My Mum Tortured Me And Made My Brothers Her Enforcers. Years Later, I Finally Discovered Why.

Posted on 20/10/2025 by Boris Clair

If the plane crashes, I will finally be free.

The thought came to me often when I was a young teenager, as easily as breathing. My mother was away, and I imagined what life would be without her. The fantasy didn’t last — she always came home — and everything exploded.

One night in 1969, I was in the car with my friends. I was running 30 minutes late. I’d tried to call my mom from a public phone booth, but the rotary dial was broken. My stomach tightened. I knew what awaited me.

As the headlights swept across the driveway, I saw her standing there — stiff and stern, her body rigid with rage. One hand clutched our dog’s leash, the other gripped a glass of water and was trembling slightly — not from fear, but from fury held barely in check. Her jaw was so tight, it looked like it might snap.

Brightly lit by the car lights, she hurled the water in my face before I could even say hello.

“Walk the dog,” she snapped. “I don’t care if you get raped — if you weren’t already.”

The author with her father and mother in 1955.

She marched to the car and demanded everyone’s phone numbers. I burned with humiliation. I knew this wasn’t the end — it was only the beginning.

Inside, she ordered me upstairs. Her angry breath followed me like a shadow. My father was asleep. She ripped every item from my closet and screamed at me to put everything back. Every time I tried, she tore it all out again. Her rage was unstoppable. It was as if she saw the devil… and that devil was me. Her fury was always aimed at me.

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That night bled into the next day. At our cabana at the local beach club, she forced me into a skimpy bikini. I was painfully thin and flat-chested, and ashamed of my body. My mother refused to let me wear my cover-up. My brother teased me constantly, saying things like, “The carpenters need you — they need flat boards.”

Mother had a solution, one I didn’t want. She stuffed my bikini top — the hard-cup kind — with foam falsies.

My worst fear happened. During swimming lessons, the pads floated out, one at a time. Everyone saw them and started laughing. I wanted to sink to the bottom of the pool and stay there.

Humiliation was routine for me.

My brothers became my mother’s enforcers. At her command, they once hoisted me onto the refrigerator and left me there, terrified, while the family ate dinner. I begged to be taken down. They laughed. She stayed silent.

One brother frequently pinned me down and shoved the dog’s blanket into my mouth as I squirmed and screamed. Mother’s voice would ring out from downstairs: “Leave your brother alone.” I was blamed even when I was the one being attacked.

My body responded to the unpredictable attacks. I experienced dizzy spells. Headaches. Nausea. I lived in a constant state of fight-or-flight.

Childhood friends saw glimpses of my torment. They heard my mother call me in her high-pitched voice, order me around, and constantly interrupt my time with them. She forced-fed me oatmeal as my friends watched and were told to eat it too. They stopped sleeping over.

At 16, a social worker — likely from school — told me I had to get out. I can’t remember much about her; my memory has gaps so large that pages and even chapters of my life are gone. People get frustrated when I can’t recall them or our shared experiences. I do remember a sense of urgency and finding out how to graduate high school early, which I did.

By January 1972, I had fled 200 miles away to college at SUNY Binghamton. It was a hippie school then, and I fit right in. My long, thick, frizzy hair — which my mother constantly straightened when I was a child — was suddenly admired. I dove into the fine arts department, and began painting and drawing. I was surrounded by people who praised me instead of tearing me apart.

But I was still desperate to be loved. I said yes to too many boys because I thought saying no would make them leave. I fell in love for the first time, and experimented with drugs. I had relationships, but they didn’t last. I had made a vow: No one will ever hurt me again. My walls stayed high.

I couldn’t outrun the wounds.

My relationship with my mother remained toxic. She craved control. Once, she drove up for a surprise visit. When I walked into my apartment, she was sitting with my roommates, having already rummaged through my drawers.

When I was 20, she became convinced I was dying of lymphoma because I had slightly enlarged lymph nodes. Every doctor told her I was fine. She told friends I was dying anyway. Eventually, she found an elderly ENT at Mount Sinai who was willing to operate on me.

The night before my surgery, she jokingly said, “Now that you’re here, you might as well get a nose job.” It was something I never wanted, but she’d been campaigning for it since I was 14. She’d had her first facelift by then.

When I woke up from the anaesthesia, she was standing over me saying, “You’ll never guess what we’ve done?” I lifted my hand and patted my nose in fear that she had them do it when I was out.

The lymph nodes were benign, but the surgeon had cut against the grain of my neck, leaving a scar like a slash across my throat. I covered it for years with a scarf. Twenty-five years later, I decided to get a copy of the surgical report. I learned then that the doctor had accidentally cut my jugular vein. Many people die from that. I didn’t because the surgeon quickly stitched it closed with vascular sutures.

Friends urged me to cut off contact with my mother. They heard my stories, my complaints, and some even witnessed the terror that she inflicted. I couldn’t do it. Even as a child, I’d sensed she must have been deeply wounded to be so cruel. I used to ask her brother, my Uncle Sonny, “What happened to Mommy when she was little? What happened in your childhood?” But I never got an answer. They grew up in a time when they learned not to share bad things. Instead, they buried them.

The truth is, I didn’t want to cut my mother off completely. Part of it was fear — the idea of losing her felt like another rupture I couldn’t survive. Part of it was that she wasn’t always cruel. We took countless road trips — on weekends, weeklong trips, even a cross-country drive. Mom had a sense of adventure and curiosity about life, which I inherited from her. And part of it was something harder to admit: I still wanted a mother. Even a damaging connection with her felt less painful than no connection at all. So when she pushed and pushed, I gave in to her.

When I was 51, I agreed to visit three plastic surgeons with her for consultations about my nose — but only if I could bring a camera crew. My mother instantly said yes. She loved attention. What resulted was a funny short film called “My Nose” about her relentless campaign to get me to have the surgery.

At film festivals, when I got off the stage after the Q&A, there was always a line of people who wanted to chat with me. They usually said the same three things:

“I love your nose. Don’t touch it.”

“I can’t stand your mother. How do you talk to her?”

“Let me tell you my story.”

Often their tale had nothing to do with their nose. Instead, it was about the childhood trauma they were still struggling with. Some of the people I met were much older than me, and their mothers were long deceased. I realised I wasn’t alone, and I wanted to do something to help others.

When “My Nose” played in Washington, D.C., The Washington Post ran a story about it on the cover of the style section. The first line of the piece was “Whatever your holiday woes this season, be glad you don’t have a mother like Gayle Kirschenbaum, and if you do, get thee to a psychotherapist.”

When Mom read it, she said, “Bad press is better than no press. I’m on the cover of The Washington Post.”

That told me everything. She loved attention at all costs.

The author and her mother in a still from the author's film, "Look At Us Now, Mother!" — The author and her mother in a still from the author’s film, “Look At Us Now, Mother!”

I asked her if she’d be willing to work on our relationship in front of the cameras. She said yes. I felt like I won the lottery. At the time, she was in her late 80s — funny, smart, happy, living well in a Florida country club community. I had a treasure trove of archival material: the 8mm films my father began shooting in the 1950s, old love letters, my childhood diaries, and tons of genealogy records I had dug up.

The resulting film ― “Look At Us Now, Mother!” ― is about our journey. The cameras rolled as I confronted her in therapy sessions. At first, she denied everything, but slowly, cracks formed.

“I once pulled a ‘Mommie Dearest’ on her,” she admitted, referencing the infamous movie about Joan Crawford’s abuse of her daughter Christina. The closet-and-clothes-hanger night? I was Christina. I was Christina many nights.

“I don’t remember why,” she told the therapist.

But I remembered.

I reminded her of the night with the water, the closet, the threats. I reminded her of the baby boy she told everyone she was giving birth to — Gary — and the baby girl — me — she got instead.

“You weren’t welcomed,” my brother confirmed. “She was just warmer to the males in the house.”

The therapists in the film helped me piece together my mother’s hardships: her father’s mental health issues and his two suicide attempts, the untimely death of her 18-month-old sister, and her family’s financial troubles. My grandmother had to roll up her sleeves and start a business as she was the only provider because her husband was depressed in bed. My mother told me, while wiping the tears from her eyes, how she’d spent more than one summer sitting alone in the lobby of Kings County Hospital while her mother visited her father for hours each day because children weren’t allowed upstairs then. It was the first time I had ever seen her get emotional like that.

The author's mother at the screening of "Look At Us Now, Mother!" — The author’s mother at the screening of “Look At Us Now, Mother!”

A true turning point in my life came when a facilitator asked me to close my eyes and imagine my mother as a little girl. An image of my mother as a wounded child came into my mind. The facilitator then told me to imagine myself as a little girl. I knew I was a wounded child. Lastly, I was guided to imagine my younger self walking toward my mother’s younger self. She was no longer my mother or responsible for loving and nurturing me. We were just two wounded little girls who had finally met each other without any of our baggage.

That was the start of my forgiveness journey. It showed me how to reframe the person who had hurt me so much. When I began to see her as a hurt child, my expectations of her changed. When she unleashed her criticism on me, I no longer reacted — there was no more cowering or firing back with rage and anger. Instead, I dismissed it, ignored it, refused to feed it. She lost her power to hurt me, and slowly, she stopped trying.

I was no longer the pincushion that flinched with every stab — no longer the designated scapegoat.

And I chose to forgive her.

Not because she deserved it. Not because she asked. But because I could no longer carry her pain in my body. Forgiveness wasn’t letting her off the hook — it was taking me off it.

At 99, my mother made a video. It was around Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement.

“Gayle, I was very harsh to you in so many ways, and for that, I ask your forgiveness. In my heart, I know you forgave me, but now I’m trying to forgive myself.”

The clip went viral.

Many people responded with some version of, “You’re so lucky. My mother never said sorry.”

What they didn’t know was that I didn’t need the apology. I had already forgiven her.

She’s now 102. We’re close — very close.

Forgiveness didn’t come easily. But it came because I stopped waiting for her to change. I did the changing.

It’s not about forgetting the past. It’s about reclaiming yourself in the face of it.

My mother is not the woman she once was, and I’m no longer the girl she tried to destroy.

Sometimes, peace doesn’t come when someone apologises. It comes when you decide it’s time.

I did. And I’m finally free.

Gayle Kirschenbaum is an Emmy-winning filmmaker, writer, photographer, and forgiveness coach. Her film “Look At Us Now, Mother!” premiered on Netflix and has been credited with transforming lives. She co-authored “Mildred’s Mindset: Wisdom From A Woman Centenarian” with her mother, centenarian influencer Mildred Kirschenbaum. Her debut memoir, “Bullied To Besties: A Daughter’s Journey To Forgiveness,” has been praised by Publishers Weekly as “riveting and beautifully wrought.”

My Sadistic Dad Abused Me And Cut Me Out Of His Will. I Was Shocked By Why I Forgave Him.

Posted on 18/06/2023 by Boris Clair

What is forgiveness, but a pass?

I learned about my father’s passing many months after his death, when a surrogate court sent me an obligatory legal notice: An estate had been created in his name. In his will, my father passed me over, stating not once but twice that under no circumstances was I to receive any of his money, even if all other possible beneficiaries were deceased. In my father’s view, it seemed, I was unforgivable.

Before I learned to swim, my father treaded in the deep end of our town pool, lifting his leathery tan arms, opening his hands to catch me. When I jumped, he took his arms down and I slipped underwater, floundering for a few seconds before my father pulled me up to the surface, holding my body against his. He laughed hysterically as I coughed and tried to catch my breath, the water lapping at our shoulders.

He said we should try again. This time, he promised he’d catch me. I got out of the pool and went to the edge. I bent my knees and hesitated. My legs shook.

“I’ll catch you,” my father said, his head and hands beckoning.

I wanted him to be the kind of father who would catch me, so I held my breath, closed my eyes and jumped, hoping that this time ― this time ― he’d keep his word. He rarely did.

As a girl, I often drowned in my father’s sadism ― his torrents of psychological and sexual abuse. In my 30s, when I began to speak and write about my childhood experiences, people I knew and people I didn’t know asked the same question: “Have you forgiven him?” Some urged me to forgive him, citing forgiveness as an edict, offering lines from the bible. My father was a flawed human being who deserved forgiveness. Good people forgive. Was I a good person?

My father wasn’t all bad. He could be caring. When I was growing up, he sat beside my bed when I was sick, gave me a pep talk when I felt anxious before my violin audition, and came to the Girl Scouts Pop Hop, doing the do-si-do with me even though, according to my mother, he hated to dance. For years, I pretended that good father was the whole of him, until I couldn’t pretend any longer.

The author, at age 8, and her father, pictured on the family deck, on their way to their second annual "Pop Hop." — The author, at age 8, and her father, pictured on the family deck, on their way to their second annual “Pop Hop.”

In “The Courage to Heal,” a book I read in my 30s while in the early stages of recovering from complex PTSD, authors Ellen Bass and Laura Davis write, “Developing compassion and forgiveness for your abuser… is not a required part of the healing process.”

I felt relieved to know that experts believed forgiveness wasn’t necessary. For most of my life, I saw forgiveness as something a victim offered an offender after the offender held himself accountable for his actions and gave a heartfelt apology. In the grander scheme of forgiveness was my sense of presidential pardons, an exemption from punishment for a committed crime.

My father never offered an apology for his behaviour, nor was he ever officially reported for or convicted of any crime. Though when I was an adult, I held him accountable in our conversations, and then also after our estrangement, in part of a memoir I published in my mid-40s, two years prior to his death. While he once, over the phone, admitted he’d done the things I’d claimed, he quickly retracted his statement. He said my perception of his behaviour was incorrect, and my unforgivable accusations were akin to sticking a knife in his chest: He was the victim.

In a research study on forgiveness, Harvard University epidemiology professor Tyler Vanderwheele states that forgiveness may boost mental health and wellbeing. Vanderwheele defines forgiveness as “replac[ing] ill will toward the offender with good will” and names empathising with the offender as an essential step toward forgiving.

I sometimes wonder if my father ever felt empathy or good will. I felt empathy and good will towards my “good” father, but not the abuser father, the greater whole of him. But ultimately, empathy and good will had nothing to do with my coming to forgive my father.

A dog did.

The author and Beau on a hike north of Boston in August 2022.

When I was a child, I begged for a dog, but my father said we couldn’t have one because he was allergic. (Years later, after he divorced my mother and remarried, he got a dog and insisted he never had a dog allergy.) My father told me that, as consolation, he’d be my dog. He got down on all fours and barked and panted. I was enamoured and enthralled until he pushed me over and lowered his body onto me. I had no power to prevent what happened next.

Decades later, in my mid-40s, living solo during the pandemic, I adopted Beau, a yellow lab mix from Mississippi, who arrived with severe separation anxiety. When I left my apartment to go to work, Beau went to doggie day care, a place where he felt happy, safe and loved ― until he was attacked by another dog. Beau’s injuries were so serious that he needed emergency surgery to repair the damage. For days after, he wouldn’t stop crying, panting, pacing and hiding in my bathtub.

The vet prescribed a sedative (Xanax) that the clinic didn’t have in stock. Because most pharmacies forbid dogs, my only option was to go to the CVS drive-thru with Beau in tow. I pulled up, put the prescription in the tube, pressed the button, heard it airlift, and waited.

The intercom voice was high-pitched, taut. “What’s your dad’s name? I can’t read the handwriting.”

Beau whimpered in the backseat.

“It’s not my dad,” I said, leaning my mouth toward the plastic device, hearing my voice rise. The vet had noted “dog” on the prescription. “It’s my dog.”

In that moment, the seed of forgiveness took, though I wouldn’t know it until months later when I came to see that Beau’s trauma, and the aftermath, had triggered my history with my father, and with it, all of my unresolved feelings: shock, anger, betrayal, the loss of safety in a place where safety was promised, the terrifying lack of control over what happened to my body, the question of whether I’d live or die — above all, the grief that the good father I’d wanted and needed was forever gone and the bond between us destroyed.

Beau at the vet clinic, after emergency surgery for serious injuries caused by a dog at his day care in November 2022.

Even before Beau’s assault, my connection to my father reverberated in my dog’s simple presence ― his panting, his barking, his clumsy way of playing. Worse, in proximity to a scooter rider or rollerblader or other random triggers, Beau suddenly turned from a quiet, sweet companion into a lunging, growling beast ― something my nervous system registered as akin to my father’s quick tonal shift, from caring man to violent abuser.

Only when I learned to disconnect my dog from my father could I fully accept the truth of my past and be present, with compassion, understanding and unconditional love for Beau. In the days after his attack, Beau’s suffering gave me the opportunity to heal the part of myself who still suffered from my childhood violations. Only then did I begin to grieve what I’d lost. I never expected forgiveness to follow.

Forgiving my father wasn’t something I wanted to do. Forgiveness didn’t even feel like a choice, it was just something I came to feel.

I realised forgiving my father wasn’t about whether he deserved to be forgiven or punished. Forgiveness wasn’t for him; it was for me. Forgiveness was my exhale.

Forgiving my father came as a release of my resentment and his corrosive grip on my life. Forgiveness was my letting go of the pain of my father’s actions and my attachment to the good father I wanted and needed, a construct long dead. Forgiveness was part of my process of mourning the loss of someone I loved and had once believed in, in order to survive.

I came to understand that forgiveness isn’t a pass, but a passage. When I forgave my father, he wasn’t exonerated. He didn’t receive any benefit, not because he was no longer alive, but because forgiveness, as I’ve come to know it, isn’t an outward act at all, but an inward gift of emancipation: I’m no longer my father’s victim. I’m simply me. Free.

The author and Beau taking a break while on a walk in May.

Tracy Strauss the author of the narrative nonfiction book “I Just Haven’t Met You Yet: Finding Empowerment in Dating, Love, and Life.” Former essays editor of The Rumpus, her writing has appeared in Glamour, Oprah Magazine, New York Magazine, Poets & Writers Magazine, and Ms., among other publications. She currently teaches writing at Harvard University and is writing a memoir about her rescue dog, Beau. When she isn’t moonlighting as a Zumba instructor, you can find her on Instagram at @pawfessorbeauandco, on Twitter at @TracyS_Writer and on Facebook at facebook.com/TracyStraussAuthor.

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