Dear Renisha: Turning Trauma Into Triumph

ADOPTED INTO ABUSE

Dear Renisha,

I recognized early on that I needed my parents approval and acceptance although I really didn't know what that meant until I was about 18, but I also recognized I didn't actually love my adoptive mother. Everyone wants to love and to be loved. We are born that way. Our parents are the first ones we're exposed to for love and survival.
With any parents, including the abusive and neglectful, our lives depend on their care. If they give it, we survive; if they don't, then we are either damaged or we don't survive.
It is this need for survival from the moment we begin life that creates our dependency upon our parents. But we must recognize that dependency does not equate to love.
Children might try harder to gain approval from where they never get it to ensure their survival which has become a habit to them from early on so is not recognized in adulthood what a bad and destructive habit this is, but that does not mean the children will actually love their parents.
I think abuse and love should really stop being used in the same sentence because one can't exist with the other.
The thing is we don't love our parents as much as we love the notion of them. Parents are held in high esteem all around the world and are considered a child's savior. But when people like me hear that, we think that if parents are so awesome and all then there must be something wrong with us instead. We think they are right and we are wrong and so they succeed in trying to shape us to fit their image, and so we conform to their ideologies and beliefs.
The truth is a parent that has abused you cannot love you. If this parent loved you, there is no way that he/she would have abused you in any way.

All I ever wanted was love ... unconditional love ...

Dear Renisha,

It took 30 years but I finally met our biological mother. Quite frankly, I'll be honest, I wasn't that impressed.

But I kinda expected that from her after speaking to her on the phone. She was very entitled. She asked me to bring her a gift and a set of new sheets and a comforter!
When I say I was so taken back by the audacity of her requesting me to bring her a gift I had a feeling we were not going to reconnect how I deep down wanted inside, and I was okay with that.

I told myself when I started this journey to find my biological family members, that it would be worth it even if I made one connection.
Whether that be a parent, sibling, cousin, aunt or uncle. That I was deserving to know the truth. All my life I heard, "Well why would you want to find someone who didn't want you?"
And, "Sabrina, you should be grateful someone wanted you." was always their response when I tried to tell them that my adoptive mother was abusive and that I deserved better!
I have always felt so misunderstood in life. Never felt like I would never fit in anywhere. I felt like a lost piece of misfiled paperwork.
I was a biracial child brought up in an all white family. I felt ashamed of being biracial. I got made fun of by both adults and kids at school. I wasn't white enough for the whites or black enough for the black folk. People often assumed I was hispanic- I am a light-skinned brown girl with fine but thick curly hair.
Mary, my adoptive mother, was cruel and evil. She was sadistic with her punishments. I tried to love her and I wanted to be loved by her. But she was incapable of loving anyone. She was all that I knew as a mother, yet, somehow she was the furthest thing from a mom. She played the role of 'Good Olde Christian Mommy' well but, boy, was she a fraud. So, for the reminder of this book she shall be referred to as Mary, not mom or mother. Just Mary.

Mary would brush my curls out. While brushing my tangled hair, she would run the back of the brush on my neck and would hit me in the head with the hard back if I cried. She lacked the skills of multicultural hair care for a child she chose to adopt. When my sister, Beverly, was older, she would braid my hair and fix it. She nicknamed me "Suzi Q" because of how curly my hair was. She would put barrettes and beads in my hair. I felt so pretty.
One day, Mary got mad at me for God knows what and she cut off all my hair into a short pixie cut!
It was hideous; I got made fun of so bad at school by my peers! I thought to myself, "Great something else for them to make fun of me for."
I share 3 adoptive older siblings: Chris, Joey and Beverly who are all biological siblings also adopted by Mary & Larry Davis. Mary abused them too. Life at home was miserable and so was school. I would lay in my bed at night crying, begging God to make the abuse stop.
It. Never. Fucking. Stopped.
Mary suffered from a lot of health problems. She was a diabetic who also had cancer and her kidneys were failing which resulted in her having to go to dialysis twice a week.
She had several strokes, and even fell in the kitchen and broke her hip a couple times . She also had congestive heart failure and that is what eventually killed her on March 30th, 2000, three weeks after my 13th birthday.
My siblings and I later on found out that Mary also suffered from mental health problems. She suffered from bipolar and schizophrenia and was unmedicated for those disorders.