Memory Recall Accuracy

by Katrin
(United States)

Photo Credit: Niklas Bergius

I had an incident over 8 years ago while living at my mother's home when I was pregnant.

My sister who was around 17 or 18 at the time (I was 20) had recently started a new job and was coming down off drugs. I tried to wake her up so she would make it to work and not get fired. I tried to wake her several times which angered her so much that she attacked me.

I don't know if it was the protective pregnant lioness that came out and if my memory of this is exaggerated as my mother claims... but this incident really upset me and the fact that my mother downplayed it and refused to do anything about it upset me even more. For obvious reasons I was forced to move out of my mother's home with no place to go and ended up moving into a battered women's shelter.

I have tried to put this incident behind me but it has caused a huge rift in my relationship with my sister. I didn't speak with her for a very long time and when I my mother givers me a hard time because I have had a difficult time having my sister in my life I bring up these issues as examples as to why. We are on speaking terms now but she continue to be extremely judgmental toward me.

My sister had a history of such terrible bullying as a child she even caused another little girl to leave the school. My mother's only response to this was that these things (behaviors) only started while my parents were separated and my mother wasn't living in the home at the time, She refuses to take any responsibility for her role whatsoever. The fact is that my sister started bullying long before my mother moved out. In fact on of the things that initiated the divorce was my father filing a report against my mother for the abuse she was inflicting on my sister out of stress from the emotional abuse my mother was suffering from her relationship with my father.

At first my mother told me that she only heard yelling and came in the room and saw me kicking my sister. Now she will at least admit that when she came in the room she had to pull my sister off from my while I was lying on the bed kicking her away from my stomach to protect myself.

Every once in a while the incident will come up and I feel as though I am going crazy because I really don’t see how they can tell me this never happened. In my mind certain details such as how long it occur, when it occurred, etc can be exaggerated or forgotten but If I say that my sister came and attacked me and I kicked her away to protect myself because she was punching right for my stomach that had to have happened right? Is it possible to make something like that up out of thin air?

My mother downplays it by saying that she wasn't punching directly for my stomach but in my mind it really shouldn’t make any difference which area she was attacking. If you walk in on your daughter on top of your other pregnant daughter and you had to PULL her off which makes it an ATTACK otherwise she would have gotten off willingly or just left the room that person is abusive and violent and my mother should have done something about it and not dismissed it like she did. If I was underneath my sister and she had to be pulled off me, I was clearly attacked right?

This has been a very upsetting to me for many years and I feel as though I need some closer because my mother continues to attempt to justify her lack of action by negating my details in the story. Is there any science behind my memory of the details in this story?

I have thought about taking a polygraph but I know my mother wouldn’t even accept that because she knows my story is the version I honestly believe but she thinks that my memory of what happened is just not accurate.