Call Me Cockroach

by Leigh Byrne

I’d learned that one from my dad; shove a problem out of sight and maybe it will go away.

Up until that point, the whole marriage business had seemed like a game—a game of chicken—between Chad and me, like two children, each stubbornly waiting for the other to back out.

I thought of Daddy too, and the weddings I’d seen in the movies where teary-eyed fathers walked their daughters down the aisle to give them away to become wives.

head switched on. “Oh yeah, I forgot; your mama beat on you when you were a kid, so now you think everybody’s gonna beat you.”

But I didn’t want to, because then I’d have to admit to them my marriage had failed.

he only talked mean to me when he was mad, or drunk, or both. Everything was fine as long as I went along with whatever he wanted. So I sucked up my discontentment with a smile, tapped into the high tolerance I’d developed as a child, and went on living.

All at once, she became my everything. The doll I was never allowed to have as a child. The unconditional love I’d always longed for. My second chance at happiness. All this was a heavy load for such a fragile creature to carry. A knot rose in the back of my throat, and I began to cry. I pressed my lips to her forehead and whispered, “We’re going to be okay.”

If Chad and I were lucky enough to be halfway decent parents to one kid, with our families’ history of dysfunction, we had no business tempting fate again.

Still, even with all the love I had to give my baby, I wasn’t sure if I was capable of being a good mother to her. Mama’s emotional abandonment and ensuing abuse during my formative years had left me with one horrific model for motherhood. All I’d learned from her was what not to do, from there I was lost. But I genuinely wanted to be a good parent, so for the first few months, I asked a lot of questions, read books on child rearing, and like most new parents, winged the rest.

Abused people grow up to abuse their kids.”

I’d tried so hard to be a good mother, read all the books and done exactly as they said. But I now realized none of it made any difference. No matter what I did, because I’d been an abused child, as a mother I would always be examined under the bright light of suspicion.

“Tuesday, every time we go to the grocery store and you see a mother spanking her kid you cry abuse. I’m sick of hearing it! Nobody’s being abused, so drop the subject and don’t bring it up again!”

His words had cut straight to my heart, and inside, I was screaming hysterically—a very abnormal reaction. But I could do a good impersonation of normal. I’d learned how through watching TV and observing the people around me.

sabotage the relationship in order to fulfill my masochistic prophecy of a life doomed to suffering and isolation—the only life of which my mother had convinced me I deserved.

As a child, all I wanted was to be loved. As an adult, all I wanted was to be loved. But it was hard for me to believe in happily ever after when the one person I should have been able to count on to love me unconditionally had failed me. If my own mother didn’t think I was deserving of love, how could I expect anyone else to?

But that’s the danger of isolation; it lures you in with the deceptive promise of protecting you and then it feasts on your spirit.

in a marriage, no matter how mad you are, there are lines you don’t cross, words you’re not allowed to say. Among them: I don’t love you anymore. I no longer find you attractive, and I wish you were dead.

the family scapegoat is usually the most sensitive and most vulnerable of all the children, and often the one who reminds the abusive parent of something within herself she cannot accept.

But the most devastating damage of all, is that I’ve missed out on the joy of family. I grew up without a mother or a father,