Penelope M
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What is your sexual orientation: Straight
Who in your life has "personality" issues: Parent
Relationship status: Seperated/Divorcing
Posts: 9
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« on: November 09, 2021, 02:29:26 PM » |
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I Miss My Mother: Complex Grief Urges Space for Second Generation Survivorship of Childhood Emotional Abuse
Mom was an eccentric hippie artist and dad was a quiet dutiful corporate guy who was proud of his babe and kids. She was not very attuned to feelings which I really needed as a child. But she had lots of things she believed in and was my teacher, friend, hero and coach even after tragedy struck. Its complicated to say that mom unintentionally emotionally abused me through her unchecked emotional disorders. While she fought bravely to recover from her own abuse, I fought a quieter battle to survive mine.
The warmth of my early childhood always had an uneasiness about it too. I had to navigate around mom’s emotional instability and paranoia. I am almost forty years old and it still conflicts me to share this. I have longed to tell my story and tried many times, always only in part. You feel as though you are giving up any chance of winning both your family’s approval for making the past disappear, or of membership in society that boasts of good family belonging. But at some point if we are to heal as a society, we have to be willing to look at how emotional abuse is passed not only through generations but also society. I hate to be a guinea pig for science, much less a martyr, and I wish I could say that I care enough about my own self as well as our world’s ability to understand patterns of abuse to speak on what is. But the reality is that complex grief over my mother death presses me to speak years later. That is no small matter, we are completely dependent on our families and we still need them even in adulthood, and many survivors do not want to talk about it. But, families are also how patterns are passed down. So the greater good is that I as survivor of childhood emotional abuse need to be able to talk about it and come to peace with my own story, sometimes generations of their legacy.
For anybody who grew up with a parent who had deep denial about a mental illness, they know shame and secrecy that burdens the relationship, real and present for the child as the parent themself, and more than most responsible adults could do.
I miss my mother so much. Her hair, her smile, her adventures, her laugh, the warm cups of cocoa, and the attention and affection she held for me and my brothers. She was the family organizer, she held us close, and provided us with our missions in life. There is no easy way to talk about the love you have for someone who was the closest one to you your whole childhood, yet growing up and leaving home was hell with a parent who did not respect the process of growing into your own being. I was not prepared to live without her but my heart told me I had to do try.
When I moved away, mom was not happy with my decisions, though I secretly hoped that she would come to be proud of me. The bits of life that I would try to find belonging in were never good enough for her, and she did not understand why I wanted to have my own life. Personality disorders complicate natural parent difficulties with transitioning to adult childen. Adult children of parents with personality disorders need special supports. I was always welcome back at home, but I could not bear to be there anymore. Yet I did not exactly have the skills to make it on my own either. I really craved her help, encouragement, and support then. All she would do was beckon me back to her. This made me feel like I was hurting her by becoming my own person, and it was tremendously heartwrenching to me that she couldn’t understand. I craved being understood and I grasped at courage to get space for myself.
Mom died years later while I was going through some hardships of my own in my efforts to live my own life. I never got to hug her and hold her as she struggled with cancer that spread all over her body. I was hundreds of miles away. It horrified me that I could not care for myself enough and build a life for myself that would allow me to care for her too. Instead I felt survivors guilt of having to live for myself through hardship and not be able to be there for her. My older brother stayed close to her through her passing. It had been years since I had seen mom.
When mom died, an avalanch of emotions stunned me, that I later recognize as complex grief of unhealed childhood trauma. The biggest hell that opened up before me with news of her passing was that all my years of obedience to her, of fawning before her, and of finding something good to feel about her, had not been enough to save her. I had been powerless. That won’t make sense to you if you have not been taught as a young child that in some small way, you have the power and responsibility to stay with your parent and not become the person you are. That your sacrificing yourself, abandoning yourself, and giving yourself over for them will save both you and them. When mom died the brutal truth came crashing down that a lifetime of pleasing mom as best I could had not saved her at all. My sacrifice of myself was no longer central to the relationship, nor were the boundaries I struggled to maintaining. Life had come and got her without asking my permission or hers, and I would never get the parent I was secretly waiting or from her against all odds, who if I were patient enough, would cheer me on for developing boundaries, saying no, and becoming the person I am. I experienced the full effect of the abandonment that I had been running from since childhood.
When mom knew that she was dying, she just got tired and had a little list of people she wanted to call and let know. She asked some neighbors, who I am quite sure she made their lives hell as mom tended to be very difficult to get along with, if they could forgive her. Her drawings and portrait, paintings, once the crowing spledor of my childhood, were scribbled awkwardly and badly out of proportion, showing just how bad the cancer had affected her. Her eyesight, her crowning pride, failed her and she needed my brother to write for her.
I was busy on the other side of the country fighting a losing battle to please my wife enough to stay married and stay in the home with my children. Interestingly, mom offered some rare moments of understanding and support for my situation that were appropriate to what I actually needed and wanted from her. If mom’s life was a play production that required my participation as stagehand, for a brief moment I had a need that got to have a few minutes in what seemed to me the center stage that she always occupied in my heart. Then she was gone and the lights went out, and to my horror I felt completely abandoned and alone. I felt I had made a huge mistake that could not be reversed. I still miss her dreadfully.
Yet I am learning more about how her lack of attunement to my emotional needs severely impacts me today. Its not the kind of story you like to tell about your mom. But it is the story I need as I continue to grow with determination. I think I have found a way to tell my story, to honor myself, and honor her. In my opinion, I am the second generation of survivors from emotional abuse. Mom believed herself to have left a family that hurt her very much. I think she was very brave and outspoken about what she experienced. Its so strange that I have often longed to but never felt able to take my own side so confidently. I was so used to taking hers that I left my own. That is why I miss mom. I have always wanted to grow to believe in myself and speak my truth the way she did.
That is the way I truly wish to honor her. Despite all of the complications, that is her best legacy in my life that I know burns brightly in me because of my desire for it. So when I say I miss my mom, I also am missing the me that I have always been working to have the courage to be fully. In speaking my truth here I have found a little bit of that commitment to myself that I have run from all my life. I have stood my ground and taken up some space that I have never allowed myself to take. I am proud of myself for writing to give voice for my passions and convictions in response to this complex grief.
I am a second generation survivor of emotional abuse. Mom sounded the alarm that healing was needed, that sexism was loose and causing much harm. I am not an activist like her, I am not outspoken , and I have a different role in our world’s healing. I am finding my peace after the cycle of life and loss. The abuses and neglects that mom passed on to me, knowingly or not, I honor myself by rejecting them, and saying ‘no’ to them, and making space here to speak my chapter of the story as compassionate witness.
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