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My mother told me more than once that she felt me jump in her stomach when my father was aggressive. She said he was violent before, during, and after her pregnancy with me.
I can’t say if this is true, and I mentally apologise as I write this—because he died in 2019 and can’t speak for himself.
It sounds true. It fits the rest of the story. Regardless, what unsettles me is her ability to tell me this without flinching—without realising or acknowledging that she failed to see the priority in the situation. The maternal instinct to protect me seems to have been absent even then. She wasn’t coerced into staying. She stayed because she wanted him, not because she had to. She stayed until she was replaced. And I was never enough reason to leave. They didn’t split until he cheated and got another woman pregnant—my half-sister. And I wonder now: was that his way out?
She told me she thought a baby would calm him down in a way marriage clearly hadn’t. I was “his” daughter. But I was told multiple times throughout childhood and adulthood that he wanted a son.
Would he have been around if I had been………Would I have been enough for her if I had been. Probably not.
She admitted she wasn’t happy, but she didn’t want to not have him. She was proud of him—proud of his bad boy reputation, his fighting, proud that she was the one he’d chosen out of all the others. She enjoyed the fact that he was feared, and presumably the perceived status it gave her. But at what cost?
When I was born, she said she loved me instantly. But in recent years, my sister told me she had struggled to bond. When confronted, she made excuses but didn’t deny having said it.
I grew up thinking I was cherished from birth—repeated profoundly enough that I felt special and lucky to have been.
As an adult, I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD and autism. I don’t claim they were caused by prenatal violence or smoking—though research suggests that could be true. I wonder instead whether the volatility of their relationship—its aggression, its imbalance—was shaped by neurodivergence in both parents. That what I inherited wasn’t just biology, but the nervous system of a home that braced and flinched before I had words.
I still jump easily—a known neurodivergent trait. But I also blink at loud noises that are anticipated or repeated, like fireworks.
Almost smiling, as if recalling a fond memory—clearly proud of what she’d done—she told me, as an adult, that she remembered me blinking as I sat in my baby bouncer, just months old, while she chopped our sofa up with an axe in in a fit of rage. In the same room.
I feel very, very sad for that baby.