validation

I need to work through this because tomorrow is the debate tournament and I refuse to be all messed up with this crap while I'm trying to debate. As I learned last year, it doesn't work very well.

I talked to my mom today. It was frustrating, and now I'm all mixed up and upside-down and confused. I confronted her about her still being angry about the social services thing. My mother says that she thinks my counselor was/is wrong, and that what she did wasn't physically abusive. She said she was listening to the radio when they were asking people about whether it was okay to spank your kids, and everyone who called in said it was. She said that she stopped because she knew she needed to and that it bothered me, but she didn't really see anything wrong with it.

I'm so mixed up inside. Half of me believes her. Half of me doesn't understand why my counselor would be legally obligated to report something that is okay, and why I am way, way more screwed up from what she did than my friends are from their parents spanking them when they were younger.

And so I'm going to try to do the only thing I know how to do when things get tangled up like this: analytically work through it.

There is no doubt, in the long run, that the sexual, emotional, and verbal abuse that I endured were far more severe than the physical abuse. My mother agrees that she was extremely verbally and emotoinally abusive, and that the sexual abuse is what caused the dissociative problems I now struggle with. The physical abuse was not nearly as horrible as so many cases are out there. I never fought back, also. It would have been much worse if I had. But is it really physical abuse, what happened to me? Or is it normal, and okay? I so need validation that what she did was wrong... because sometimes, like now, it seems like she's probably right, and it wasn't that bad. So here is exactly what happened:

1. When I was very young- one, two, three, and four- when I would wet my pants or start crying or throw a temper tantrum my mother would hit me repeateadly on the butt, quite hard (my dad agrees that it was hard, so that must be true). She used the flat of her hand and it never left bruises, rather only red lines/white handprints that eventually faded. My mother was very angry at those times, and agrees she did it more out of her own anger than out of a rational desire to punish me. She was pretty out of control. Also, my mother hit me on the arms and legs and pinched me. When we were in church for example and I would not sit still she would pinch my arms or slap me hard on the leg. When she was angry with me she would grab my arm so tightly that it left red marks and wrench it, dragging me away somewhere. She would force me into positions very roughly.

2. When I was older- five through 10- she would hit me when I was being rude or argumentative. She hit me still with an open hand, when she was very angry and out of control. She always screamed when she was hitting me. She screamed louder than anyone else I knew, sometimes in front of my friends and it embarrassed me. But the screaming/name calling we both know was verbal abuse. As for the physical abuse... she hit me across the face, often across my thighs. She would still often grab me so tightly it left marks, and sometimes shoved me back into walls and such. She usually just hit whatever part of me was closest when she was angry. If I fought back it was worse, so I never did.

3. When I was ten-fourteen she did everything she had done before, hitting me all over, never with a fist, never leaving bruises, always leaving red and white hand-prints, sometimes stayring red for a long time. She on occasion grabbed me and shoved me against things and held me there. One time she grabbed me and was choking me, whether she meant to or not, and I was very sure she would kill me she was so mad that I thought she could never have the control to stop. My mom is very strong, so everything she did hurt really bad. She sometimes would pull my hair a little too.

So these are the things she DID do. But she never really punched me, and never left an actual "bruise," only those handprints on me. She always did it out of anger, but she never hurt me seriously enough for others notice more than just the red, sore marks.

I DON'T KNOW. Maybe it wasn't abuse. Maybe it's normal. I can't think it would be though. That's why I told my counselor in eigth grade. Because my friends all said it wasn't normal, and their parents didn't do that. Some of my friends' parents had spanked them when they were younger, but always deliberately and calmly out of punishment, not out of the wild anger my mom's violence came from. And none of my friends shrink away when people move quickly.

I want desperately someone who totally understands what's abusive and what's not to tell me if what my mom did was normal. I can't stand this ambivalence. I can't stand not knowing. I know she thinks what she did was fine. I dont' know I don't know I don't know.