Trigger Warning: Child abuse is an inextricable part of my story. This is the first entry where instances of abuse will be mentioned.

I said “I love you” to my abuser. I wrote “Love, Steph” in cards. I spent more than a few years trying to make myself small enough to satisfy her. I participated in the obligatory phone calls. I slept under her roof even after I was free from her authority. I invited her into my own home. I let her know my children. In short, I never gave up on the idea that my abuser might love me. Certainly, she would not like me, but maybe she would love me.

It was a fool’s game.

I have been strict no-contact with my mother since the fall of 2018. The incident that finally pushed me to take that path was relatively minor considering our history. Though I was a nine-hour drive from her, and she was assaulting me over social media, the feeling was unmistakable. She reminded me of my place in her life – under her spitting hot breath and in compliance to her rage.

I let her have her rage that day and removed myself as the target of her lack of self-control. I was forty-four years old.

I have many good memories of my early childhood: swimming, bike riding, playing with my pets, sneaking icing roses from my grandmother as she decorated cakes, elementary school, Brownie meetings, and large family gatherings that seemed to occur around every possible occasion. And I have many memories of loving people in my life: my many aunts, my dad, my grandparents, my friends, and especially my teachers.

What I don’t have are memories of a sense of safety or care emanating from my mother. Not one instance that I can point to. Instead, ingrained in my mind from about age four, is her spitefulness and manipulation.

I didn’t know those words then, but I felt their emotional impact.

I still do.

I would love to have a tender memory or a feeling of gentleness that might make me want my mother’s affection and care. I have longed for it many times. This is perhaps the reason that my earliest memories of my mother are from my bedtime routine. It was the only time set aside for me and I suppose I found some sense of caring in it.

“Children, obey your parents in the Lord for this is right.
Honor your father and your mother – this is the first command with a promise – that it may go well with you and that you may live a long life on the earth.” (NIV)

Trust and obey
For there’s no other way
To be happy in Jesus
But to trust and obey.

Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

I vividly remember my mother hunched over me in the bed as she led me in those recitations, and her touching me inappropriately under the covers – in a way that I was only able to admit was molestation twenty-five years after those early memories.

At around age twenty-six, I visited a licensed therapist who had an office in the church where my husband was on staff. We spent enough time together for him to be able to dig, but the moment I knew that I was going to admit what happened in my childhood, I canceled my remaining appointments. I wondered about the statute of limitations and if he would have to report and I wasn’t clear about what those things meant.

People in the church knew my mother. She was a godly woman. I was sure that no one would believe me if the story came out. And I still felt protective of her for whatever reason. I felt maybe like I was the one in the wrong because that is what she had told me since I was very, very small.

But when I was in my early thirties and my own daughters were running around at age four, five, and six, I couldn’t help but experience similar circumstances that triggered the memories and made me realize that what happened to me in the dark bedroom of the little house with the multicolored carpet, or in the green bedroom on Papa’s farm, or on the top bunk in the breezy single wide where we first lived in Appalachia, wasn’t mothering. It was abuse. And one night, I fell to my bedroom floor and wept and finally said it aloud to myself. A decade later I dared to say it aloud to another person.

People generally have very passionate feelings around the idea of parental divorce. I call it no-contact in this post. I know the consequences. I always knew the consequences: sibling estrangement being the one I struggled with the most. That is why I was in my forties before I took the step.

But I am not without reason in my decision and I am far from the only child whose mother has abused them. The statistics are consistent. Of reported child abuse cases, mothers are the sole perpetrator the majority of the time. Statistics run between 5% and 8% for women as molesters and, though it is less reported for many reasons, those women are often the child’s own mother. When you add to that the statistics of mothers abusing together with the child’s father and mothers abusing together with a partner not the child’s father and mothers who turn a blind eye to abuse by their partners or family members, those percentages climb.

And because this is Pride month, I can not think of this topic without flying hot over the propaganda that passes for public discourse in our day.

Because the simple fact is, the chances that the abuser or the molester is the woman behind you in the school carpool or the man who stands in the pulpit of your church are far more likely than the chances that the abuser or molester is the drag queen performing at brunch or the trans woman who is trying to have some privacy in the public restroom.

But evangelical and fundamentalist churches, and too often the public at large, prefer to entertain the lie that the dangerous ones are those in the LGBTQ+ community. It makes an easy excuse for their bigotry and is far more comfortable than the truth that sits with them every Sunday.

Former evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.

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