"Nothing But Life, And Violence Too"

The tendency to posture ourselves as decent people is innate; it's unlikely that people go through life convinced they are evil. Through this lens, I can at least perceive my parents more clearly.

Henry Darger, “Untitled (Two boys canoeing)” (undated)

Over the weekend, my mother sent me a message in response to my recent post:

“Sorry for what happened to you, son. I never threw boiling water at your older brother. It was a small vase that I threw out of anger, but not at him. Unfortunately, he tried to stop it with his hand, so it hit him.

Don't judge me. As a mother, I struggled to protect you. No mother would hurt her child, and your dad and I never threw knives at each other. I admit, your dad hurt me. But I stayed so I can finish my obligation to you, to see you finish your studies.

Son, when the abuse happened to you, you were already a teenager, you could have fought back and run away. But why didn't you? You let it happen to you. You could’ve told us when it happened –– and weren't there other people in the house?

I already confronted your uncle and he apologized, but that is not enough. I gave it to God as He said in the Bible, and I quote, ‘Vengeance is not yours, it's mine.’ Please forgive us if we did wrong in your childhood.”

Just remember this, I love you so much. I'm always here for you and your siblings to listen and help while I'm still alive.

I don’t know if it is anger or resignation stopping me from replying to her. I also reflected on whether it was wrong of me to have brought up what I went through as a young boy, thinking about that part from the book I recently read, “The Ministry of Time”. The main character had an argument with her sister because of what her sister wrote about their childhood experience. She mused:

“My sister maintained that her work was a sort of reclamation, a space-taking practice in protest of a childhood spent in squeezed spaces. That all she was telling was the truth, as if the Truth was a sort of purifier that turned mud and plasma into clean water by judicious application. I didn’t know who read her writing, other than people who already agreed with her. To me, it felt like she’d chosen to hang a target around our necks. I didn’t understand how anyone could find power in a show of vulnerability.”

I question whether my motivation for writing is to cleanse myself, like the character's sister. Sometimes, I wonder if sharing my personal anguish is a performative invitation for sympathy. Is it vindictiveness that drives me, or an attempt to absolve myself of past events?

Lately, I've been experiencing memory problems, unable to recall significant parts of my childhood and young adulthood. I now believe my brain is reacting to trauma, shielding itself by locking away those thoughts deep within my subconscious. Recounting my history, especially the harsh and unpleasant parts, forces me to confront demons I've ignored for so long.

There's also the gaslighting—how my parents refuse to acknowledge that they weren't the saints they portrayed themselves to be. We were trained to mistrust our memories and align them with the story they wanted to tell.

I hate that my mother can't see what she did wrong, painting herself as a victim incapable of committing harm. I don't understand why she refuses to see the forest hidden behind the tree: it doesn't matter whether it was boiling water or a vase that she threw at my brother. She willed harm. She caused harm. Maybe thoughtlessly, as she says, but the intention does not justify the effect it brought.

She says it was unfortunate that my brother shielded himself, resulting in his scar. Unfortunate—as if it were accidental, not a person defending himself from violence inflicted upon him. She excuses herself for exposing us to their countless quarrels by saying it was for us, that she stayed out of duty.

I can’t understand why she believes that I let my abuse happen to me, that I share the responsibility for it. She claims I could've fought and run. There's a strange irony, knowing that she also accepted the abuse she suffered, repeatedly crawling into the same toxic relationship.

“Pain cannot be kept intact, it needs to be ‘processed’, converted to humor,” Annie Ernaux wrote in her book “I Remain in Darkness”, a memoir about her mother afflicted by Alzheimer’s disease, who Annie described as “a violent woman, with only one system of values to account for the world, that of religion.”

I keep coming back to this particular passage from her book:

“This violence reminds me of the aggressiveness she showed toward everything around her, including me. Suddenly I hate her, once again she is the ‘bad mother’—brutal and inflexible.”

And this one, when her mother dies:

“She was life, nothing but life, and violence too. The weather is gray; I think of that new town that she never liked, where she died. Shall I ever recover from such pain? Everything I do reminds me of her. Maybe I could consume my grief and wear it out by telling her story.”

I don't believe people can be easily boxed into good or bad. It's frustrating to acknowledge that those who've hurt us are also like us: humans possessed by peculiar faults and idiosyncrasies. Annie herself says she has inherited her mother's "brusque, violent temper, as well as a tendency to seize things and throw them down with fury." The tendency to posture ourselves as decent people is innate; it's unlikely that people go through life convinced they are malevolent agents. Through this lens, I can at least perceive my parents more clearly.

Maybe, as Annie counseled, all of this must eventually be turned into humor. But the journey toward that must start with the telling of facts, a clinical surgery of cancerous emotions. In a sense, sharing these memories is taking responsibility: not for what has happened before, but for what I can shape out of it—what meaning I could construct for what’s to come.