My mother, the dealer: How do you survive a childhood on the brink?
My mother disappeared from my life when I was four years old. I ended up with my father, whom I barely knew. I sat alone in my room many hours a day playing with Barbies. I imagined the mom lying helplessly with broken legs in a clinic.
Often I fell asleep between smug party-friends
We lived in Hawaii. Outwardly it was a paradise. In fact, we lived on my father's drug deals. He showed me how to fry fried eggs for breakfast so he could sleep until noon. At around 8 pm, I then put myself to bed if I did not fall asleep between his smug party friends.
Once I opened the door and stared into the barrel of a pistol. Two men shouted that they would kill my father now. They stormed past me into his bedroom. I was shaking with fear. But he came out alive and never told me what had happened.
Visit to Mom - in prison
After 15 months, he surprisingly drove me to jail. There, my mother, who had been caught on the deal, sat on a bench in the yard. I remember the guard, tears running down her cheeks as she watched our first reunion.
My mother was in her mid-twenties. She did not radiate anything maternal. But she was there, at least for a few hours. I was happy.
Move to Germany
At the age of six and a half, I boarded a plane at the hands of a gaunt, strange woman. And out in snowy Hamburg again. The woman was my mother. She had withstood the hard time in jail and probably starved just as often as I did with my father.
Surely she had imagined her daughter in a different way than this uncertain, silent girl that I had become.
Whatever I tried in the years that followed, nothing was good enough. I was not happy, she did not like my school friends, I said the wrong sentences in the wrong way.
She still does not know about my secret
And I carried a secret around with me that she still does not know about today. When I was five, a friend of my father went to bed with me and abused me. At that time the last remnant of basic trust was lost in me.
Maybe a sensitive, patient confidant could have brought my traumatized child soul back into balance. But my mother did not notice anything about my distraction.
Terraced Idyll instead of hippie life
We moved to a pretty terraced house in Lübeck to my grandparents. The contrast between our hippie life on the beach, sexual permissiveness and night-long drug parties could not have been greater.
After all, my mother looked pragmatically forward. She took care of jobs as a waitress or bartender and continued to flush her demons down with plenty of alcohol.
Over her mute daughter and our completely changed everyday life, in which there were suddenly meals, compulsory education, table rules and thrift, she simply looked away. She focused on the men who were entranced by their unconventional manner, their disarming honesty, and their uninterrupted lust for celebration.
My grandma was the first person to praise me
I did the love of my grandma good. She was the first and only person to praise me. "That's what you did!", She said, and I still feel her appreciation today.
My mother never praised. I learned German in six months, I longed to please them. If she was happy with me, I thought, she would drink less, and then we would have a normal life.
On my insecurity collapsed her inexhaustible self-confidence. She did not ask what I feel. She explained in a tone that did not allow me to argue why I was the way I am. It was as if she were stuck in a strange mind like a ghost and know better with strange thoughts than she did herself. I dared not contradict.
I did not argue, but the body rebelled
But my anger cramped until my body began to rebel. I got chronic pain in my back, in the joints in my shoulder. The doctors found nothing.
At 15, I started drinking with my girlfriends. My mother got none of it. So I braced myself and told her that I would graduate high school in the US because friends had offered to live with them in Malibu.
Now we were at least spatially separated. But it took me well over 20 years to get rid of her inwardly and to forgive her my terrible childhood.
The humiliations continue
She celebrated her 50th birthday in the addiction clinic. I established a professional existence as a therapeutic naturopath in Hawaii.When we telephoned, she still explained to me what I feel and think, and inwardly made me crazy.
But I said nothing and then spent days digging out what really bothered me. It humbled me that she interrupted my sentences to end my thoughts seemingly pointed and eloquent myself.
I had long since crossed the 30 and still did not dare to hurl it at her: "No, Mommy, I want to say something else!" Depressive phases, deep self-doubt and the feeling of being unworthy of being loved continue to determine my life. My relationships often ended before it got serious. I did not feel that I deserved marriage, home buying and own children.
At over 40, I visited my mother again in Germany. Again, my old child rage caught up with me: Why did she spend so much money on handbags, skirts and mascara, where we often could not even afford lunch? How could she give me my few extra kilos, where she herself was so thin that I was worried?
Only a therapy and a break from contact helped me
Weeks later, when she criticized my red-dyed hair during a phone call ("stupid idea, no one stands red!") And I remained silent, I realized that I had to change something. About me! I wanted to learn to limit their influence on my self-esteem.
I wrestled with a therapy that I now use as a naturopath for my patients as well? the knocking therapy (short EFT). During intense therapy hours, all my stubborn pain came up in me. Brave, I asked my mother for a six-month contact break. And finally came to rest inwardly. I realized that when I use my voice, loud and clear, "no!" legend.
When I first said to her, "No, I do not want that!", She asked surprised: "How are you talking to me?" And I said calmly, "Just like you with me."
She is clean at 70 - and I do not need her anymore
Since then, our relationship has settled on a peaceful but distant contact. She is almost 70 years old, clean after years of effort and married again. I now focus on myself, have a wonderful man I love, and good friends. It feels good to know that I do not need them anymore.
Text: Veruschka. She still has contact with her father, but the relationship is very distant. You rarely see yourself? and if, never alone.
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