A Punishment From Above
I’m 32 now, and I ran away from my mom when I was 14. I was sick of being manipulated, having no privacy, and just generally thought of as less than a person. I wanted out and I took the first opportunity I could get. I got lucky.
To this day I don’t know how, but I met some people on the streets who were trying to escape their parents too and we looked out for each other. I’m not saying it was easy or even fun, but it was 10 steps up from living in that narcissistic place that my mother called home.
My mom couldn’t find me, though I have no doubt she tried for years. I took it to extreme levels to make sure she could never hurt me again. I have never uttered my real name since I left that place. There were only ever two people I told who I really was.
Even then, I never told one of them my name, and the other only found out. By the time I was 15, I was four states away, had a fake name/identity that I was proud of, and a group of people I could trust more than I could my mother.
CPS didn’t even find me until I was almost 16, and that was only because I let my guard down due to a pregnancy. When I was seven months pregnant, two months before my 16th birthday, I ended up in the foster system. I’m not proud of what I did next. But I am glad I did it all the same.
I told CPS that my parents had been homeless too, that I had been born on the streets, and that they had now passed. CPS barely even looked into my story, they just stuck me in a foster home.
It turned out to be an okay one. They had a couple of other kids and were in it for the money and didn’t care what we did so long as it didn’t affect them. Still better than living with my mom. My older foster sister was there for my daughter’s birth, too.
She had been in a similar situation to me and was kind and supportive during the last months of my pregnancy. My daughter and I lived in that foster home for another year until that family’s licence got revoked. By that time I was 17, had a job, almost finished high school, and was on track for college.
I ended up living in an apartment with my older foster sister for another year with our daughters. I got into college, and got good scholarships due to grades and circumstances. I could pick any college in the country, but decided to stay in the city I was comfortable with, near my foster sister.
Everything was great until I was 21. That’s when it all fell apart. My daughter was five, starting school, my foster sister’s daughter was eight, and my foster sister was 23. I’d known that my foster sister had depression.
She’d been dealt a bad hand in life, much worse than mine, but I never knew how severe it was. One night I came home after collecting the girls from school and found my foster sister, my best friend, had taken her life. It was awful. The only good thing was that eventually I was allowed to keep her daughter.
I wanted her, I fought for her, all the while dealing with mourning the only person who ever really knew me. But I wasn’t going to let that sweet, wonderful little girl be raised in the foster system. My foster sister had obviously been planning what she’d done for a while because she had written out a will.
In it, she made a heartbreaking request. She asked me to raise her daughter. Once I graduated college at 24, my daughters and I moved. I had been offered a job across the country and we decided it was time for a change. We wanted to road-trip it and thought it would be fun.
We planned a 10-day trip, with me giving my original home state a WIDE berth. I didn’t want anything to do with it. My daughters were eight and 11, and we chose together where we wanted to stop, what we wanted to see, and what we could miss.
Neither of them thought it was particularly weird that I wanted to avoid a certain state, as they knew I hadn’t had a happy childhood and assumed it was memories from that. They weren’t exactly wrong. But all my precautions didn’t matter.
Soon enough, I ran into my worst nightmare. On day seven of the trip, at least 1,000 miles away from my original home state and in a fairly crowded city, I ran into my mom and dad. I recognized my mom instantly, and I’m fairly sure she did the same to me. I managed to keep a lid on my emotions.
I looked past her and pretended I didn’t know her. It was too late. She, however, started chasing me down the street, shouting my real name. I don’t know how I did it, but I barely even flinched. All I wanted was away from the crazy woman and the memories that she was bringing up.
My dad didn’t recognize me at all. I’m fairly sure he thought my mom had finally lost it. By this time, I had grasped my daughters’ hands and was trying to get them out of there as fast as possible.
She kept chasing me, screaming my real name, until my oldest daughter got annoyed and turned around to try to shut her up. If I had realized what she was doing before she did it, I wouldn’t have let her. I knew engaging with my mom was way worse than ignoring her. My daughter made a fatal error.
She shouted to her “I don’t know who you think she is but my mom’s name is Kate NOT Elizabeth like you keep shouting. Why can’t you go terrorize someone else.” I admit, I was angry at my daughter for letting my mom know my new name.
It took a lot to calm down after that and have a conversation with her about why you don’t give strangers’ personal information and why engaging with crazy people isn’t a good idea, but I managed it.
To this day it is something I am most proud of, that I managed to raise my daughters as real human beings and not things like my mom and dad tried to do for me.
My daughter was sorry, but ultimately it was my fault because I hadn’t taught her that yet. We’d lived in a fairly small community before. Everyone knew everyone and it had never been an issue. Anyway, I should have known that my mom wasn’t going to let this go, but I wasn’t thinking that at the time.
I just wanted to get the heck out of dodge, so we did. My daughters didn’t even put up a fight, which made me feel 10x worse because we had plans in that city, stuff I’d wanted to do for ages and my daughters were looking forward to as well.
I drove as far as I could for the next ~10 hours, just to put some distance between me and mom. I didn’t hear from her for about another six months. My guess is that that is how long it took her track me down with the name she now had for me. In that time I’d got my life together really well.
I’d bought and moved into a nice house with my daughters, was dating a nice guy, had a good job and a substantial income. I was happy. Then it all unraveled again, in a horrific way. One day, she appeared. One morning there was a knock at the door fairly early. My daughters and I were only just getting up.
I thought it might be the guy I was dating, as he was always doing things like bringing me coffee early because he knew I didn’t have much time in the morning with two girls and a fairly demanding job. Still, he usually didn’t come that early.
I didn’t think much of it, though, because his job had weird hours. Instead, I opened the door to my mother. I was shocked. “What the heck are you doing here?” I bit out. It was all I could say. It was like 6 am and I had just woken up. She just starts bawling her eyes out, kneeling on the doorstep and praying.
“Thank you Lord, for bringing her back to me. Thank you Lord.” Of course, she didn’t do this quietly, so it brought the attention of not only my daughters but my neighbors too, most of whom I was on fairly good terms with.
My youngest daughter stayed out of sight the second she realized who it was at the door. Then she did the most brilliant thing. After a minute of me looking completely repulsed at this scene, she held up my phone and mouthed 9-1-1 at me.
I nodded and she went upstairs to make the call. I was trying to get my mom off the doorstep and off my property, as well as get my oldest to get inside and stay there. Neither were listening. My neighbors were coming over to see what was going on.
Two of them told me they had called 9-1-1 and one asked if I needed that before they realized someone else had done it. I wasn’t keeping quiet about how much I wanted her away from me. When officers showed up, my boyfriend was also with them.
He was an officer too, and when he realized that this was happening at my house and that it was my daughter who had made the call, he asked to come along and see if I was okay.
When I told the officers I had no idea who this woman was, they carted her off with a citation for trespassing. My boyfriend stayed with me while I got the girls ready for the day. Eventually I had to go and explain to the neighbors about what was going on.
My boyfriend came with me and convinced me and a couple of the other neighbors to install security cameras around their homes. But that wasn’t the end. After about another year, my mother had terrorized me so much I had to get a restraining order.
She had to stay away for me for at least a year, not that that stopped her. She’d somehow managed to buy a house in my neighborhood, so that was her “address.” Throughout all this I never heard from or saw my father.
Life was a little better by that stage, though. My boyfriend and I got married, and I had another baby. Another little girl who is adored by all, especially her older sisters. And then came the twist.
My mom found out about this too. She took it to the next level after that. Tried to crash my wedding, tried to come to the hospital for the birth, did everything she could to see the new baby. By this time, my family and I mostly took it for granted that we had a stalker.
She was just there and we wanted nothing to do with her. I once ran into her by accident at the local supermarket. I would have let it go, but she ran up to me and tried to take my four-month-old from my arms.
She kept saying how I must need so much help without my Mommy there to help me and the brats that I put up with had to make things worse. I love my daughters, all of them, and I was really angry about that.
Word of advice: Never make someone who just had a baby angry, especially if she is an officer’s wife. Not only did I call the authorities for her violating the restraining order, but I also managed to get her up on charges for trying to take my baby daughter.
At this stage, the restraining order became permanent at long last. Throughout all this, my husband one day came home with the file on the person who was originally “me.” He said it might help me to know who my mom thought I was. The revelations were heartbreaking.
My husband said he and his colleagues had looked over “my” file and decided that running away might have been the only reason I was alive. I’d told my husband long ago who I really was, and he agreed that what I didn’t wasn’t right but it may have been right for me.
At that point, my family and I decided we had to move. My husband had a job offer in another town and my oldest daughter was just about to start high school, so if we were going to move it was now or wait until my middle daughter finished high school.
It took four years for my mom to find us again. To this day, I don’t know how she did it. We told very few people where we were going and even fewer our actual new address. This time though, she didn’t knock on the front door, or try to engage me in anyway. What she did was so much more bone-chilling.
She tried to burn my house down, with my husband and youngest daughter in it. I was at work and my two older girls were at school. My husband had the day off and wanted to spend it with our youngest daughter.
He was going to pick the older girls up from school and we were going to meet for dinner later that night. My husband and youngest daughter were upstairs when he heard someone come in the front door.
The older girls hadn’t been well in the last couple of weeks, so he thought it was one of them. He was wondering why they hadn’t called for a ride home. He waited a few minutes for them to come upstairs like they normally would, or at least call out because they normally did, but they didn’t.
So my husband went to see what was up. What he witnessed haunts him to this day. My mom was in the living room going through everything, tearing stuff up left and right. She started throwing around family photos, expensive gaming consoles, TVs, and anything she could get her hands on.
Once she had thoroughly destroyed the living room and kitchen, she went back out the front door…and came back with a can of gasoline. By this time, my husband was back upstairs with our daughter and had called 9-1-1. This whole scene was all caught on our home security camera.
Once my husband realized what my mother was trying to do, AKA burn down my house, he managed to sneak downstairs and get our daughter out without my mom knowing a thing.
The authorities showed up just before my mom was going to light the match. That’s when they heard her yell to upstairs, not knowing that my husband and daughter weren’t up there anymore. She thought she was speaking to them. Her words still send a shiver down my spine.
“This is how God punishes people who keep daughters from their mothers.” She knew full well that they had been in the house, and that she had blocked the only stairway and thus the only way out of the house.
I’d been called at work about it, and my daughters and I raced home to see my mother being taken away. She was brought up on a whole slew of charges, including stalking.
They even found plans on her to do away with my husband and two older daughters, whereupon she would keep me and my youngest underneath her house so that we would always be with her.