My heart sinks every time Mothering Sunday comes round, with its enforced celebration of all things maternal. It has become a commercial opportunity for this performance of love. But for those of us who have experienced abuse and neglect at the hands of our parents, the garage floral bouquets and breakfasts in bed feel like watching a party going on in another room.
A solid mother-child relationship should be a bank from which a sense of security can be drawn for a lifetime. But being brought up by my mother was more like handling dangerous knives or being dragged through a bonfire.
I was raised in the minority Welsh-speaking community in Cardiff. Eryl and Gwilym Lewis, my parents, came to the city to work from rural Cardiganshire and Ogmore Vale respectively. She was an outstanding high-school English teacher and he worked in the Public Health department of Cardiff City Council, which included monitoring cargoes that came into the docks.
For some reason that I still don’t understand, from an early age my behaviour drew my mother’s rage. I was an ordinarily naughty child (I remember getting into trouble for baring my bottom to other children when we were playing and was disappointed that nobody else would join in). But even a small childhood accident, like tearing my dress on a fence, resulted in violent storms from my mother, banishment to my room, and being given the silent treatment for days.
My mother, Eryl, wanted to control every aspect of my life, which was suffocating. I was told often that I was clumsy, a liar and a fool, so I became convinced that deep down, I must be evil. At the same time, I also knew that this treatment was deeply unfair and wrong. My father tried to keep the peace at home but never defended me from my mother’s attacks.
The pressure from her to perform well at school was also tyrannical. I liked schoolwork and being stretched so she was pushing at an open door, but I was called lazy and relentlessly made to get top marks. Sometimes in school, the children who are being abused at home aren’t those who act out in an obvious way, but those who are too obedient. They know that the only way to stay safe at home is to do well academically and not draw attention to themselves.
I started writing poetry at a young age and my mother hijacked that too as a way of achieving reflected glory. I loved writing but being forced to compete – and I often won competitions, which I found embarrassing – left me mortified and ashamed. Eryl stood over my shoulder and often inserted her own work into poems that would be submitted under my name, a strange kind of plagiarism. Eventually, I rebelled and stopped writing altogether.
One Christmas, when I was 16, there was a huge row. Arguments were frequent over the years, as Eryl pushed me to do evermore academic work and to enter writing for competitions. But this particular year, I dug my heels in and refused to write a slew of poems for the upcoming St David’s Day Eisteddfod. Despite the shouting and the emotional blackmail, I wouldn’t budge. Eryl said that our relationship would never be the same again. I thought this could only be a good thing. But the controlling in other areas of my life continued.
Gwyneth found her mother’s controlling behaviour suffocatingI left for university and became more independent, with a boyfriend of whom my parents didn’t approve, and so the bullying intensified. I was cast as the “awkward person”, “rocking the boat” and provoking my mother. From my point of view, I was just getting on with my life. In my second year of studying, unable to stand the onslaught any more, I had a nervous breakdown.
No one ever knew about what was happening. Emotional secrets were buried deep in my community. Until I published about the experience of being emotionally abused in my sixties, only a few of my closest friends knew about the hell in which I’d lived.
As an adult, I never managed to persuade Eryl to back off, but I did stop providing information about my life and refused to give her any more control. After my husband and I were married she sulked for three weeks because I wouldn’t provide her with the key to our house.
By that point I didn’t care and the silence was a relief. I chose to keep in touch with my parents and looked after them until their deaths a decade ago, but it was never an easy relationship. I knew that if I cut off contact that I’d start fantasising about the parents I’d left. I preferred to be reminded of the difficult reality. I still experience devastating waves of shame for no reason when I’m ill or over-tired. The abuse leaves you with no confidence and an inability to trust in your own decisions.
Eryl’s behaviour didn’t come out of nowhere. She too had been emotionally abused by her mother who, late in her life, came to live with us. It’s said that the abused become abusers but I have to believe that there’s free will. It is possible – if not easy – to break the cycle.
Gwyneth [middle] chose to keep in touch with her mother Eryl [right] despite her difficult childhoodI’m always surprised (and suspicious) when a daughter declares that her mother is her “best friend”. That’s an enviable intimacy to have had but no, your best friend is your best friend. A mother’s role is much more foundational: it is to bring up a child so that they know in their body that, whatever they do, that parent is on their side. It’s something to do with being trusted to do the right thing, even if you argue over what that might be.
A mother can be confided in and can deal with the truth, however tricky. Above all, she shows the child the respect of knowing that she isn’t the parent’s possession but a completely different person. I’m happy for those people who don’t know what it is to be deprived of that crucial relationship and deeply sad that I didn’t have it. I would have been a very different person.
The last thing my mother said to me, on her deathbed, was “Shut up!” This stung but didn’t surprise me because she’d been telling me the same all my life in different ways. Eryl, as she died, was calling for her own mother as, no doubt, I will when my own turn comes. After all, in some situations, only your mother will do.
I’ve done a lot of therapy over the years but the most effective has been Pesso-Boyden, recommended by, among others, trauma expert Bessel van de Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score. In this technique subjects are invited to imagine an ideal mother to replace their actual one. But, as a result of my experience, I’m so distrustful of mothers that I don’t want to deal with the parental model at all.
Perhaps I’ll use an Ideal Dog instead and, when I go to church on Mothering Sunday, while others are praising mothers, I’ll be thinking of a certain greyhound who I know adored me.
‘Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling’ was shortlisted for a Sky Arts Award and won the Wales Non-Fiction Book of the Year. It’s published in paperback by Calon in March, £10.99
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