Freya Webster: My middle-class mum beat me, my siblings and dad within an inch of our lives

It’s strange the things that can put your own life into stark relief and suddenly make you look back on the decades with a level of insight and clarity that you hadn’t necessarily even realised was missing.

Such a thing happened to me recently, watching a documentary on television that echoed much of my time on this Earth.

It sent me spiralling for several weeks as I realised just how abnormal, difficult and unacceptable my childhood and early adult life had been.

The program was called My Wife, My Abuser and contains graphic video evidence of a man, Richard Spencer, being beaten and verbally ridiculed by his wife Sheree.

Spencer suffered this abuse for 20 years – and it often happened as their two young daughters looked on.

Seasoned police officers involved in the case described how they’d cried as they dealt with it.

Some said it was one of the worst crimes they’d investigated.

Yet when I watched that program – it was released on Netflix in late 2024 – my first response was to think, “Gosh, she isn’t that bad: she’s not a patch on my mother. And she isn’t even touching the children”.

You see, I grew up in a household where my mother was physically violent, emotionally and verbally abusive, and horribly controlling.

My mother meted this behaviour out to her husband – my father – and also to her children, from when we were toddlers onwards, sons and daughters alike.

None of her violence was fuelled by alcohol. She did not hold down a job outside the home. We were a nice, middle-class family – intelligent, well-educated and well-spoken.

It’s so important to acknowledge that violence really does happen behind well-to-do doors.

I’m not here to diminish anyone else’s experience of domestic violence, and I know (at least according to instances that are reported) that women are at far greater risk of it than men.

But that was not my experience, and it’s an uncomfortable truth to acknowledge that sometimes women are violent, too.

Not all mothers are nurturing and wonderful and the conversation around abuse needs to be broader, so everyone feels able to come forward and talk about it without shame.

I’m writing this piece to do just that. For as I kept watching that film about female violence in the home, more pennies began to drop, and I realised just how far outside the norm my initial reaction to it was.

Yes, of course, what I was watching was bad. It was criminal and terrifying. And so, too, was what had happened in our house.

You’d never have guessed it, though.

It was a big house set in a large garden, in a good area of a large town. And yet my mother’s temper was quick and fierce, and good hidings, as they were known, could come at any time.

She called us and our father horrible names – names this paper would not want to print – and she’d turn violent at a moment’s notice.

Perhaps one of us wasn’t word perfect with our homework, or we hadn’t reacted to something the way she wanted. Or it could be that you were the punch bag for something totally unrelated to you that had annoyed her.

She hit with her hands and fists, or grabbed kitchen utensils, including knives, to hit us with.

Sometimes, in the midst of a verbal hiding, she’d send you off to collect her preferred instrument of punishment and make you carry it back for her to use on you.

She shoved us against walls, pushed us into corners where it was easier to deliver physical blows and harder for us to escape: all you could do was to cower like a traumatised dog.

I’m sometimes amazed that none of us ever went to hospital. Sometimes, I’m even amazed that none of us died.

There was no timetable to her lashing out. You could go for a week when all seemed fine, or have several consecutive days where, no matter how hard you tried, everything you did was wrong (in her eyes) and would set her off.

I remember one severe beating in the hall one morning before I left for school.

I was probably 13 or 14. My mother had kicked off – I don’t recall why – and she picked up a chunky walking stick and started walloping me with it over and over again.

I crawled to the foot of the stairs, curled up as best I could, and let the whacks rain down.

Resistance was not only futile, it would likely make things worse.

But it was so painful and so relentless, I remember thinking that this time she might actually kill me. Yet still I did nothing.

She was so out of control on that occasion that the bruising couldn’t be hidden.

Friends saw it at school and I told my best friend what had happened.

She wanted to call social services and I had to beg her not to: I was too terrified of what my mother would do if she found out.

And so the cycle of silence continued.

Over the years, I know that I’ve tried to lessen some of the extremeness of it in my mind.

Often, if I start to dwell on the repercussions and the sadness of it all, I think to myself: ‘Get a grip, people have been through a lot worse.’

I wonder if other children of abusive parents feel this way, too.

It isn’t comforting to know that your mother felt no qualms about treating her nearest and dearest so harshly.

Society tells us that mothers are supposed to be happy to lay down their life for their children, but mine was happy to have her children and husband live in fear of losing theirs.

Still, I’ve often tried to make excuses for her, to find some empathy and sympathy for her.

“It was a very different time,” I find myself thinking. Or “It must be exhausting having children – my mother’s temper must have been constantly frayed”.

But as I watched that documentary, I found that I couldn’t make excuses any more.

Finally I saw it for what it was and I realised how much it had affected me – and still does.

The truth is, every act of violence is like a bomb exploding.

And it isn’t just the initial blast that does the damage, it’s the harm you don’t see that, over time, causes structures to collapse: the cracked foundations, the fallout of debris and dust that clogs up other workings.

I have lived my whole life among the wreckage. The violence that began in early childhood continued until my early 30s.

I’d like to say that my mother stopped because I finally said to her that if she ever hit me again, she would never see me again.

But I think it probably had more to do with the fact that she got very sick not long after I spoke those words and, as a result, was weaker – and kinder.

People so rarely talk about women as abusers: the accepted parlance is that men are the violent ones.

My father never even raised a little finger in anger – or his own defence. Or ours.

He barely ever even raised his voice. None of us did, mind you. None of us would have dared.

Even after a good walloping – often around the head and face and ears – you weren’t allowed to look upset.

I spent a lot of my youth sitting in the car holding cold flannels to both sides of my face to bring down the redness and welts.

If I didn’t look cheery about it, I’d be threatened with more violence “to wipe that look off my face for me”.

Sometimes I realise I have physical reactions ingrained in the very fibre of my body.

My mother would often take off one of her shoes and use that on us and, even today, decades later, I can be triggered by someone simply removing their footwear.

Once, more than a decade ago now, when a female boss, clearly annoyed about something, walked at speed behind me as I sat at my desk, I ducked, convinced I was about to get a good thumping.

Her issue had nothing to do with me and, of course, an act of physical violence was not remotely her intention – but I still ducked.

In later life, when I could afford it, I got a bit of therapy. My therapist thought it remarkable that none of us had become alcoholics or drug addicts – or committed suicide.

I definitely have self-esteem issues, however, which is a common impact from living with abuse.

I also have disordered eating (another common effect), which manifests as emotional overeating – a sort of literal swallowing of pain and not being allowed a voice – and have often struggled with my weight and body confidence.

(It’s important to note that a lack of body confidence can stem from the deep-rooted feeling of having been robbed of dominion over your own body. It creates a seismic disconnect within you.)

I’ve never married and never had children. I realise now that I’ve always avoided relationships where someone might have personal power over me.

Love is not a secure space for me and I know what it feels like to be very alone.

Indeed, we were all discouraged from socialising outside the home, or even talking about home life.

Meanwhile, inside, my mother often tried to separate one of us from the herd.

If a sibling was in trouble, you could never, no matter how much you longed to, go to their aid. That way lay only escalation.

You just had to stand there and watch it, and feel helpless and useless, forced to be complicit in my mother’s maniacal behaviour.

Watching the documentary also made me think again – as I often have – about my father.

How did he feel being beaten up by his wife and watching his children being beaten, too?

She hit us all the same way and with the same ferocity. He never once retaliated in any way and, if we showed him too much attention or care, she took that as disloyalty to her.

My father and I never spoke about it at all. I wish we had.

I only ever knew my mother one way, but he met and fell in love with someone he must have hoped for a happy future with, yet ended up with someone who abused and belittled him.

Both of them are dead, so the conversation will never be had.

I remember the first time I dared to stand between him and my mother when she was giving him a good thrashing.

It was not an easy thing to do: her anger could so easily have been redirected in my direction.

It was instinct rather than reasoned thought that drove me. In fact, it became a family incident – everyone crowded round, trying to hold my mother back.

Eventually she relented, though I can still see the look of contempt on her face.

I don’t remember what happened afterwards, though I expect she paid me back at some point.

In truth, a lot of it I’ve pushed to the back of my mind where it now lingers in shadows so dark that I can’t quite make out the shape of it.

Despite all of this, I loved my mother. I love her still. I’m sure her behaviour has had an impact subconsciously on what I think love is, but unpicking it all is probably the work of a lifetime.

The truth is I have never had a soft place to land; never felt secure anywhere.

Home has always been unsafe, judgmental, frightening, controlling. And it was my own mother that made it that way.

And yet I don’t believe she was evil. She was no Rosemary West. She was still my mother and, on her good days, she was great company.

Even now I have empathy for her. She must have been deeply hurt or unhappy herself, with no idea how to deal with it.

All that fury, all that violence, must have been the result of things that happened long before she ever had children.

Should she have gone to prison, like the wife in the documentary eventually does? I don’t think so.

Of course, sometimes prison is the answer – and often it won’t even feel like enough of one.

But my mother didn’t need a jail cell: she needed serious mental support.

I really wish that she’d got that support and made her own life happier and more productive – as well as those of her husband and children.

In any case, none of us would ever have gone to the police or called a service such as Childline.

And there’s that silence again, always at the centre of these situations. Perhaps because our abuser was our mother, we also felt protective of her and would not have wanted anything to happen to her.

As odd as that may sound, there’s still a bond between you, as a child, and your mother.

It’s part of what makes the issue so complicated: the people we are told love us the most can be the very ones making our lives hell.

I don’t have all the answers. I’m not even sure I have any.

Safeguarding standards have improved enormously since my childhood and perhaps nowadays we’d be on a watch list.

Or perhaps we’d slip through the net, with teachers unable to imagine that an intelligent child from a nice house could possibly have a violent, out-of-control parent – never mind mother.

But if the problem really is to be addressed, we do need to accept that perpetrators don’t always look how we think they do and that the problem exists in all parts of society.

So many children, so many women – and men, too – need help. And that help is never just about the immediate issue of getting them to safety, because the ramifications of domestic violence can continue for years afterwards.

The escape route is only the beginning, and the hurt and the damage run very deep indeed.

The name Freya Webster is a pseudonym