Page 27 of Serpent & Saviors

She shielded me from the anger and pure hatred my mother felt on more than one occasion. As much as I hated it, my mind took me back to one of those times.

I shook with fear as my grandparents waved from the car. They had to go into town for something, and I did what was safest–run to my room and lock the door. It was too hot outside, and the woods scared me almost as much as my mother did.

I never knew what would set her off. Every day the rules seemed to change, even sometimes hourly. As a small child, it was confusing. What made her angry yesterday might make her laugh today. What made her laugh last week or even an hour ago might send her into a physical rage toward me in a matter of minutes.

If it wasn’t the pure hate pouring from her, it was delusions and massive acts of paranoia. In her mind, we were all conspiring against her. Her favorite thing to do was trick me.

That’s how she got me out of the room that day.

I can’t remember the exact thing she used, but her sweetness in that moment was the only thing I craved, so I opened the door. She’d lost her phone and literally tore her room to pieces.

At first, it started as a game, and we went on a hunt to locate it. Fifteen minutes later, she turned on me. She screamed, accusing me of siding with ‘the agency’.

After slapping me, she shoved me into a small broom closet and locked me inside. I heard her talking to herself, afraid of the things she said she was going to do. She wanted to set me on fire and probably would have: if she’d been able to find matches.

My grandfather saved me that day. He’d forgotten something and came back home. This was just one of the many reasons my mother scared the living shit out of me.

But the time she tried to drown me was the worst. I was maybe six years old. She dragged me out of bed from a nap and shook me violently, cursing the entire way.

“You think you’re so clever, don’t you? I see you. I know what you really are. We’re going to take care of the sickness inside of you right now,” she yelled in my face. I was confused and disoriented.

She filled the tub. “Spawn of Satan, we need to purify you. I can’t guarantee it will work, but one way or the other, you’ll end up in heaven or hell today.” I shook, and tears fell down my cheeks.

As she yanked me over to the tub, I whimpered and tried to reason with her, “Mummy, I’ll be good.”

She soothed me in a rare moment, confusing the hell out of me. It was for show because the minute she was able, she shoved my head under the water. The icy coldness startled me, and a new level of fear filled my body. The longer she held me under, the more panicked I became.

I remember needing to take a breath, but realizing I couldn’t. I had no way of getting away from her. At such a young age, I wasn’t strong enough to fight back. The level of determination she had would absolutely have ended in my death.

Nothing could change that she wanted me dead, needed me purified. I tried to turn my head, but her grip only intensified.

For years, that’s where the memory ended.

I blocked the rest of it out until I was fourteen. A classmate of ours drowned, and after attending the memorial that night, everything came back. Fragments at first. Then more.

I remembered a hospital stay as a small child—how safe I’d felt there, even without understanding why. Later, I found the medical records. I don’t even remember how. I just remember reading the words water on the lungs and feeling something in me go cold.

Secondary drowning.

The phrase stuck with me. Haunted me through my teens. By the time I got to medical school, it was one of the first things I researched—what happens when water gets into the lungs, when the body can’t recover from it.

But knowledge didn’t dull the memory. If anything, it sharpened it. I could still see her face. The look in her eyes as she let my head break the surface—just long enough to drag in a breath—before forcing me back under again.

If I let myself sit in it too long, I could easily feel it all over again. Her hands around my arms. My body thrashing. The confusion. The terror.

That was the incident that finally forced my grandparents to act. She was hospitalized after that. It wasn’t the end of it—they let her come back more than once—but I was never left alone with her again.

It took years of therapy before I could stand being near water without my chest tightening. After that incident, the medication helped. She chose to stay inpatient. My grandparents visited her regularly, but we all agreed it was best for me to keep my distance—to give her time to heal.

The worst part of all of it was that she died before we could reconcile. A blood clot took her in the middle of the night. As an adult, it’s one of the hardest things I’ve had to come to terms with.

Your mother is supposed to love you more than anyone else in the world.

Mine couldn’t.

I understood it as an adult—in a clinical and logical way. But the boy in me still ached for something he was never going to get. The faint voice of Nan calling my name pulled me from the past.

“I’m sorry, Nan, once more please?”