed for a snuggle every now and then."

All moms sneak into their children’s bed for a snuggle every now and then.

That’s what people told me years later, when I mentioned it on a couple of occasions. However, there came a day when a psychiatrist asserted, "No. You should feel safe with your family, in your room, in your bed."

I’ve thought a lot about what I was sensing in those moments, assuming it must have been anger or hate. But it wasn’t. It was despair.