AniaJ
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What is your sexual orientation: Gay, lesb
Who in your life has "personality" issues: Parent
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« on: April 06, 2018, 02:34:51 AM » |
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I have been thinking it might be true for a while, but having moved back home recently and realizing I have to get out of that situation has got me thinking about it more. I don't know how exactly to cope with this realization, so I thought joining this forum might be a good first step. And maybe talking about some of the stuff I’ve realized might be a second.
I don't have too many clear memories of what my mom was like when I was much younger. She was working at the time and the only really negative thing I remember about her is how she would come home from work every day and almost the first thing she would always do is complain. My older brother, dad (he worked nights), and I might all be sitting together watching TV and she would come in and immediately it would be time for a 30 minute or longer tirade. My mother has a way of talking about things, even when she's not complaining, that is super ... .intense, is the only word for it I think. More than what she would say, I remember how her voice would sound.
But I remember around the time I hit 11 years old, my mom started telling me really intense things about her childhood, her feelings, abuse she went through. She has told me over and over again that when I was in upper elementary/middle school, I seemed so intelligent and insightful beyond my years. So maybe that’s why she thought it appropriate to share these things with me. It always made me really uncomfortable, but my reaction usually was to say “I’m sorry” or stay quiet and listen. If I didn’t sufficiently emotionally support her when she would dump all these things on me, she would get really mad. Especially when I got older, cause I guess by the time I was 15 I was supposed to be able to deal with it. I remember a few times she was telling me all this stuff and when I didn’t respond appropriately, she complained that I had so much empathy for fictional characters (I have loved reading and stories ever since I was little), but I couldn’t have that much empathy for her. She’d say I lacked empathy and was selfish. One time I got up the nerve to tell her it actually made me uncomfortable when she dumped these things on me (this was one of her retellings of the time her mother tried to strangle her, which is another thing. she never seemed to remember when she had already told me something, so I’d hear the same awful stories over and over), we were driving at the time and she slammed on the brakes in the middle of the road and then pulled over and screamed at me for not caring about her.
The older me and my brother got, the more and more angry she would be when we weren’t a “perfect” family. She would sit us down for “family meetings” about how we weren’t operating as a family well enough. My brother actually had the guts at times like those to point out that mom seemed to want to have a family just to create for herself some sort of fantasy of an ideal family. She straight up said a few times that yes, she had a family because she wanted to recreate what she didn’t have as a child growing up, but that wasn’t a “fantasy” that was just the way it was “supposed to be”, no matter how unrealistic everyone else thought her expectations were. When things aren't the way she wants, it's always us and never her. She's cultivated whole narratives around it, like what sort of disorders she thinks we have that make us selfish and uncaring.
I think my relationship with her got really bad and went beyond what my older brother would experience, when I was 12 and had a TBI from playing soccer. Afterwards, I had some permanent disabilities and difficulty in school, and after a certain point my mom would complain I wasn’t her daughter anymore and that she wanted her “old daughter” back. She went on a crusade to try to “cure” me and would look into all these dangerous pseudo-scientific woo sorts of things, and keep making me try them. If I didn’t want to do it then I would get all sorts of rage, which eventually turned into her thinking I was faking my disabilities specifically to make her life difficult. One time she told me that she thought I was faking to make things hard for her and only couldn’t do things that she wanted me to do (even though I clearly had demonstrated difficulty doing those things regardless of who wanted me to do them, even if it was myself) and that it was because of I was “jealous” of her because, “I’m prettier than you”.
Yeah, my mom also thinks everyone is jealous of her. Because she is smart and pretty. EVERY TIME she has, or perceives, any sort of interpersonal conflict with anyone in her life (which happens a lot), her go to reasoning is that they were jealous of her. It’s also how she would reason every interpersonal conflict I ever had with friends or whoever. She’d tell me they were just jealous of me. I always felt this was an empty and shallow explanation and never liked when she would assert that.
But she has an incredible penchant for making everyone else’s problems about her. One example is that my dad does not come from a great family either and he’s cut off from his mom and all his siblings, but he was best friends with one of his brothers, who committed suicide when they were in their early 20s. I can’t even imagine how painful that must be for him, cause I consider my brother my best friend as well. But my mom brings this up a lot, but always in the context of how much it hurt her, “he was like a brother to me too”. Even when I have mentioned that I can’t imagine how devastated my dad must be over this, her IMMEDIATE response is “I’m devastated, too”. Which may be true, but the worst thing is what my brother brought up recently, which is that she will bring it up so cavalierly around our dad. Our dad is a very quiet, stoic person, but she acts like because of that he has no feelings, and doesn’t even imagine that it might be very painful for him for her casually bring up his brother’s suicide all the time. Heck, just recently she said she had a “breakthrough” that it might have been hurtful of her all these years to try to make him have a relationship with his abusive mother, because she “finally realized how I would feel if he’d try to force me to talk to my mother”. I was gobsmacked that she only JUST realized that. I figured that it wasn’t nice to try to force my dad to talk to his mom when I was, like, 10. But she was acting like she was some sort of empathetic hero for having only just had this revelation.
Recently, I had a pretty rough day where I had to drive 4 hours somewhere, my plans for who I was staying with fell through, and I had to drive 4 hours back the same night. When I got home exhausted at 1 am, my mom came out only to complain that I had woken her up. She said she’d had a rough day (she had just been working from home all day) and I joked that I’d obviously had a rough day, too. Her response was “Your rough day was my rough day. When a parent’s kid has a rough day, it’s really their rough day also” then to go back to bed and tell me to be quiet. But she doesn’t just make all our hardships about herself, but our successes, too. Most recently when I was staying with her, it was almost bizzare how much she was asking for “recognition” and praise about what a great mom she is, because of some things I had done in college and the grad school I got into.
As far as my timeline of realizations go, I think the first real big incident was when I was home from college my freshman year for spring break. My mom has a bad back since before I was born and it was acting up that evening. I sat down on the arm of the couch next to her and she got really mad because she thought I might bump into her and aggravate her back. I told her I didn’t mean anything by it, but she said I should have known anyway not to do that, and that I was selfish and insensitive. I tend to not react well to being called things like that, so I got defensive, and her next attack was to say maybe because I was like that I deserved to be treated the way I was by a boy who abused me when I was in middle school (I don't necessarily want to go into the details, but it's impacted me in a PTSD sort of way through my teen years and still now though less so). She then told me that most people coming home from college would be hanging out with friends and berated me for not having any and always hanging around the house. Then she told me that I only deserved to be affected by what happened with the boy from middle school if he had sexually assaulted me, because SHE had been sexually assaulted as a teenager, so she had it worse and I didn’t deserve to have issues. A little while later we were fighting and she told me “there are winners and losers in this world and you’re turning out to be a loser”. I think the scariest thing about this moment is how calm she was. She wasn’t mad, she wasn’t yelling, she just sat there completely calm as she said these things and I was crying. Then she kicked me out of the house (it was midnight) and told me if I took my car, since it was in her name, she would call the police. I didn’t talk to her for several months after that, after I went back to college.
The worst part is now she completely gaslights me about that incident. I can’t tell if she’s doing it intentionally or if she’s genuinely rewritten history in her memory. It’s so jarring how much she acts like something completely different (and much less outrageous) happened, I’d almost start doubting myself if my brother wasn’t there to confirm events. Whenever we’re in a “good” place she also loves to say “You and me never fought when you were a teenager. We always got along so well, we never had any major incidents”.
She will go from zero to 100 real quick. Most recently I was talking with my brother and he said what’s so scary about her is that “90% of the time she’s completely fine, it’s that other 10%!” I think his percentages might be a little off, but he’s got the sentiment right. She will just blow up out of nowhere, or do something ridiculously outrageous, like the time she left the house after having been drinking at 1 am, didn’t tell us where she was going, wouldn’t answer her phone, made us all drive around looking for her, then came home and yelled at us for not having known she’d obviously went to the emergency care center because she “felt a little funny” and for not having followed her there to see if she was alright.
She fought with my dad all the time while I was growing up. She would storm into one of me or my brother’s rooms (we’d usually be hiding out together) and yell, “I’m definitely doing it this time, I’m definitely divorcing your father!” But she never has. One time one of these fights happened right before we were supposed to go out to dinner as a family. Mom drove off somewhere on her own (driving off somewhere is one of her go tos when she’s upset) and my dad decided to take us out to eat anyway. On our way out, we passed her car coming back. I don’t remember why, but after eating, I ended up back home with her and my dad and brother were out. My mom started laying into me about how I had “smirked” at her when our cars passed. Apparently I had “smirked” at her because I was so satisfied that we were going out to eat with dad and had left her out. I did no so thing, of course. I didn’t make any sort of facial expression when we passed by her car. I remember her yelling so much and then accidentally (?) breaking a favorite glass figurine of her’s in the sink and then yelling that I was probably happy that she’d broken it cause it would make her unhappy and I wanted her to be unhappy.
Most recently when I came home, she had a deadly serious conversation with me for about half an hour about how she was convinced my dad was trying to murder her. She will say paranoid things like that a lot, like that he’s tried to injure her or is trying to undermine her having a job or is manipulating or lying to or cheating on her. But even for her, talking about how she thought he was plotting her murder was shockingly insane. She's convinced my dad is such an awful, unloving husband, and there are many things I recognize aren't perfect about him, but it's always stood out to me how my dad has never spoken a bad word about her to me (sometimes to a detriment imo) but she is always talking bad about him to us. It's even so that whenever I have a nice conversation with my dad, where he says something nice or helpful to me, if I tell her about it her first response is to undermine it, usually by saying she's said the same thing before or is nicer to us than he is or that he got the idea of what he said from her and was just repeating it.
I’ve finally left the house and gone to stay with some friends in another town because it just all got to be too much. I had moved back after graduating college and was going to stay until I go to grad school in another country in 6 months, but I couldn’t deal with the “walking on eggshells” feeling any longer (my dad hasn’t been great either, but at least he is consistent when he’s mean, it’s my mom’s unpredictability that makes it too stressful to live with). There are so many other things I could say (including my mom on and off being part of a religious cult throughout my childhood) but I think the reason it’s taken me so long to admit that all this behavior is beyond abnormal and definitely screwed me up in some ways, is because that (generous) 90% estimate of my brother's. When she’s good, she’s really good. She’s intense and she was definitely an overbearing, overprotective mother in many ways, but she was also very supportive of our interests, saw money as no object (even though we aren’t exactly well off) to making sure me and my brother got the best education we could, encouraged us in our talents, told us how much she loved us, and can even have extremely clear, rational, intelligent conversations about many things, including parenting rights and wrongs.
But all of this amidst bouts of extremely irrational and volatile behavior, that she seems completely unaware of. She said to me recently, “Your brother says both me and your dad are crazy. That hurts me so much, cause it’s just him! I’m a wonderful parent, I’m the best parent you kids could ask for. It’s living with your dad that makes me crazy sometimes.” (of course she always want reassurance that she’s a wonderful mother. We could tell her in person and give her gifts and take her out to dinner on mother’s day, but if we don’t write a post on FB for all her friends to see about what a great mom she is, she’ll throw a fit). I mean, she even went to therapy a few years ago to deal with her childhood. She claims it’s completely made her better and healed all her trauma. But none of her behavior has changed. In some ways, it’s gotten worse. I often feel like I have two entirely different mothers. Yet even now, I feel so bad about writing this, I want to defend what a loving supportive mother she has been/is and I also feel paranoid she will find out about this post somehow. I'm full of anxiety.
But, I guess now that I’ve recognized all of this and gotten myself into a safer environment, I wonder what the next step is. I want to be in a better place emotionally for myself before I move to another country to go to grad school. So I’m wondering how to survive the next 6 months while working on getting there. I'm hoping to find some support for that here.
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