‘No One Mourns the Wicked’: Correcting the Narrative on Child Abuser Claudia Ulatowski
- Rachel Ulatowski
- Feb 20
- 14 min read
Trigger Warning: This post contains descriptions of child abuse that may be upsetting to some. Reader discretion is advised.
A couple of months ago, I came across a quote from pastor Mark Wingfield: "When we try to bury the evil a person did with their bones, we leave behind horrible ghost stories."
In the past few months, a few controversial figures have died. In the ensuing debate of how to remember them, I've concluded that there are two groups to whom something is owed when someone dies: the loved ones left behind and the victims left behind. No matter how evil a person is, there is a chance that someone will feel some emotion toward them upon their death. To these, we owe them the right to grieve. However, we also owe something to the victims. We owe them the right to feel relief, joy, freedom, or whatever complicated emotions come to the surface. To process their lingering trauma in whatever way feels fitting. To heal. Unfortunately, I was denied the rights a victim is owed when their abuser dies, and forced to mourn the wicked, and the "ghost stories" it conjured will impact me forever.
Ten years ago, I lay on the hardwood floor, getting ready to sleep with the dog in the space beside the laundry and dryer, where I'd slept for years. An upgrade from the cold staircase of the unfinished basement in our last house, where I slept from ages 6 - 13. My lifelong abuser and "mother," Claudia Ulatowski, had just died unexpectedly from a brain aneurysm. I couldn't even begin to process my feelings or the trauma. I think I genuinely felt grief, but there was also a hint of relief that would only grow stronger with each passing day. Then, my biological "father," Timothy Ulatowski, appeared over me in the dark.
"Look, I know you and Claudia didn't have the best relationship," Tim said, with an eyeroll. "But tomorrow at her funeral, we're just going to focus on the positive, okay?"
Focus on the positive.
From the day I was born until I was 17, I endured nearly 24/7 physical, psychological, and verbal abuse, and sexual harassment from Claudia, but Tim dared to say, "Focus on the positive." In the coming days, he'd sit and talk about how Claudia was the "only truly good person" in the world. Anytime mentions of her abuse toward me inevitably cropped up, he and my sister would quickly emphasize that "nothing actually happened." It was just a "typical" mother-daughter relationship with all its challenges and woes. If that was the case, though, it's weird they had to repeat it and emphasize it so often. It's strange that a 50-year-old man had to tell his grieving teen daughter not to say anything at her mother's funeral if nothing ever happened.
For the past 10 years, I've silently watched as Tim and my sister constructed an utterly false narrative of Claudia. A profile arose of a doting "mother" and disabilities advocate who supposedly selflessly devoted her whole life to her children, especially in providing the best life possible for her three sons with severe autism. I watched as fence posts were donated in her honor and scholarships were established in her memory. Only, this narrative couldn't be farther from the truth. To reiterate, my family is allowed to grieve however they wish. However, grieving someone despite their flaws is not at all the same as completely fabricating the legacy of an evil person.
Some days, I began doubting myself. After all, if "no one mourns the wicked," why did so many appear to mourn Claudia? Now, I've come to realize that no one actually did mourn her. They mourned an illusion of her. A fantasy of her. A lie they were told about her or that they constructed of her in their minds to escape reality.
So, I am finally correcting the narrative on Claudia, who was not a disabilities advocate and certainly not a good, selfless Christian mother. She was, in fact, a raging narcissist and child abuser who took away countless opportunities from her disabled children and severely abused her youngest daughter, me. I was her scapegoat, the one she singled out from her six children for abuse and torment.
It's hard even to know where to start with her abuse. I don't even know when her abuse started. I strongly suspect it was present when we were infants. My very earliest memory is sitting in my car seat, maybe 3 years old, and Claudia turning toward me from the passenger seat, shaking her fist at me.
"I'm going to punch you," she growled, in that weird, gravelly, gritted-teeth manner she'd use to try to be intimidating.
My older sibling leaned over, giggling, to clarify, "She doesn't mean fruit punch."
I was abused and subjected to violence before I was even old enough to comprehend such violence. I was so little I thought punch meant fruit punch because I couldn't comprehend the 40-year-old, 200-pound woman in front of me meant she wanted to punch a child for something so trivial, I can't recall what it was.
How can I summarize Claudia’s abuse without running over 10,000 words? There aren’t enough words to describe it. Just imagine living with someone who hated you and viewed you as inhuman, and spent every waking moment obsessing over you and plotting how to make your life miserable.
Growing up, Claudia constantly searched for ways to embarrass me. I was only allowed to change my clothes and shower once a week. I wasn’t allowed to shave my legs or wear a bra. She made sure to cut my bangs in an uneven, choppy, zigzag line, just below the very top of my forehead, once a month, to humiliate me. I wasn’t allowed to brush my hair in the house or without permission; I had to brush it outside, no matter the weather, to avoid leaving hair in the house. When I had a bed, I had to go outside and hit every one of my pillows and bedspreads against a tree in the backyard every morning while the neighbors stared to get the “hair” out of them.
When I was about 6, I made the mistake of showing affection to the family dog, who Claudia and Tim abused and neglected, secluding to small spaces in the home, like the basement staircase, underneath the kitchen table, or next to the laundry closet. They decided that since I showed empathy to the dog, he was exclusively my dog. Claudia began complaining that he kept her up at night by whining and barking on the basement staircase, where she had made him live, and decided it was her six-year-old daughter's responsibility to keep him quiet all night. Hence, when my brothers and sister were cozily tucked into bed and asleep for the night, I’d be shaken awake, dragged half asleep downstairs, and forced to spend the night with the dog. Claudia would open the door leading to the staircase and lock it behind me. I had no pillow or blanket, and the stairs, leading to the unfinished basement, had no AC or heat. Initially, I tried sleeping on the dog's bed on the stair landing, but he'd run up the stairs and make noise.
If the dog clicked his toenails on the floor or whined, Claudia would appear at a crack in the door and threaten, “I'm going to kill you both.” So, many a night, I spent the entire nighttime half-awake, sitting on that top step, holding the dog down to keep him quiet. If I nodded off to sleep, I'd violently jerk awake to catch myself from falling off the stairs. Other times, I'd just tumble to the bottom of the staircase. I spent nights like that for years while Claudia and Tim snored in their king-sized bed on the heated floor above me.
Eventually, we moved homes, and Claudia decided not to bring my bed at all, relegating me permanently to the laundry room floor with the dog, where we slept until I moved out.
The humiliation bothered me the most at that age, but it certainly wasn’t the worst abuse. Physical abuse occurred from my earliest memories to age 17. Claudia had the emotional regulation of a 5-month-old, which meant I was usually her punching bag. If she was hungry, angry, in a bad mood, etc, I was the one who got punched, slapped, shoved, knocked to the ground, hair ripped out of my scalp, wooden spoons broken over my head, and skin pinched with her long nails to make it bleed and bruise at the same time.
As for what prompted these violent beatings, here are a few examples: I made "a face." I took a cookie from the pantry. I had a stuffy nose. I was afraid. I was sad. I talked to her in the morning when she was in a bad mood. I allegedly smiled during a serious moment.
However, Claudia wasn’t satisfied with just her abuse. She wanted everyone to hate me and treat me horribly. If Tim showed any fatherly affection toward me or if I played with my brother, she’d make sarcastic, incestuous jokes about how they were going to “marry” me and I was their “beloved.” She loved to spit the word "beloved" out, curling her lips and sneering in disgust and envy. One day, she casually mentioned to us kids that Tim often asked how he could “turn her on" sexually, and expressed how the thing that “turned her on” the most was when he was mean to me. I think her words got back to Tim, since he increasingly started to encourage her to abuse me for the most trivial of mistakes.
Claudia had a weird obsession with "scatches" on surfaces. We had a wind chime on the sliding glass door, so we'd hear if one of my brothers got out. I'd remove it to let the dog out and set it on the counter. After years of this habit, Claudia decided the wind chime was "scratching" the granite countertops and demanded I put it somewhere else when letting the dog out. Of course, I was 13, abused, sleep-deprived, and trying to break a habit that had become muscle memory. The first time I naturally forgot not to put the wind chime on the counter, Tim happened to overhear Claudia fuming about it and told her with a smile, "Beat her. That will make her remember." I got beaten with a spoon until I had welts up and down my thighs. I remember Tim's smirk and Claudia's barely contained excitement that he was mean to me, just as she liked.
Claudia portrayed herself as the squeaky-clean, religious, conservative mother, but the truth was she was obsessed with sex. She taught my sister and I that rape didn’t exist and that the woman or child was always at fault. From an early age, she accused my siblings and I of incestuous relationships. She was obsessed with my body, often bursting in on me in the bathroom, ripping aside shower curtains and towels, or making me run across the house topless. She tracked my menstruation on the family calendar. When we got a lock on the bathroom, she was so desperate to get in that she twisted a coat hanger out of proportion to pick the lock with it and walk in on me. Often, I'd come out of the bathroom to find her on her knees on the floor, looking through the crack at the bottom of the door. She found twisted joy in exposing my body to others, forcing me to swim and get baptized in plain t-shirts with no bra padding so everyone could see my breasts. As a teenager, she started waking me up in the middle of the night to interrogate me in the pitch darkness in her closet, shining an iPhone light in my face and accusing me of “having sex with grown men" and being pregnant (I was a virgin and never had a boyfriend until age 20) while discussing her frequent fantasies and dreams of me being raped.
She did her best to deprive me of sleep and food. I wasn’t allowed to grab food from anywhere in the house or serve myself. Most foods she considered “too good” for me, so I survived mainly on a 100-calorie yogurt for breakfast, a sole PB&J sandwich for lunch, and a tiny spoonful of casserole for dinner, dropping down to 88 pounds as a high school freshman. Yet, she convinced me I was fat, ugly, and stupid. She often referred to me solely as “that thing” and made disgusted expressions every time she saw me, to make me think I was less than human.
Now, you might think she only abused me and was still, somehow, an advocate for her disabled children. That’s not true. Her disabled children were often pawns in her games. She’d tamper with their medicine and refuse to adhere to prescriptions so that they’d have meltdowns and ruin our family outings and vacations. She started training one of my brothers to wake up at the crack of dawn and sleep all day, so she had an excuse to wake me up early to watch him while she slept until noon. She refused to potty train them, fired their therapists, and stopped their education altogether. Claudia kept them isolated and away from support and education, ensuring she’d get attention for having entirely dependent children.
I got up with them in the morning, made them breakfast, helped them use the bathroom, cleaned up after them at lunch and dinner, and often played with or entertained them, on top of exclusively caring for our dogs, doing the dishes and garbage, and cleaning the floors of the house, while Claudia slept till noon everyday and wiled the days away lounging in the pool, scrolling social media, watching TV, reading her Bible, and locking herself in the bathroom for hours 3-times a day to talk to her father on the phone while my siblings and I looked after ourselves.
Claudia never really loved anyone. She wasn’t capable of it. Her “love” consisted of obsession or playing favorites to try to hurt or prove something to those she hated. She drove Tim crazy with incessant cheating allegations and complaints about how everything he did for her wasn’t good enough. She’d take my brother and sister on special outings without me to prove how much more she loved them than me. The next day, she’d talk nastily about their weight, behavior, and intelligence behind their backs.
The only people I think she came close to hating as much as me, though, were my paternal grandparents, especially David Ulatowski. When my paternal grandpa was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, she insisted with a smirk on her face that it was good that he dropped 100+ pounds in the course of days because he was “so fat,” ugly, and disgusting. When he had bouts of good days, she’d tell Tim, “I wish I could say I was happy for you, but I’m not.” When he died, she initially didn't tell us children that he had passed, and instead made brownies and cheesecake to celebrate his death. On the night before his funeral, she drove Tim to tears, demanding to know how much of his father’s money she was getting. When he loudly confronted her about it, she told him to be quiet because she didn't want my brother to hear and think she was a "bad person."
Was Claudia mentally unwell? Probably. However, she was definitely cognizant of her actions. One day, she got it into her head that my brother was writing about her abuse of me in his personal essay assignments for his college English class. She immediately started blubbering and crying.
“I don’t want to go to jail,” she whispered, lips trembling and tears rolling down her cheeks.
He wasn’t writing about her abuse, but her fear spoke multitudes. She knew what she was doing. Tim knew what she was doing. During their arguments, Tim would text or say things to Clauda like, “I’ll tell the police you abuse your daughter.” “You love your pinky finger more than you love your daughter.”
Yet, to me, Tim said, “Focus on the positive.” “Nothing happened.” Claudia cried, “I don’t want to go to jail.”
They knew what they did. They knew it was wrong. Yet, they woke up every single day, and actively, consciously, intentionally chose to be the worst, most evil people they could be. Then, they thought they could just erase reality. Rewrite the narrative. Claudia was so selfless. She was a fantastic mother. She advocated for her disabled children. All lies. All pure fiction. All just an attempt to erase the reality of a victim. A child victim.
I think, maybe I could’ve forgiven Tim for the “don’t tell anyone," “nothing ever happened,” and “just focus on the positive” statements. Well, not forgiven, but maybe pretended they didn’t matter. I’d pretend to be gracious to his semi-annual texts to his adult children and the sole yearly invitation to Christmas, where he magically cared about having his “children altogether” after ignoring their birthdays, tragedies, achievements, and any happenings in between those semi-annual texts.
Then came the day I realized I'd never forgive him. I’d already begun to distance myself once I hit 18. He didn’t notice, of course, but I had. We were walking through the mall, and his second wife’s daughter was being naughty, hitting her mom, not listening, and acting entitled. The typical bratty child behavior that I’d never been allowed to display.
“I’m going to spank her,” Tim’s wife fumed.
A spanking was warranted, and, when delivered in a controlled manner, certainly isn't abuse.
Tim tried to dissuade her, though.
“She’s just a kid,” he defended.
She’s just a kid.
She’s just a kid.
She’s just a kid.
At that moment, I knew for sure that someday I'd cut off contact with Tim and never speak to or see him again (I'm happily now 5 years no-contact).
Those words are my biggest ghost story. They haunt me. I hear them every day. Running in the morning. At work during the day. Drifting off to sleep some nights. She’s just a kid. And, I've asked myself more times than I care to admit, “Why was I never just a kid?”
Why did I never deserve grace? Why did I never deserve leniency? Why did I never deserve the patience and compassion a child deserves? There was a time I was the same age and size as his second wife’s kid. And he advocated, “Beat her.” He was the voice in Claudia’s ears most days, goading, “Do it, do it.” Do it to her because it’s better her than me. Do it to her because I’ll get on your good side.
I’ll never be completely okay.
That’s something you learn to accept when you’re an adult survivor of child abuse. You’ll never be okay. You will never be on the same level as everyone who was raised in loving, supportive households. I’ll always be ten steps behind everyone else. I’ll always be personally held accountable for the ways my trauma has impacted me emotionally and socially, instead of my abuser and my abuser’s enabler. No one will ever really understand. No one will ever really care. The only time people care is when a child is carried emaciated, chained, and on death’s doorstep from a headline-friendly “house of horrors.” Otherwise, they don’t.
You just go through life, and you live your ghost story.
I’ll do that. I’ve lived my ghost story, but I won’t do it quietly. I won't forgive and forget. I won't focus on the positive. I won't mourn the wicked. I won't tell a story that isn't true. Ten years is long enough to keep silent and grapple with the emotions and trauma alone. So, I've finally let it out. Spoken my truth.
Claudia, wherever you are, I hope you're still sniveling because now people will know that you are a bad person. You never cried for what you did to me; you only cried about how you'd be perceived. You thought you should be loved and adored by all while being the devil, but that's not how it works. Maybe you should've just been a good person or at least tried, even just once in your entire life, to be good and think of someone other than yourself.
I'll especially never forgive you, cowardly, enabling, self-centered Tim. I don’t think I’ll ever quite know the full extent of the damage and impact of you saying that day, “focus on the positive," and a few days later, "Nothing ever happened." I was made to deny my truth. Deny my story. Deny my trauma. Erase my entire childhood. Carry what you did to me in silence while you went on to live your happy life. Suddenly, I just had to exist as if nothing ever happened, when everyone knows it did. I know it did. You know it did. My siblings know it did.
But you know what, Tim and Claudia? I was a kid, too. I was just a kid. I was a kid when you let Claudia abuse me. I was a kid when you encouraged her to abuse me. I was a kid when you told me to bear the abuse I'd suffered in silence and never tell anyone.
I was just a kid.