Sorry I've been away - very busy and tired also a bit emotionally shaken I think by issues brought back to mind. I've got loads of posts to catch up on!
Just to say it is hard when you've had an abusive background to change the record and be a better parent sometimes. Although it starts with just wanting to be better IMO.
When my first DS was born I had terrible PND and i wasn't always 'there'. I was often quite severely beaten as a child (belts, sometimes shoe, once I was pushed down the stairs) mostly by my Mother (She has amnesia about most of it and still says 'I was a difficult child' as if she was forced to hit me repeatedly)
So when I had 1st DS and he reached 'terrible 3' stages I was sometimes overly rough with him. I would smack him at times - god i hate to think of it - and handle him quite roughly.
One day I was washing his hair and he screamed and complained so loudly I lost my temper and smacked him on the cheek and the look he gave me! He stopped crying. That's when i stopped and said to myself 'what the fuck am I doing I'm turning into my mum'. The next time I started feeling angry I'd stop and take a breath or phone their dad to calm down or take him for a walk.
I never hit him again. And that's when a revelation occurred to me: Children aren't instrinsically 'bad' they don't need a slap to make them behave. I can honestly say this was a revelation to me, as until then I grew up in a family circle where hitting and even beating children was just the norm and the rhetoric was always that children asked for it!
2nd DS was a very stressful pregnancy I hated every moment of it and even wished for a miscarriage
. I never rested, never slept and cried every day. I was carrying heavy shopping bags up till the day before my labour. DS was 3 weeks early and a colicky, restles baby. Which is no surprise. I had never felt so alone in my life. Looking back I question how I managed to function at all I was so miserable. PND was horrendous. And my issues still meant I would retreat into my own world.
Happily though, we've come through it and I really started to look at my parenting by just watching other women with their children, reading mother and baby magazines and trying to question myself.
Looking back it is so hard to be a good mum when you don't have a responsive mother, a mum who plays with you, listens to you, reads to you and makes you feel perfect just as you are A mum who notices that you're being abused and hurt etc. You just don't have a model. You have to find or invent a new model for yourself. I always say I have a model that tells me what I don't want and I use that model to spur me forward.
I still feel massive guilt at times. 2nd DS has slight hearing problems and I blame my stressful pregnancy and my aloofness for not realising straightaway that he had a problem.