I was reading these entries back and wondered, who did she enjoy hurting more? Me, or my sister?
With me it explosive from the start. She knew that I could always see what she was doing, in a vague way at least and as much as my young brain could process, and there was never a time when I didn’t fight it. On reflection I think that the biggest thing for her, the explosions. When I’d lose control entirely, that’s when she’d “won”.
[my sense of self was not fully formed, it still isn’t]
With my sister, the extra level of hurting came from my sister still loving her, for a while at least. My love essentially stopped when I grew up, but my sister hadn’t had time to do that yet, not really. To be honest, I think we both loved her, and there will always be leftover parts of us from when that love existed. It’s hard to accept that this person who is supposed to love you, and tells you that they love you, and that you love and want to love, just wants to hurt you. I don’t think a child’s heart broken like that ever recovers.
I have no doubt that my sister had it worse. In other families, parents learn a lot from the first child, the eldest. They learn what rules are reasonable and what’s safe to let slide. They learn who they are as parents, and what mistakes they’ve made, and with the next child, they have a chance to do it all again, but better.
With my mum, she used the things she learnt to hurt my sister more than she could have ever hurt me. The parental mistakes for my mum were gaps in her defences, flaws in her attack plans, knives that could be sharper.
I wonder, too, if my mum was, in some way, bored of abusing my sister. I was such a jumbled mess of a person by default, a power keg sometimes and numb at others, she really had to work to hurt me. I hated her, I loathed her almost completely, so she had to re-ignite the love I always had in me first, to expose the weak point, and that was half the game.
With my sister it was easier. She started earlier. She was so vulnerable, my mum had started hurting her sooner, my sister’s weak parts always on display. My mum would have doubled-down on hurting her just go get the same thrill. As bad as it was for me, I can’t even begin to imagine what my sister went through.
Yes, this is child abuse, and yes, it’s fucking sick.