“Do you wear earrings darling?” She asks as she continues to clean up the kitchen bench she’s been pottering away at for the past hour. I don’t know exactly what she’s been doing, but I’m finding myself getting more frustrated the longer she takes. We were meant to leave for Cairns as soon as we woke up, but three hours later, we’re still nowhere close to leaving.
“No, I don’t” I respond, hoping that’s the end of the conversation.
“Oh why not darling?”
She looks over the kitchen counter at me. I try to find the words to say as my heart takes a leap.
“I just … don’t like them…” I respond with, once again hoping that’s the end of our conversation and we can get on the road to Cairns so we can find the place she wants her ashes scattered.
She looks at me confused, as her pearl drop earrings shimmer in the light.
“Do you have your ears pierced, darling?”
“Stop with the fucking darling!”
I want to scream, I want to tell her to hurry the fuck up and most importantly I want to tell her “yes they are fucking pierced because you held me down and poked a needle in them when I was 8 years old!” The trauma of the memory is the sole reason I don’t wear earrings everyday and is the same reason why the holes in my ears never close over, and haven’t since that night.
It’s just one of the several truths I have to keep from her at this point in her life. It’s not worth telling her a story either she can’t remember or chooses specifically to ignore. Part of me, in this moment, wonders if it’s a test. If she remembers exactly what she did.
See it was one of those rare years she celebrated my birthday, and her gift to me, was getting my ears pierced at the local shopping center. I screamed and cried I didn’t want it done, my brothers didn’t have pierced ears so why did I have to?
“You’re a girl” was the response, and I was dragged into the shop, the circulation in my arm severely restricted by her grip.
Just like every other birthday, I managed to ruin it for her. Once it was by riding my bike in a dress and tearing the hem on it. This year, it was by forgetting… purposefully, to put the studs in my ears and allowing them to close over in a matter of days.
When she found out, she told me I was an ungrateful cunt, before boiling the kettle, forcing me down on the table or floor or some other hard surface, her knee jabbed into my back, and pushing a needle through my ear. I screamed and cried and sobbed and begged for it to stop. When it finally did, she told me it was my fault. If I didn’t fuck it up the first time, I wouldn’t have had to experience this now. I sobbed and she asked,
“What do you say now?”
“Thank you” I whimpered before heading to bed at 3am in the morning.
I escape to the bathroom to avoid the conversation any longer, the memories and try to focus on my breathing. I’ve been using phenergen again to help me sleep, but found that it didn’t help much last night at all. In between feeling alone and lost and trying to care for my dying abuser, I remembered a nightmare that has plagued me for the last six months.
I am in North Queensland, over 3000kms from home in Melbourne, and try as I might I can never get back to Melbourne. It’s always different people and combinations of events that stop me, but months roll by and I lose my job and I get stuck up here. Now, my nightmare is real. She wants me to relocate and work from home up here. Pressure from every single doctor, nurse, specialist and even neighbor makes me feel like a horrible daughter for not wanting to. I want to scream on a daily basis, I want to tell each and every person that she doesn’t deserve the time, effort and energy i’m putting into her at present let alone any further.
But I can’t. Because regardless of everything, and all the years of therapy, I’m still that little girl wishing for her mothers approval and doing anything to get it. How fucking pathetic.
As I make my way back to the kitchen, having calmed myself down enough to not have a full blown panic attack, I notice she’s struggling with something.
She asks,
“Darling, can you help me with this?” And points to the new hole she is trying to poke into her watch.
