I will never have that.

In my life I have many blessings. I'm not the type of person who says they have nothing to live for and is stashing a masarati somewhere feeling sorry for myself over nothing.
But if I'm being honest here (and I am), there's more than the sexual abuse in my past that caused the existence of numerous alters.

This is the first time I'm going to write these words down but if this is going to be a process in which I share my life and experiences I feel it's necessary to disclose even my most painful memories. You know, in some ways the sexual abuse I experienced was easier than what I'm about to talk about, because this...this abuse....it was ongoing throughout my life into adulthood.

My mother abused me. She also abused my father...and frankly, he should have left her over it in my opinion but he being an alcoholic had issues and demons of his own to deal with I suppose. And far be it from me to tell anyone who should be married to whom. The reason Anya exists is because my mother would yell at me, for hours, calling me degrading things...telling me that when I got older I'd make a horrible wife, when I had a boyfriend she used to tell me that he'd eventually see "what she sees in me" and leave me over it because only she could possibly really love me. I wish it stopped there. She used to manipulate me, playing with my emotions and using my need for a mother's love against me. When we would get into arguments as is common for a mother and daughter...she used to beat me...drag me down the hallway by the hair on my head and her rage was just...seething....even scary. I remember going through my teen years (as many of you I'm sure have and some might wished they could just permanently forget) hearing my friends complain about their parents "crazy" rules about wanting them home by a certain time and wanting them to succeed and apply themselves in school....well my mother would be ready to fight with me LITERALLY for no reason....she was always angry with me.
I'm a perfectionist...and that's not something I'm proud of...my whole life I strove to be the person I felt she wanted me to be, to be the perfect daughter and achieve everything to make HER proud. No one told me this would be an effort in futility. While my friends were partying it up I would be home doing work, spending time with my family, and the extent of my social life was limited to being online for the most part because my mother didn't want me to have friends.
I remember praying....praying that God would just make me better, make ME the person she would love and end the turmoil I felt within my heart about a relationship we never had.
Even when I was really young I'd go to hug her and she'd push me away and I remember crying and her telling me that was weakness and to stop feeling sorry for myself. She never bonded with me in the way most mothers would with a daughter.

To make matters worse, my parents fought endlessly. Around the holidays when most people would enjoy spending time with their families my parents would be talking of divorce...my father coming home drunk from parties making my mother even angrier.
The first time I had even SEEN a loving family Christmas aside from movies was with my boyfriend's family. I was cautious...really cautious and self conscious about getting close to a family because I felt so out of place around a family that seemed to really like spending time with eachother...that even seemed to like me.
It was in my later teen years that through exposure to my boyfriend's close family I'd begun to learn what it was like to have calm and happiness in a household a very foreign and even a scary concept for me. Over the years that followed I left home at 17 in order to attend college and to get away as quickly as I could from my parents. When most kids would be homesick in freshman year I didn't even feel a tinge of loss or dismay....I was finally free...well...almost.
My mother called me 6 times a day or more yelling about how I left her and she was going to drive up to my school and get me and I could go to school down where she lived and live at home like it was "supposed to be". Of one thing I was sure. Come hell or high water I was not moving back home. ever. I had retained a scholarship to attend college and I wasn't going to move home to be with her and my father who at the time had no relationship with me to speak of.

With time (and therapy) I began to understand that she's got issues and that I needed to claim my independence and draw lines in the sand in order for her to stop controlling me. Part of me always wanted to trust her, to believe her, to love her...it's not like she was an evil person all the time...she'd taken me shopping, she'd told me before she'd loved me, she'd been nice to me...it was all a giant roller coaster of emotions and when I finally weighed the costs in allowing her to yell at me for hours on the phone I finally realized that I was never going to get better unless I put an end to it.

By my second semester of sophomore year I had become so weighted down with being sick and trying to find out what was wrong with my health my doctor finally told me I needed to withdraw and take care of myself...which, reluctantly, I did.
When we finally did find out what was causing my health to deteriorate, we began treatment immediately and being that what I had was rare there was only one treatment...and it wasn't working.
At 19 years old I was told to get my "affairs" in order because there was nothing left for the doctors to do for me. My family (parents included) were devastated....for a little while at least...then as I continued with treatment and my boyfriend continued to take care of me doing everything all the way down to feeding me as I was dying in front of him...my mother finally decided she was done being a human being.
She called me angry with the medical bills that were accumulating saying I just needed to get over it and move on...this being told to a person who couldn't even HOLD a phone because I was so far gone...and then she said something I couldn't even imagine HER saying...."Could you please just hurry up and die so I can collect your life insurance policy?". After that day I just waited to die...my heart was broken....I had no one to turn to and no one could understand how I was feeling because no one I knew had ever been exposed to someone that heartless. And just when I thought it was over....through nothing less than an act of God...the treatment began working. Which of course my mother credited to herself for praying for me in church and all of her accommodations....did I mention we weren't even in the same state? My boyfriend was the ONLY person who kept me alive...the only one there for me.

In the years that followed me being what I now feel is nothing less than stupid, continued letting my mother into my life in hopes of fostering some semblance of a relationship...and at every turn....she time and time again proved that she was at times completely out of her mind...
She used my relationship with my father against me, saying if I didn't talk to her then he wouldn't talk to me either...which I just hated because him and I had actually bonded during my illness and I didn't want him to suffer because of...well...her.
The thing about my mother is...she thinks she's always right...when she causes pain she doesn't care or understand why someone may get tired of it or how what she does to me and others isn't justified. She used to be better at hiding how she really was...my dad and I used to say she was like Jekyll and Hyde. In public and around "friends" she was always personable and appeared to be the perfect mother and wife...and everything else...but behind closed doors she was just...a constant source of rage and discord in the family. But as she's getting older it's becoming more difficult for her to keep the dark side of herself a secret...she's now getting in trouble in friendships, work, and at some point she may very well end up in jail for some of the things she's done.
I know that most of you are probably reading this wondering why I didn't just kick her out of my life...my answer isn't a stellar one but it's still the truth: Because despite everything she's done wrong and everything she is...she is still my mother and for that reason alone I do love her.

Fast forward a few years...now I'm with my fiance and I'm happy...my mother is in debt up to her ass due to poor decision making and even poorer tact. I gave her every cent I had around the time I'd first my my husband and well....you couldn't by her attitude even tell I'd ever done anything in the world for her...in her opinion I was just a spoiled bitch and she was ashamed of me. She took out credit cards in my name maxing them out spending the money on god only knows what...leaving me saddled with 150 grand in debt when all I was aware I had on file was a credit card with a 500 dollar limit and no current balance to speak of. I found all this out by accident when my fiance and I pulled my credit report along with his shortly after we became a couple. Imagine our shock. Turned out my mother had forged my signature and though I was able to prove my case on some of the debt some of it I could not get lifted and so I had to pay over 100 thousand in order to be debt free. My husband really was beside himself after a few meetings with my mother he quickly learned why I tried so hard to keep a safe distance from her and why I refused to live in the same state as her in order to keep my life intact. Yet despite my intentions to remain separated from her she would always offer to do nice things or send nice things to me and later would use those things to control me again. And my husband coming from a family with two loving parents it is beyond a culture shock to be immersed in this sort of "family" dynamic. But even that my mother blamed on me, saying that I must have poisoned his mind against her or he's immature too and can't see that it's my fault like everything else.

Well in recent weeks another one of my mother's scandals ended up burning me, or rather, us.
My husband and I had gone out to dinner one night and when I went to pay the bill the waiter told us my debit card had been declined...I assumed it was a bank error and my husband handed over a credit card and with it paid the bill.
On the way home I called the bank who disclosed that the account had $0. Impossible. I immediately felt my heart thumping out my chest...I waited to be transferred to the stolen card department assuming that someone must have grabbed my credit card number...Not so.
Apparently the accounts were seized and frozen due to a court order to garnish them in order to repay a debt my mother had not paid and that my name had been on.
My husband and I hoped and prayed that his account (our joint account) had been spared in this process but once we got home, we found out it too had been frozen.
My husband, understandably, was furious with my mother for yet again dropping the ball.
The bill she hadn't paid we gave her back in October and she continued to get ongoing correspondence via mail telling her to pay up, but she didn't.
Instead of telling us that she wasn't going to pay it in October she told us she'd take care of it and that was that.
When I called my mother frantic telling her what had happened she basically gave us the equivalent response of "well that sucks hope you guys get that worked out". I lost it...it was one thing for her to fuck with me...but with my husband that was simply something I would just not stand for. ever.
I lit into her telling her she needed to handle the situation because it was her fault and responsibility to do so. She hung up then a little while later called my husbands phone, he refused to talk to her so I answered...she played games saying she didn't want to talk to me that she only wanted to talk to my husband. When I told her he didn't want to she hung up again.

For a week we were financially crippled. When she finally did apologize it was "sorry that you guys are going through this" instead of admitting any fault and taking any responsibility for her actions. And now that our accounts have been fixed my mom calls us expecting us to just accept things as if this never happened. And this time...I just can't.
And over and over I think about friends and how when they're in a tough spot it's usually because they landed themselves there but their parents are always there to help in any way they possibly can....and it makes me realize I will never have that. It's heart breaking for me.
Every time she does something wrong she never apologizes and just expects business to continue as usual and I simply don't get it.
I hope that if/when I have children I never ever subject them to even a fraction of what I was.
-Divided Mind-