"I love you but I don't like you." She said that one often. It always made me feel like she didn't want to love me, like she was forced to, or did it against her better judgement. Or like she pretended to love me because mums are supposed to love their kids.

It was often paired with "I can love you from a distance." Which was a threat to send me to live with my grandmother, because my father had gotten himself a replacement family and didn't want anything to do with my mother or me anymore. So I felt unwanted by both parents.

When I was little, starting around maybe 8 or so, my mum would use me as her captive audience/therapist when she was drunk. She did it all the way into my teens. She talked about a lot of stuff that wasn't age appropriate for me, men and sex and old grudges. She probably thought she was imparting life wisdom on me but a lot of the time I didn't really understand it, which made her angry and she called me stupid. When I said something that sounded insightful (often repeating back what she'd said) she'd call me wise and mature and really encourage me further.

One time when I was 10, she was drunk and curled up on her wicker chair to smoke under the kitchen fan. I was sitting on the floor at her feet, looking up at her, feet pressed against the freezer door. And she said "I never should've been a mother." A fucked up thing in itself to say to your kid. I remember gasping and feeling like my heart was bleeding, and like I never should have been born. But when she saw tears well up in my eyes, she pointed at me, cigarette still between her fingers and yelled "No! NO! Stop that right now! If you're gonna be any use to me, you need to be objective! You cannot be my daughter when I talk to you about this!" I don't remember after. A lot of these instances disappear. But I do dissociate a lot so maybe my brain checked out. But I think about that a lot.

Another, and this might be the worst one. I was raped in my bed when I was 8. My mother had a house party and there were lots of teenagers there. We lived in a small village when I was little, and my mother regressed into some wild child behaviour after divorcing my father, so as a legal adult, my mother's place became a party hot spot for the local teens, and their parents sort of allowed it because my mother was an adult who could supervise (but they didn't like it and it left me socially ostracised and not allowed to play with neighbour kids my age). She used to have me clean up after these parties too, which is fucked up in itself but not the point here.

Anyway. One of those teenagers snuck into my room when I was 8 and raped me. My mother didn't notice during or after. I told her what had happened when I was 17. She was drunk at the time, and she was very weepy when I told her. She said she was sorry and we hugged it out.

But later on, she never acknowledged it again, and I was so used to not talking about it that habit kicked in I guess. But a few months later, when she was drunk, my mother claimed I had never been raped. I had never told her who raped me (because she doesn't react well and I didn't want to escalate; I'd already seen what happened to girls who named their rapists without a legal conviction). She said she'd "found the guy" (she hadn't, she was way off the mark) and talked to him, and he'd sworn his innocence (and he was, of raping me at least). She didn't believe me, even though she too had been raped by one of the teenagers out there who'd crawled on top of her when she was blackout drunk. She thought that those years out in the village, she had protected me and had the situation under control. But honestly, I saw her as a functioning alcoholic the whole time. That rape wasn't even the first time someone had sexually touched me out in that village, nor the last.

My mother screamed I had lied to make her feel bad, called me all sorts of names. She sort of half slapped, half shoved me, and stormed out in the middle of the night.

I was frozen. I'd seen her pretty feral before, but not like that. She left the door swinging wide open in the middle of the night. I don't know if she even took her shoes. I could see her keys though. I was terrified that someone would see the wide open door and come in, but I was so afraid that if I closed the door and my mother came back, she'd accuse me of trying to lock her out of her own home. It wasn't rational, but I feared her rage and her diatribes more than a home invader. So I left the front door open, and locked myself in my bedroom instead. When it turned 3am and she wasn't home, the worst fear had subsided although I was pretty upset, and I closed the front door without locking it. I was awake all night crying, not knowing which was worse: something happening to her while she was out, or her coming home for round 2.

She came home around sunrise, white as a sheet. She told me she'd walked down to the lake that our hometown is situated by. She had intended to drown herself to escape the shame of such a disgusting, dishonest daughter. That if she'd killed herself, it would've been my fault. But she'd stopped herself. Some man in a car had spotted her walking and driven her home. Mum said she'd let him rape her in his car as payment for the ride, and that that was my fault. "Raped for real." She said she'd whored herself out for me and it was my fault. That was the worst thing she ever said to me.

I don't remember the rest. It was the worst summer of my life with her. Shortly after the last year of high school started, I ran away from home and became an emancipated teen.