The Sad Girl Saga

You Don't Have to Like Him

"You don't have to like him but you have to love him," my mother said to me when I was around six or seven years old.

We were talking about her new husband. If I'd known anything about core memories in that moment, I think I would've known right then and there that this would be one of mine. Before my mom and this man were married and before we left our little two bedroom house to move into his bigger house with a finished basement and a pool in the backyard, my mom and I used to hide his car keys to get him to stay the night. That is all I remember about him from when he was supposedly so fun to be around that I didn't want him to leave.

I don't remember much of my childhood at all really. But I have many more scattered memories of wanting to get away from my mom's husband than of wanting him to stick around. And I remember the night my mom told me I had to love him. There was a fight. There was always a fight. I was angry. I was often angry but in quiet ways because at this point I'd already learned that my visible anger had consequences while others visible anger did not. The details are fuzzy. I don't know what the fight was about and I can't remember if it was afternoon or evening. But I do remember being in my bedroom with my fairy Princess sheets telling my mom I didn't like her husband.

My mom told me I had to love a man that made her cover the bruises he gave her with sweaters and makeup. Several times police were called either by my mother or a neighbor but no matter who called by the time the cops got there, my mother wasn't interested in pressing charges and everything was fine. There were slamming doors and lot of broken objects and the time he broke my mom's finger. And I always had to be perfect. My hair in rollers or braids, nose blown, teeth brushed, sit up straight, closed picked out, top grades. And when I didn't meet the standards, he picked me apart. My step-dad picked me apart as a child and then my mom picked me apart as an adolescent and then I picked me apart as an adult.

My mom should've been a harbor of safety but she told me to love the danger and slowly she became the danger too. I could fill pages and pages with accounts of much more horrific abuse than a misguided sentiment spilled into the mind of a little girl. But I think it's the little things we're taught about how to think that shape the way we interact with the world even more than the big damaging things. Traumatic events are debilitating but when the tools you're given to climb out of that black hole are broken you just learn to live there.

"You don't have to like him but you need love him."

It's not just the words that solidified a core function in the way I navigate relationships. It's also the examples of all the times my mother didn't like her husband but loved him. Of all the times she stayed when she should've left because abandonment is more excruciating than contact with a fist, and the identity built around another person more important to preserve than the sense of safety in her children. But this sentence was a direct message, a command, a lesson.

My ability to measure my self-worth collided with my ability to love the people that hurt me. If I can show someone I'll love them no matter how much they hurt me then I'll earn their love and earning their love is everything because losing their love feels like dying.

I grew up with no safe landing and now I have a brain that craves a safe place to land so badly that any threat of losing that kind of comfort creates instant and intense feelings of abandonment that I will do anything to prevent.

"You don't have to like him but you do have to love him."

They don't have to like me but I need them to love me.