I'm starting to feel more anger toward my mum. Over the past few years, I've come to recognise the pivotal part she played in creating the problems I grew up with, and have been feeling angry about it. I've had several difficult discussions with her, have developed a more adult understanding of her - and I do feel compassion for her, woman to woman. In her world-view, my compassion excuses her as she excuses herself, but it's not so. I'm quite capable of understanding & empathising with her, while entertaining great contempt for the woman she is.
Her self-delusion is astonishing. Convincing herself of Dad's wit, charm, sexiness, good character and love for her, she reframed his sadism as stress-related bad temper. I don't think she did him any favours - his was a twisted soul and, had she challenged him properly, who knows whether he might have sought & found peace somehow? Not only did she deny what he was really doing to his family - systematic physical and psychological torture - but she consciously and deliberately chose her vision of a sexy marriage over the safety of her children.
By CHOOSING her denial, she inflicted it on us. My life has been shaped by the after-effects of growing up in this fakery. Whatever was good about my family life has been poisoned by mistrust, and that resulted in my mistrusting goodness where I find it. Whatever causes me pain is familiar and I accept it as my due; my destiny; my punishment for existing and for failing to deny it completely.
The last time we had A Talk, I reminded her of how I seriously believed that all men hit their wives. "I did, too", she said. She tells me her own father only hit her mother once. Either she's denied the facts of her own childhood, as she denied ours, or what she said just then was a lie. She is a complex invention, made out of layer upon layer of delusions, denials, lies and contradictions. And that was all I had for a mother.
Unlike me, Mum's very good at doing nothing. If she has to wait, she goes into a kind of trance: she looks very peaceful at those times. She tells me she "retreats into her core" but can't/won't describe what she finds there. I wonder whether her childhood was, in fact, similar to mine. Perhaps her 'retreat' is a form of disassociative fugue; perhaps this was her childhood survival mechanism. Perhaps she, too, grew up in a lie. If so, perhaps it explains how she found it easy to love a monster, and to demand her children love him too. She's the last survivor: I'll never know the truth, because she doesn't.
Her overwhelming selfishness shocks me. She tells me that, even without the social pressures on a woman to stay married, she wouldn't have left Dad because she loved him and the sex was great. This man was throwing her toddler children against walls, spewing floods of verbal hatred over them, beating them up for not being adults and for simply being, and he did the same to her. She loved him too much to leave. She is PROUD of that marriage! The cruel, selfish, idiotic bitch.
Girls learn about being a woman from their mother. Mine - verbally and by example - taught me to deny the truth of my life, to expect violence as my due, to trust nothing but deception ... and to lie about it all. What she taught me, more than anything, was to accept pain and be happy about it.
The many threads on Mumsnet, where OPs say "the children adore him" and "don't tell me to leave, I love him", make me feel agony for their children. How DARE they teach their children what my mother taught me?
I am nowhere near over it. This has taken me two hours to type; I keep having panic attacks. I am so angry - and feel so despairing - about the damage I've suffered! I doubt my ability to become healthy: the damage is so deeply rooted, and so complete :(