The Trauma She Shared!

She cornered her eldest daughter in the front porch of their apartment and kept beating her, initially with her fists, then with every other cooking utensil she could lay her hands on at the time, the young teenager kept pleading for forgiveness for a crime she hadn’t committed only because she sought release from the brutalities and all the pain that came with it. The mother just kept on beating her for she hadn’t her fill of the malice she was undertaking. Then midway in-between the crime she started shouting some senseless inquiries in the line of; “why didn’t you come first to me to inform me you have had your menarche? Why do I your mother have to know that by our neighbor’s agency huh? She is more of a mother to you than I am erh? So tell me when was it? And how did you manage it you ingrate of a child? Speak up!” All these rants of an inquiry were accompanied by even more severe beatings than the assaults that landed without them. The young teenage daughter just stood helplessly in the corner collecting all those misdirected blows and responding how best she could to those mindless inquiries. Her younger siblings; two brothers and a sister stood aghast looking on with added horror to the happenings in motion. What could they do but cry along, any attempt on their part to succor their big sister will also be met with their own measure of blows, beatings, assaults and abuses of every form and kind. This is a snapshot of their world for the most part growing up. The mother drawn upon in this narrative had a man but he was not always around because they fought a lot. She drank too much of alcohol and will on most occasions leave the house at the break of day dishing out moneys to each child and ask them to buy food when they get hungry. She will show up in the course of the day once or maybe twice intermittently but always came home to share the evening and night moments. Her interactions with her children were marked by a masked affection, for she interacted with them yet in a very haughty and somewhat abusive manner for their interactions were laced with insults and degrading utterances that were not deserving of the light these little ones were. This was no poverty situation for she had business going on. And money flowed in decently enough to cater for basic needs and some extra spending when she chose, so why this degenerate quality of interactivity with her very flesh & blood? There were many times without count when she would say upon embarking on her abusive stunts that; “the discipline that was cultured in me is what I am teaching you so that no outsider will come and tell me I didn’t raise my children well!” But beneath this particular utterance lay the masked communication that says; ‘the undue trauma that was inflicted upon me by my own mother is what I am inflicting upon you too’. And this is the case of the matter. For this woman was raised by a mother who suffered considerable hardships & rejection from her own family. And given that we are containments of our experiences and often times becoming the contents of what we contain, we pour these contents into the holding cups of our loved ones unconsciously for these grim experiences that we on occasions must phase through tend to shadow our awareness such that when we move to interact with the ones we call loved, we act them out. So her own mother treated her with the abusive indifference she is now meting out to her own daughter for she doesn’t know any better. Love & tender kindness in her interactions as a young girl herself was near absent, so was she not cultured into another trauma machine to churn out same into the bloodline of the generations she will birth? As a mother the love for her children was evident for they were clothed & fed, but the quality of the interactivity was off-balance. And this motherly love of which we speak was contained in the agency of her abusive tendencies such that in her eyes she was doing a good job as a mother, for her own mother taught her nothing more, or perhaps less! Her sense of self-respect was born of the fear-response the children naturally gave off at the sight of her presence, yes, she felt respected when she sensed the pain of fear in her own children, so that the fearlessness that a well-balanced child will exhibit in a show of love for their guardian was rather considered an act of dire disrespect that was met with blows to instill that fear. So you see how inverted the motions of love & tender kindness in the quality of interactivity amongst a family was? You may probably seek to know what the opinions of the neighbors and probably members of the extended family were? It was that of normalcy, for this was the norm of the culture, an unconscious sharing of trauma from one generation to the other. There were however a few people who had grown lofty enough to see the degeneracy of the cycle in motion. One of whom was her own father who obviously was a very patient & wise man. There was this one time he paid a visit to the apartment where his daughter lived in a black volgswagon passat, and as he relished quality time in-doors to eat and converse with his daughter, the two boys, that is his grandsons went and hid themselves in the back seat of his car so that when the time was ripe for him to take off, he would inevitably ferry them along to his own residence without his knowledge. He did drive some considerable distance with them hidden where they were upon setting off, but at that point the children felt as though they were too far in the journey away from a home they didn’t want to be a part of to be taken back, they reared their heads at the back seat and he caught a glimpse of them in the rearview mirror. But for the monument of a man their grandfather was, he didn’t panic neither did he get angry, he only patiently asked them whether they had informed their mother that they were coming with him, when they said no he patiently steered the car around and drove them back to the house. He must have had a more heartfelt conversation with his daughter upon that turn of events for after he had left for the second time, their mother remained calm in their presence, this was not her norm, for that act in her eyes is one of dire rebellion and the disrespect that is contained within it and thus more diversified beatings & variegated abuses would have followed in response. But thats the thing, you can only give of what you have, and if your consciousness is teeming with abuses from parents & guardians you trusted to have safeguarded you from the very abuses they now rain upon you, of what quality of interactive content can you perhaps share with your immediate circle of loved ones? Many long years up the line of this narrative, her daughter who was chiefly the target of her abuses has grown into a young woman obviously not without her own store of emotional baggage and living away from her mother, purposively avoiding her at every turn. She is often heard calling another woman she fellowships with in a community church her mother, and affectionately so, for the need to nurture that parent-child bond is a sacred need in which is contained a long-lasting wellness that cannot be ignored lest its absence manifests a certain marked dysfunction in behavior that is capable of disrupting the harmonious succession of the Light of Love in any human setting.