The other night I spoke to my sister on the phone. She's in Texas right now, preparing to marry the man she loves, and after our conversation had covered the essential topics (her dog and new apartment, the date of the wedding and her fiance's well-being) it moved onto something I never expected: our mother. Recently, my sister, Shay, and my mother had a falling out, and for over a month Shay would have no contact with her, but last week they spoke and worked out what had been stressing their relationship throughout most of July and all of August. After telling me this, she asked me for my opinion on her decision. Was it a good idea to reopen a relationship, no matter how tenuous, with our mother? I was shocked, and pretty annoyed. She already knew my opinion on the subject. I try my hardest to avoid communication with our mother, and only in very special circumstances am I anywhere near amicable, and so I told her, without any hesitation, to cut our mother out of her life. For the people that know me well, you already know all of the weight attached to that figure in my life, but for those who don't know me and my life well, a quick and thorough explanation is necessary.

For most of my childhood and adolescent life, my mother was physically, mentally, and emotionally abusive. I have memories of her dragging me across the front room floor by my hair during a beating, memories of her making my oldest sister strip down to her underwear in our living room and striking her all over with a brutal studded leather belt, and more recent memories of her eyes as she looked me in the face and called me a demon. When I was in high school she had a break down and started “seeing angels”, and for the last three years, she's been waiting for God to move her across the country from our family so she can become a preacher and bring hundreds of thousands to his flock. I still remember the day when Shay and I came home from school to find her cutting her hair and eyelashes off with scissors. She chased us from the house keening prayers, but when the ambulance showed up she was placid as a clear sky and clutching her bible in her lap. Up until that point, I was split between believing I really was the disobedient, ungrateful, evil little heifer she always told me I was and screaming just as loud and just as violently as she did when she came for me or my sisters, but after the EMTs loaded her onto the stretcher, I understood that I wasn't the problem. Even still, it took me until my first years in college to realize how much better my life was without her and also how little I owed her in the future. However, I'm the only one of my sisters who has reached that conclusion.

After I gave Shay my opinion, she responded with a defense I've trashed time and time again, yet somehow always come back face to face with.

“Even though she's done a lot of stuff to us, like bad stuff, we should still try to love her and forgive her because she is our mother. Like, when we were talking, I felt like she really cared about me, Maiasia.”

I replied,

“Shay, are you really trying to tell me we should forgive her for all the times she hurt us, all the times she beat us for no reason, the times she f*cked with our heads and lied to everyone about us. She was our mother, yes, in a biological sense, but that's it. She never treated us like we were her daughters. Instead she treated us like we had ruined her life and told us that we did as well. Does that sound like the sort of person we should love and forgive?”

She was quiet on the phone for a few moments after that and then changed the subject. We had had this conversation before. Once I left for college and vowed to keep my mom's influence in my life to as little as possible, Shay had also decided to forgive our mother for all of her sins and made opportunities to pull me aside and explain that I should treat our mother better. The treatment she always referred to was my disregard for my mother's emotional fits, her narcissism, and all of her attempts to form a friendly relationship with me. Each time my mother approached me with a hug, I'd remind her that I wouldn't hug the woman who tried to choke me against our laundry room wall, and it upset both her and my sister, but what did they expect?

Like I said, I always hated the idea of loyalty with no regard for actions. Dysfunctional families are damaging, but even more damaging is the commitment to the “family” ideal, to that state of mind in which every abuse is permissible, every exploitation excusable, every back hand, every walk out, every screaming match just plain normal because it is within the bounds of the “family”. My sisters and I were put through a bizarre form of hell for all of our childhoods because of our mother, and to forgive her abuse and neglect because of a genetic connection only lessens the gravity of what she did. To accept abuse, one has to either feel as if it was warranted or feel as if it never mattered, and neither of those choices are the sort that lead toward fostering a healthy mental state and sense of self-worth. Yet, for some reason, people don't understand this.