Sable Monroe

There are some people you survive by forgiving.

There are some people you survive by understanding.

I survived my mother by losing respect for her.

That probably sounds terrible.

Good.

Some survival strategies are terrible. They are not the things you would teach in a parenting class or embroider on a pillow. They are crude little tools fashioned by children who do not have access to better ones.

By the time I was twelve or thirteen, I had started to understand something that would eventually save me:

My mother did not know everything.

More importantly, my mother did not know me.

Before then, my childhood had been fragmented. I had lived with grandmothers. I had been passed between adults. However dysfunctional that was in its own way, it gave me reprieves.

Then I came to America and had to live with my mother for one long, uninterrupted stretch.

From twelve until eighteen, I was in it.

There was no grandmother’s house waiting to give me distance. No other household where I could disappear for a while and experience a different version of family.

I couldn’t leave.

So I left in my mind.

I began examining my mother instead of simply accepting her.

And I did not examine her kindly.

I didn’t merely stop respecting my mother.

I mentally dragged her.

I picked apart her choices, her relationships, her judgment, sometimes even her appearance. I thought vicious things about her because I needed her to stop looking powerful in my mind.

She could not remain Mother, capital M, the woman whose judgment defined reality.

She had to become some fucked-up woman who happened to be raising me.

Sometimes my internal monologue was as crude as:

You dumb bitch.

You evil bitch.

Look at the decisions you’ve made.

Why the fuck would I listen to you?

I had to turn her into Boo-Boo the Fool.

It was ugly.

It also worked.

Children have a tendency to make their parents enormous. They are our first authorities. For a while, their version of reality can become reality itself.

I couldn’t afford for my mother to remain that enormous in my mind.

So I dethroned her.

I looked at the decisions she had made. I looked at the men she had chosen. I looked at the chaos she had tolerated and sometimes created. And I kept returning to one increasingly important question:

Why should this person’s opinion of me carry any authority?

That question protected me.

Because when you are a child, adults have enormous power to tell you who you are.

You’re lazy.

You’re selfish.

You’re difficult.

You’re ungrateful.

You’re stupid.

You’re going to fail.

And when those judgments come from someone you believe is wiser than you, they can burrow inside. Eventually you stop hearing your parent’s voice and start hearing your own.

But what happens when you stop respecting the source?

What happens when the person telling you that you’re worthless becomes, in your mind, someone whose judgment you wouldn’t trust about anything else?

Something changes.

The words can still hurt.

The person can still punish you.

They can still control the house, the money, the food, the rules.

But they become less capable of controlling reality.

That was my first form of independence.

Long before I could leave my mother’s house, I stopped allowing her to be the ultimate authority inside my head.

It wasn’t therapy.

It wasn’t healing.

It wasn’t even particularly mature.

I was a teenager.

It was psychological warfare conducted by a child with no fucking army.

And it worked.

I didn’t have nice tools.

I had my mind.

So I used it.

I called her things inside my head that no therapist would recommend. Careless woman. Gutter woman. Duncebat. Fucking fool. No standards.

I examined every bad decision I could see and used it as evidence against her authority.

Look who you chose. Look what you tolerate. Look at the mess you’ve made. And I’m supposed to believe you know who I am?

It wasn’t compassionate.

Compassion wasn’t what I needed.

I needed insulation.

Every ugly thought put another layer between her judgment and my identity.

By seventeen, some of what I had been thinking privately had started coming out of my mouth.

I remember an argument with my mother. I don’t remember what started it anymore. Memory is funny that way. Sometimes the circumstances disappear while one sentence remains perfectly preserved.

She told me to get the fuck out of her house.

There was one rather significant problem with that suggestion.

I was still a minor.

And I didn’t have my immigration papers.

I told her that.

Her response was:

“Go fuck and get your papers like I did.”

There are sentences mothers say to daughters that probably deserve several minutes of silence afterward.

Apparently I was not in a silent mood.

I told her I would get better than she ever did.

I meant a man.

She threw one of my Zebra romance novels at me.

Even now, I have to appreciate the symbolism.

A romance novel flying through the air because a mother and daughter were arguing about men, immigration and whose life choices were worse.

You couldn’t write that shit.

Well.

Apparently I can.

By then, though, something fundamental had already happened between us.

She still had parental authority over me in the technical sense. I lived in her house. I was seventeen. I didn’t yet have the freedom to simply walk away and establish another life.

But psychologically?

Her throne was gone.

I had stopped confusing adulthood with wisdom.

I had stopped assuming motherhood made someone emotionally competent.

And I had stopped believing that because someone had the power to judge me, their judgment deserved to be believed.

That distinction matters.

Especially for children who cannot leave.

We tell people in dysfunctional families to establish boundaries as though everybody has somewhere else to go.

Sometimes they don’t.

A thirteen-year-old cannot establish the kind of boundary a thirty-three-year-old can.

A child cannot always say, “You may not speak to me that way,” and walk out.

Sometimes the person hurting you controls whether you eat dinner.

Sometimes they control transportation.

Sometimes they control the roof.

Sometimes they control immigration paperwork.

Sometimes they can make your life considerably worse simply because you challenged them.

So I am not going to tell a child trapped inside a dysfunctional household to perform some beautiful, therapeutic confrontation.

Sometimes survival means keeping your mouth shut.

Sometimes survival means obeying rules you know are ridiculous.

Sometimes survival means becoming very good at appearing compliant while protecting a private part of yourself that says:

I don’t believe you.

That part matters.

Because eventually you may get out.

I did.

I left at eighteen.

But leaving a dysfunctional family is not the same thing as leaving everything they put inside you.

That realization came much later.

You can spend years defining yourself against somebody and eventually discover that you inherited pieces of them anyway.

A temper.

A defense mechanism.

A way of interpreting love.

A way of responding to fear.

A tendency you swore you would never have.

That is the cruel joke of family.

Sometimes the person you spent your childhood trying not to become leaves fingerprints all over you anyway.

Then adulthood becomes another kind of work.

As a child, I had to mentally tear my mother down so she could not swallow me.

As an adult, I understand what I was doing.

I also still do it.

I can see a recent picture of my mother and think, old bitch.

Healing did not turn me into somebody who suddenly thinks tender thoughts about her.

What changed is that I understand the function now.

Back then, contempt helped me survive her authority.

Now, sometimes it is simply the language my mind still reaches for when I think about someone I spent years having to mentally dismantle in order to protect myself.

Those are different stages of survival.

I don’t regret the first one.

I don’t know what would have happened to me if I had believed everything my mother said about me.

Maybe I would have internalized her limitations.

Maybe I would have mistaken her fears for predictions.

Maybe I would have built the life she thought I deserved instead of the one I eventually discovered I could have.

So yes.

I disrespected my mother.

Quietly at first.

Profanely, inside my own head.

And eventually, openly.

It wasn’t nice.

It wasn’t gracious.

It wasn’t the kind of coping mechanism adults like to recommend to children because adults prefer survival stories in which the child remains sweet.

I wasn’t interested in being sweet.

I was interested in getting out.

And before I could walk out of my mother’s house, I had to evict her from the position of authority inside my mind.

That was the first escape.

The second one came at eighteen