Dear Javier,

thanks for sharing some more about your childhood. So the first five years of your life you spent growing up with a father who was violent and a bully, who used to severely punish you and your siblings for even the slightest transgression. You were so afraid of him that you would wet yourself anticipating his beating. In addition, he was beating your mother too and was threatening to kill her (She was the victim of physical and mental abuse by my “father”, harassed, endured death threats, and then was left alone as my father left her for his mistress.)

During that time, your mother tried to protect you, but she was weaker and would got beaten up too, I guess. She, you and your siblings were victims of domestic violence. Did your mother ever asked for help from social services? It appears she was enduring your father’s abuse, and might have endured his abuse even further, had he not left for another woman.

So when you say:

She always put her kids first. My mother never neglected us, we took her for granted and did her wrong.

it’s not completely true, because she didn’t leave your father. She allowed the severe abuse to last for 5 years. Perhaps she had no other choice, nowhere to go (her parents had deceased by that time), your father was maybe threatening to kill her if she turned to anyone for help…

But the fact is that you as a little child were exposed to domestic violence, in which both you and your mother and your siblings were victims. The difference being that you couldn’t do anything about it, but your mother could have, at least in theory, since she was the adult. You felt completely helpless and terrified because there was no one to protect you.

Your mother allowed severe punishments, or she couldn’t prevent them from happening, and the result is that you have severe trauma starting from very early in life. Apart from fearing for your life, you feared probably even more for your mother’s life, because your survival depended on her. She didn’t ensure you the conditions for healthy growth, but allowed (due to her own difficult background and personal weaknesses I don’t want to speculate about) that you and your siblings grow up in an abusive home.

Children from such homes often grow up to be drug addicts and act out in various ways. You were no exception. But it wasn’t your fault – it was the consequence of being raised in an abusive, violent home, suffering and witnessing abuse on a daily basis, and fearing for your own life as well as the life of your mother.

The first 5 years of your life determined your later trajectory. Everything that happened later is a consequence of those 5 years.

One year after your father left, your mother found a man who loved her enough not to beat her, but not enough to marry her. She settled for a relationship of being a mistress, because she probably didn’t think she deserved better? You say your mother was happy. Well, she might have been happy in the beginning, when this man was promising her to leave his wife. But as the time passed by, I don’t think your mother was truly happy. She was probably hoping he’d leave his wife and children, but he never did it. Maybe he was giving her false hopes and you saw him through,  you saw he was lying and manipulating her (I realized he will never leave his wife and kids).

You wanted to protect your mother from pain and disappointment, you told her to leave him but she wouldn’t, so you stopped speaking to her. Perhaps you were influenced by other people telling bad things about her – that she was a homewrecker? Maybe you felt embarrassed because your peers were saying these things? If so – if you wanted to protect yourself from embarrassment – that’s completely understandable, because in our teens we’re very susceptible to what our peers think about us. If your mother was a source of embarrassment for you, it’s no wonder you “rebelled” against her.

You say that your mother broke off the relationship because of you, and that it broke her “into thousand pieces”. That it killed her and you never saw her happy again.

Well, although you may not see it, Javier, your mother hasn’t treated you well, neither did she treat herself well. She first got involved with a bully, your father, who was abusing her and the kids for full 5 years, and it stopped only because he decided to leave for his mistress. Then, she got involved with a married man. She didn’t think how that would affect that man’s marriage and his children. Her need for a relationship and to feel loved by a man was more important to her than the well-being of those children. She put herself first, rather than those children.

In her marriage with your father, she didn’t leave, she didn’t make the abuse stop. She didn’t put you, her children, first. She put the relationship first, although it was a horrible one.

It seems to me that your mother, due to her own weaknesses and perhaps a difficult background and the conditions in which she grew up – had a need for a relationship, for man’s presence, even if that relationship was abusive or unsatisfactory. In her marriage she was physically and mentally abused, in her relationship with the married man she was probably emotionally manipulated, lied to, promised things that would never happen etc. She never had the courage to break it off, although she certainly wasn’t happy in that relationship either. But she didn’t know better, perhaps felt she didn’t deserve better.

What I am trying to say is that your mother in fact put herself first before her children. She didn’t see clearly how her marriage was affecting you, and later, how her illegitimate relationship was affecting her lover’s children. This doesn’t make her a villain, but she’s no saint either. She had personal weaknesses and deficiencies and didn’t know better.

How does this what I’ve just said affect you?