Editor’s note: The following article was written by a Lovefraud reader who we’ll call “WalkonMom.”
I used to think that “six” was my lucky number. And sometimes, I used to remind myself to show gratitude for six little things, like, the sound of New England leaves as they rustle underfoot, the first snowfall with really huge flakes, each breath flowing in and out, especially when you recognize that you are free for the first time, the scent of your baby’s head as you cradle and rock her in your grandmother’s rocking chair, the preciousness of each holiday, along with the sacred spirit of wonder that fills you as you see your child grow from year to year. Falling in love, and realizing that, no matter what, you’ll be strong enough to fix any boo boo or heal any abuse in the relationship, however seemingly impossible, because, well, you chose to love that man, and that’s supposed to mean forever, and, besides, you’re a mom—that should be enough.
But to survive in a situation of domestic violence, how much love could it EVER take for you alone to mitigate or hold it at bay? And when you realize that nurturing is never enough, that you can’t solve or ever heal it, and when you need to leave Hell to save your child, how much LOVE will it take to get you both out—alive? How much love will it take, years later, when your once kidnapped child chooses borderline behaviors to blame you for everything the sociopath did?
I’ll never forget. November 4, 2008. The night my 17-year-old daughter returned to NH from NJ after nearly six years, finally reaching out to me for help—a plea in the darkness. It was late, and I was tucking her into bed. My second husband and I had just returned from our honeymoon to pick her up in Hartford earlier that night. She had recently voiced some problems (again) with her Dad. I wasn’t given to know what the seriousness of his issues were over the past several years. She and I had only visited on a few rare occasions during her six-year transition to womanhood.
This is what I do know: While she was away, she’d attempted suicide and ended up in the hospital on multiple occasions. She’d cut herself, developed impetigo from self-injury. She took varying cocktails and combinations of drugs over the years, sometimes in dangerous and lethal quantities. She’d engaged in dangerous sexual activity, run away, sometimes being found on a city bench. Most horrific of all, as I was to discover that night, she held an ominous secret close to her heart, one that loomed much larger than the two of us. Bigger even than life itself.
No match
I’d left my first marriage in 2000, and with nothing, save one child, and a NH restraining order. I was no match for this cruel man who would stop at nothing to punish me. He was incapable of love, and as his warped mind was obsessed with obtaining and destroying the one thing he knew I cared about, his sole aim became that of molding our precious child’s soul into something he could torture me with forever, a meted out, deliberate punishment for my daring to leave his controlling, jealous, narcissistic personage, a payback for my rejecting his penchant for enjoying watching me suffer—and for leaving the abuse. “You’re it until I die, baby,” he used to say, over the years. “You’re IT.”
And so I had to borrow money from Mom to keep NJ courts from snatching my daughter back unwillingly, even as she and I had moved to NH with his physical help, and his written, signed understanding that I had no choice but to leave the marriage because of his abuse.
We endured death threats, were in hiding twice, hired one corrupt NJ attorney, “enlisted” the aid of therapists, NH DOVE attorneys—family services workers. But we were no match for the lies, death threats, the unending stream of NJ Italian family money, all fueling corruption that carried a singular purpose: to wear me down while making me appear as “crazy.”
Thus, we fought a three-year long, fledgling court battle with a corrupt judge, between two states, both warring for the acquisition of my child’s tender flanks.
Kidnap
It was in 2003 that he decided to kidnap our child, at the end of a month-long visitation. And it was during that fateful year that the same vulnerable girl who used to plead desperately for the abuse to stop, decided inexplicably, to go back to NJ—to live with her father.
When she returned for a short time to NH with FBI help, she’d evolved into a demanding, enraged, uncontrollable, borderline, destructive teen, filled with angst, three-inch devil horns super glued to her forehead, and Celtic swirls painted where two eyebrows used to be, in the style of her famous half brother’s band.
Once I’d witnessed just how cleverly he’d turned her head with those expensive Lolita skirts, shit kicker boots and a multitude of other promises to be involved with the band, how he coerced her with things he purchased during his “quality kidnapping time,” I knew my role as a mother was over. All I had left was my right to mourn, to breathe, and to try to walk on.
She walks away
At 12, she’d arrived at her own ironic version of an age of reason. For me, it was just another hellish turning point in the ongoing dialectic of domestic violence, an unholy grail of horror from which I knew I would never emerge, because he’d continue to use her to seek and secure a lifetime of vengeance and vitriol from me. What else could I do? I had to play dead, and let her go. She tried to push my mother down the stairs—threatened to kill all of us. So on one fateful summer day, I watched her put on her goth armor, the teeny weeny sexy skirts he’d purchased, and I let her choose to walk away. July 27, 2003—that remains the date of her death, regardless of our current and future interactions.
And so, this same beautiful soul and creature who once begged me to leave her father, now openly rejected the peaceful life it had taken several years for me and Mom to create for her, after finding the courage to leave the abuse. In the silence of one oceanfront family home, I was left alone to nurse these impossibly painful, openly weeping, inner wounds. From that day on, I mourned my daughter as dead. The mere possibility of having to hold, within, the fear and possibility of her death at his, or her own hands, in light of the risks I knew awaited inside the Hell she was to re-enter, now alone, without a mother’s protection or presence, would have driven any mother mad. I screamed and ripped my hair out for a week, and cried and vomited for one more. Then, I donned my teacher’s clothing, and went back to work, telling the story as if I were reciting summer vacation details. The only eyes that no longer had tears were my own.
No one validates this kind of death as mourning, so again, I was not given the grace of sharing it with anyone, for fear of being called crazy, or over-dramatic. Those few people I brought into the circle of the story blamed me, for being stupid enough to “choose” a sociopath, for letting her go, for feeding her Twinkies in grade school, for simply having been born at all. “What kind of mother leaves her child?” they would query. Well, the kind whose child threatens to kill Mom or use their Daddy to kill the family so that she can live the “Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (that he promised her, replete with sex, drugs and rock and roll in NJ), that’s who! I couldn’t compete against a band that was becoming famous; without that, he’d have had no power to sway her into the world of the perverse. Boundaries. It all boils down to boundaries.
Loss of motherhood
For six years, half of me tried to imagine living again as some fictitious single woman, one would never be again a wife or mother, while the other half keened as the woman whose child was absent and had died at the age of 12, to a murderous and conscious-less husband. I checked the NJ obituaries on a weekly basis.
Since that time, regardless of whether or not my daughter still breathes, I will always mourn the loss of motherhood. Life can be ironic, particularly if the devil won’t let you out of Hell.
I’ve read that children of divorce in the context of abuse tend to seek love unrelentingly from the parent with whom they feel unsafe, the one they instinctively know does not love them sincerely. My daughter and I were always so close that, had I demanded she stay with me, she would have given me the middle finger and left anyway, not because of hate, but because she needed me to prove to her, against her father’s protestations, that I loved her enough to let her go, to figure out who her daddy was on her terms, not mine, or the court’s, or any therapist’s. She compartmentalized her love, keeping me in a box only for the tough times.
Meanwhile, after years of trying to keep her safe before puberty, and to hold all of this up alone, I was battle worn, devoid of personal power and hope; in some ways, it was a relief to let her go. Years of his unrelenting torture had kept her hostage, and me from moving on with some kind of half-life. You see, she and I were so connected that I know that she knew all this, too. Deep inside, she knows that she and I were always just pawns, even as her budding psyche needed to fill that void in inner space in which we all need to KNOW that we are loved by our parents unconditionally, even if it’s not true.
Just a pawn
She had always been scared of her father’s unpredictable, controlling nature—many NH friends who called, after she left, validated this when they told me how shocked they were to discover she had chosen to live with him. But the hardest part for me throughout all the “she said” accusations, and through all the dirty legal tactics, his M.O., to avoid accountability, was my knowing from his eyes (and her mouth) that she was “just a pawn” between two equal parents, and an innocent victim of a lose-lose, power-over scheme, in which her Mom was the sole instigator, merely a cartoon character in a b-movie, a buffoon, an inconsequential, incompetent piece of shit, whose indomitable spirit as a mother existed in order to be squelched and mocked, at all cost.
Yet she could only see the situation at that time as any child would, stuck between two divorcing parents who would act upon love only and therefore fight for HER behalf. In spite of circumstances, children all need to believe that their very existences hold real meaning, and that both parents are acting sincerely. That is why she felt so vehemently angry. Since she knew that she could always be herself with me, and that I would love her back without question, while holding her very birthright, which carries also a permanent reminder of my sole personal responsibility for her rage about being born in the first place, within my own being.
In 2008, six years had passed since I’d experienced being a mother to my only child, six years since I’d been lost inside his torturous definition of divorce hell, a place in which I was stripped of all motherhood, raped from the inside out by a cruel and damaged man. Looking back, she and I both knew that all this irony and complexity required that she release herself from the fire of her daddy’s life, and from mine. She had needed to figure it all out by herself, to pull herself up by her Goth corset straps, and eyebrow-less face.
Something to show you
Within this set of sixes in years, I hadn’t known if my child were alive or dead, or even whether or not I’d ever find the will to continue living for myself. So simply for us to come back together, just before she reached the age of 18, was a small miracle. Naturally, she and I were catching up, that November night, on lost years of talking, about little things—how she’d run away from Dad again, how she was missing too many days at school in her senior year, how she didn’t want to live in NJ anymore. I remarked on how very thin and frail and sad she was, compared to how she had looked when she had visited in the summer. I asked her if she was feeling better. She’d vomited when we picked her up, lying in the back holding her stomach all the way to NH. She said, casually, “Oh you know, Mom. I’m withdrawing from heroin again; when I ran away from Dad last week, I had to stay with my friends.” Her friends had held her together, even as the drugs to mute the pain of trauma and long-term abuse were gradually killing them all.
I tried not to pry, even as I felt that sudden, old and all-too-familiar adrenaline rush from the past, that trembling murderous rage within that makes you want to kill the bastard that did this to your child, to erase that power-ridden, sociopathic smirk forever from his evil, stinking face.
It was then that she said, “Mom, I have something to show you.” I tried to draw her out tenderly by guessing what it might be, but then she slowly lifted the fabric of her pants up over her emaciated pajama-donned legs, revealing a horrendous, ugly truth, a horrific badge describing the six years she had taken on a un-winnable and pointless battle all on, by herself. Her precious flesh hung in tatters; there was a long series of deep muscle scars running up and down her thighs; some cuts were half-infected, others long healed. A few were one to two inches deep. I could not breathe, but I knew this moment could either save her life or end it; her future, carrying the basic will to live, was in my hands. I felt IT coming. I stayed steady, like a ship withstanding a rogue wave, turning my bow into the white squall.
His son
And then she said, “I know now why I’ve done this since I was young.” My response was a silence in deep waves of impending grief and doom. I held my breath, as I could sense that dread and nausea and relief were rising up faster than I could feel the blood coursing through my veins. Slowly, and with utterly slow agony, she revealed that her 29-year-old half-brother, son of her father (from his 1st marriage), had raped her, had sex with her. He’d done it while her father was downstairs; my former stepson and daughter up in her bedroom. She said that it was consensual, that she loved him, but that it also led her to take heroin. It made her cut. It made her run away. She’d stopped going to school. It was her senior year. She had done this over the years. I knew then that it hadn’t been the first time, but it wasn’t mine to say it. Her half brother had thrown her across the room before coming to see me; that’s when I realized there was no going back. This was bigger than incest or abuse. This was a life or death situation.
My daughter’s precious life depended, in that moment, for me to be stronger for her than the ocean is deep. She needed, more than oxygen, for me to hold her as a fortress- of understanding, compassion and love. And so as I rocked and held her, I struggled to keep all my past wolves at bay. She spoke only of one incident, yet the cutting and the sex and the problems with her father and his son likely occurred since she was a little girl.
As long as I could focus on breathing out into that eternity, into the inferno of that moment, and as I held her, I felt that we both began to let go, to breathe back in all the life from those lost years back into the corpses of one other. To keep the horrendous thoughts from ripping me apart, I consciously drifted into my realm of gratitude, and uttered seven silent things for which I was now truly grateful, as “six” was no longer my lucky number:
For scent of song in a sky of blue, for dancing and healing and walking on, for the gift my daughter bestowed, which was to let her mother go so that she could be free and learn to grow strong enough to climb back into the abyss again to save her daughter’s life, for the phrase “love goes on forever” engraved on our laundry basket by one nine year old child, for newspapers that do not yet contain the obituary of my own child, for the hope that someday truth will prevail over lies, with the spirit of good triumphing over the hell of insincerity.
Lastly, for the power of imagination lying deeply within the understanding that there will always be many different kinds of deaths we must accept, all of which she and I have endured.
Into the fire again
As she was a minor, the abuse was reported by her, to therapists, and to her father, and to DYFS. Yet still, She chose to enter back into the fire again. She is now 21, trying to bully me into believing that “none of this happened,” trying perhaps to assuage her guilt that I’m slowly dying, by striking the truth from the records of her history. She also has developed borderline personality. In the meantime, I’ve been diagnosed with a rare connective tissue disorder, and fear that these things will never be resolved between us, as my time on earth is limited, keeping me from being able to let go of her. Time is short; most of all, it is unfailingly precious.
Motherhood, too, with a sociopath, is a tenuous, bitter, lose-lose hole into which we fall; it burns me inside that the revelation of the perpetrators must die with me. Yes, against my better judgment, I must do as I am told by US therapists: to keep these secrets under wraps until after I die. One never wants to stir the hornet’s nest, and the revelation of the names themselves will be the margin of safety I leave for my new husband and his family, in the event they are ever threatened. It all seems so ludicrous, and it is exactly why perpetrators continue to get away with murder. I will never see the fruit of my womb heal from her own wounds; I will never be able to protect her from this genetic disease, which she, too, carries. Most of all, as she eschews the truth of her history, she refuses to honor our connection as mutually respectful. I am no longer a mother.
In life with a sociopath, I believe now that one gives up the right to motherhood. The rights to breathe and live on are defined by sheer whim, luck, space, and a lot of grace.
Yet, The one thought that will always bring me the only comfort as I die is this:
In the bowels of Hell, there is but one gravestone, and the only surname that is and will ever remain engraved on it belongs to the sociopath and his son.
Walkonmom, please accept my most sincere virtual hugs and support – from one mother to another, and both of us recognizing the horrific truth that our children are spaths. My eldest was diagnosed “Borderlie Personality Disorder Cluster B” and is wholly, and completely dangerous. He, too, has self-mutilated for whatever “reasons,” and sought the approval and acceptance of his abusive sperm-donor. He, too, “died” long ago, and there is no reconciliation between the beautiful (literally) infant that I bore and the monster that he is, today.
Yes, there comes a point when “motherhood” is no longer a factor, and it’s probably one of the most brutal of all punishments that an abusive spath can deliver.
Thank you, so very much, for your honest and courageous story. May you find peace – a true, soulful peace – in your journeys and healing. And, DNA does not a family make.
Brightest and most comforting blessings to you
Dear Walkonmom,
When I came to Love Fraud in the summer of 2007, most of the bloggers here were recovering from romantic relationships with psychopaths, but as the years have passed more and more bloggers have come here from the wounds inflicted by FAMILY relationships with psychopaths. Many who have parents, siblings, and children who are “cluster B” disordered, dangerous to them, and it is particularly painful to have a child who is personality disordered.
I wish as a nurse that I could put a bandage on your wounds and say “there, there, it is gonna be okay” but I can’t because “it” (the relationship you wanted with your daughter as a normal mother would want) may never be possible even if you lived to be 100.
I too have lost a son who is a full blown psychopath and am also the daughter of a psychopathic father that I so wanted to love me. There are many many other bloggers here who also have lost children. I can’t tell you there is an easy way to accept the loss, or that it will be 100% pain free at some time…but even now we are able to find meaning in our lives and acceptance and peace. God bless you, you ARE still a mother, because you have loved your child, even a child who is lost to you now.
I was discussing on the blog the other day about the “stages of life” and how as we grow from an infant into an adult and then a parent and then into our “sunset years” the things we strive to accomplish in each stage are different…I am 65 and already into those “sunset years” in which my own time on earth is limited though for now my health in general is good for my age…I know I don’t have a long time left to do the things I want to do and must come to a resolution of the past decisions I have made.
If your health is such that you are entering this “end stage” at an earlier time in your (age) life, still, you are entering that time when you will need to come to a resolution and an acceptance of what IS rather than what we would wish WAS. Coming to peace and acceptance of what has gone on in the past, the decisions we made (both the wise ones and the unwise ones) is important.
Walkonmom,
Your story is very well written and thank you for sharing.
I have a daughter who is now 13, who’s sociopath father has attempted to gain custody of through a battle in the family courts. Luckily she had never known or bonded with this man. I feared letting go as you did when I ran out of money and energy. I felt at a point even without her bond to this man that she felt if she just went to him, all this ugliness would end and her mom (me) would not have to endure any more abuse and maybe she could handle him and make it stop. It’s been very scary and it’s not over.
I wish she could read your words and FEEL them and know what it is inside of you but I also know when the BPD, psychopathic people are deeply entrenched in their disorder, they really never feel it or get it.
May you have peace for now and forever.
Eralyn
Well, my first husband, the bio-father of both my daughters is dead. He died on Tuesday night, in his sleep, of congestive heart failure, and alcoholism. He was living in a camper on his twin sisters horse pasture.
As I type my older daughter is preparing to fly across the country to attend the funeral.
She is torn up.
From the time I left him, when she was 3 and a half, and my younger daughter was 8 months old, he never sent a Birthday card, or called at Christmas.
Never willingly sent a child support payment….when they were teen-agers, he kept the courts at bay by sending 9 dollars a month.
I was already over it when I left. I feel very little about it. But, I feel sad for my daughter.
In the last couple of years, her Dad had reached out to her, and she had got to know him, a bit.
Anyway….
Kim I hate that your daughter is sad…but no matter how much of a shiat they are, we WANT to love our bio parents. Fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, mine was such a shiat to me that I ended up hating him, then eventually got to where he was a non-entity to me.
He was extremely well known and very very VERY rich, and I had always said that when he died (summer of 2007) thhat I would sue the heck out of his estate and make them settle for just $1 to get rid of me…but you know when the time actually came, I realized that if he had left me ten million bucks I would have given away every cent of it to some charity that he would have hated. I realized finally that I didn’t even want his blood money under any circumstances. He never paid a dollar child support or did anything positive for me when I was growing up by I wanted to get to know him….and UNfortunately I did get to know him very well. He raped me among other things. Two of my three half sibs also had nothing to do with him.
I can understand your daughter’s feelings, and I hope that she can get some closure. Having a P-parent is about as bad as having a P child.
How are you and Pinky doing? Are things better? How is your scooter? The job? I’m still sitting here on my tricycle scooter but getting around better, only about 3 1/2 weeks to go before I get a walking boot.
Walkonmom, I read your story with tears streaming – it’s deeply touching. Your well written story (are you a writer?) drives home the insurmountable damage done by sociopaths. I don’t have any children. But I mourn the loss of my disordered biological family every day in some way or other, and as the daughter of narcissistic and sadistic parents and stepparents, try my best to learn how to bond with people at 52 years of age. I feel for both you and your daughter, and I hope you find some meaning in your situation which has no fairytale ending.
Thanks for all your beautiful responses, replete with wisdom, validation, kindness, and very good advice. Thanks also to Donna, who had the courage to post our story.
I’ve been on Lovefraud for awhile, but as I grow weaker in each day with my illness, I have found it very difficult to let go of my only child, whose soul was once pure and kind and beautiful, but now which splits in two in the struggle to find some kind of bastardized reality that only a warped hard-wired psyche can handle; I felt it very important to start to expurgate my truths in a somewhat safe way, while also not compromising her privacy, just in case something happens, and she is left motherless, with no one with whom she she can ever tell the truth that can validate and nurture her as she knows I have always done. She knows we are always connected, and says so; something tells me that this whole splitting thing is a ruse to keep her life on an even keel.
Each breath contains the potential for healing and change and revelations on the part of my daughter, and so it is without hope, but with radical acceptance, openness to change, and strong boundaries to protect my right to the truth and my new family’s right to walk on in peace without the sociopath attached, that I move forward, with no expectation save the Golden Rule being applied to me as well as to and from all those I love.
Somehow, in all this business of being thrown off our paths by psychopaths, I forget to put the oxygen mask on myself first.
Stargazer, I have done some writing, and do appreciate the validation, more than words could ever say. Illness, just as violence, takes everything away, sometimes all our friends, former capacities, and former successes, save one thing: the unrepeatable essence with which we come into the world. Hearing that something one does has been validating to someone else brings HUGE meaning to a life that is lived from a bed; finding common ground in experiences helps hold up all the collective old wounds that we all share, until the suffering eventually becomes weightless.
Love to all; I’m sending healing energies to each and all who have ever suffered at the man-made obstacles that we’ve all had to try to overcome.
Sincerely,
walkonmom (an invented “nom de plume” to protect my current family from retaliation)
Walkonmom,
Your story is heartbreaking. Please, try not to take more responsibility than is yours to take. You did the best you could with what you knew. The universe provided only so much and you worked with that. Your daughter is a separate entity. She had her own choices. I feel like you are taking all the responsibility for everything that happened. I think that letting it go would be very healing for you. I mean TRULY AND REALLY letting it go to God. Accept that you are helpless and that you can’t control the outcome.
What I hope will happen is that this will help towards healing your autoimmune disease.
sky
Thanks, Skylar, for your wisdom. I wish the disease were autoimmune and something that could be healed by letting go. It isn’t. It’s genetic; I was born with it. The doctors didn’t figure that out until two years ago; my daughter has it, too.
walkonmom
Walkonmom, put all of that energy into your own health, my dear – you’ve got every reason to do this. With your experiences and gift of writing/storytelling, your voice can be one of those that facilitates change.
I’m sure you’ve looked into every avenue to manage your condition, but we simply don’t know “everything” about medicine, and there are more alternatives than there are human beings on the planet. Keep fighting, Walkonmom, because you are SO worth that effort!
Brightest blessings