I never brought this up with therapists because I was never completely sure if it ever actually happened. But I have this memory of being 3 or 4 and my mother telling me to go outside and play because she is trying to clean the house for a Halloween party my parents are going to host and I say no--I am having fun pushing my Barbie car around on the floor--so then my mom grabs my head between both her hands and starts banging my head against the wall repeatedly. Then I am outside and I am in a daze and I thought I remembered my mom banging my head against a tree, but I realize I was probably just reenacting what she did; I think I banged my own head on the tree. I don't remember any of the Halloween party and practically no memories from that age, the next year or any memories from before. I was never really sure it actually happened because every other memory I have of my mom hitting me, it's way less severe. Like, when she started spanking someone, she couldn't stop, but that was on our bottoms. Sometimes she would hit me in the head with a brush or slap me with a fist but was never a repeated motion and never gave me a concussion like she did when I was a toddler.

When my mom or older sister bring up events from childhood, they act like it's my fault that I don't remember, like I am intentionally only remembering the bad.

But years later, the other day, my mom was losing her temper while working from home. I could hear her in her bedroom screaming bloody murder all because her internet was dropping. And it triggered this instantaneous depression in me. I became immediately sad and slow feeling and just wanted to crawl into bed. And the Halloween memory felt real. Like I'm no longer invalidating it. And it helps that I know it's not just my imagination but I also see my mom differently and I don't want to have anything to do with her. She was always the good guy among my parents because my dad has NPD--he would always make paranoid accusations and insult people when he was stressed out. So I clung to my mom. But now I realize they were both extremely childish and still are. But part of me still wonders if it even happened or if I'm just making it up to be dramatic. My mom always reinforced this narrative that my grandpa was way way more abusive to her and that she was doing really well as a parent considering the fact that grandpa was so angry. But none of the stories she told me of grandpa hitting her were worse than giving a toddler a concussion but I still somehow bought it and always felt bad for her that she was abused and always told the narrative to myself that I got spanked so much because I was a bratty child.  Even my sister says that we can't blame mom because "we were brats." So it's not until recently that I realize my mom actually manipulated/gaslighted us into believing that we were any more difficult than the typical child all because she didn't want to face her anger issues. But the only bad things we did was get into physical fights with each other, which, I fucking wonder why. My sister had to go to rehab for drugs when she was 17, but that was way after all the abuse happened; my mom wasn't slapping around teenagers, she was slapping around small children.