Clarissa's Blog

She violates your boundaries. You feel like an extension of her. Your property is given away without your consent, sometimes in front of you. Your property may be repossessed and no reason given other than that it was never yours.

On the eve of our emigration to Canada, my mother came to my apartment in my absence, sorted through my clothes and books, and gave them away. When I confronted her about it, she waved me away with, “Well, it’s not like you will need all this stuff in Canada.” I still miss my favorite books that she gave away. By a strange coincidence, the books she gave away were precisely the ones I loved the most and was hoping to keep. It is impossible for her to see me as a separate human being, so my possessions are, by extension, her own.

While I still lived with my parents, there was absolutely no way in the world to convince my mother not to rummage in my underwear and my things.

Once, at the age of 15, I came home and discovered my mother in a blinding rage in front of my dresser. All of my underwear was lying in a heap on the floor.

“Where is your bra?” she yelled in a fury that was unexpected even for her. “Where is it? What have you done with it?”

“I’m wearing it,” I said. I felt entitled to wear it because I had bought it with my own money in England. I was 15, I had started developing quite early and by that age already had noticeable breasts. We had to wear these scratchy school uniforms that were leaving me raw without a bra.

“Why are you wearing it?” she vociferated. “Who allowed you to wear it? You are too young to wear a bra! I’ve wasted hours of my time looking for it? How dare you?!?”

She yelled for several more hours, informing me that I was a little whore and a horrible disappointment as a child.

“I curse you!” she screamed. “Do you hear that? Your own mother damns your existence! What kind of a monster do you have to be for your own mother to curse you?!?”

Since then, my mother has tried giving me bras as gifts on regular occasions. Every time, these bras were ridiculously tiny for me. It is really enough to see me once to figure out that I cannot possibly be wearing an A cup. But whenever I told her that I couldn’t wear these bras, she would get incensed.

“Of course, they fit you,” she would protest. “You are pretending that you can’t wear them for some weird reason. Put them on now! Just do!”