How Emotional Abuse From My Childhood Makes It Hard to 'Take Up Space' Now

In the household I grew up in, I learned love wasn’t freely given, it was hard won.

I was first made aware of the space I took up in this world when I was told I was an “accident” baby, a baby who caused a marriage that later ended in divorce. The words, “You were an accident” came out of my mother’s mouth so frequently, it continued to echo around in my brain until somewhere along the way, it changed to mistake, mistake, mistake. And without realizing it, I undertook the lifelong task of becoming a child my mother would want to have. I remember one year, writing to my mother in a Mother’s Day card that I knew she didn’t want to be a mom when she got pregnant with me, but I thanked her for loving me anyway. When I wrote it, I desperately wanted her to deny the fact that she hadn’t wanted to be a mother — or at least say that she didn’t regret it now because she wanted me. I was perhaps more disappointed than I should have been when she said it was the most thoughtful card I had ever written to her. 

When I was in junior high, I was so excited when we moved houses because my sister and I were going to have our own rooms. But soon after, if things got messy, our mother was quick to remind us that the spaces we called our bedrooms were not actually ours, but were her property on “loan” to us. Things needed to be clean (though she wasn’t a particularly clean person herself) because as she indicated with a loud voice and pointed finger, we lived on her floor, within her walls and in her space. Chores were a primary area where she asserted control. She wanted us to be the kind of children who knew what she wanted and would do it before being asked. When we failed to read her mind and complete the chore she wanted done, she would inform us this was how she knew we didn’t really love her. It was in this way that she brought me to heel, seeming to know that dangling her love as a reward would make me work harder to attain it — because it was at this time, I thought it was still in the realm of possibility to receive it. 

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