This might be long so please bear with me :).
Was going to change my name for this but from the details most would probably guess who I was anyway so … here goes.
My parents discovered that I couldn’t see when I was three months old. They wanted me to grow up as independent as possible and so they generally let me do most things when I was a child. I had a bike, rollerscates, my dad allowed me to drive his car on a deserted road … you get the picture. My parents didn’t want to wrap me up in cotton wool though so as a result they were a lot harder on me than on my sister. I think that my mum’s thinking was that it’s a tough world out there and there’s a lot of prejudice so she saw putting me down at every opportunity as being her way of preparing me for the big bad world. Nothing I ever did was good enough, when I entered a Yamaha music contest in the keyboard division and won the regional heat and went on into the provincial finals and came second I “didn’t win so it’s not a big deal”, When my sister scraped through her exams by the skin of her teeth, but without the right grades to get into uni, my mum took her to the beach with a bottle of champagne to celebrate, when I passed my exams with, not magnificent grades but good enough to get me into uni I was told that there wouldn’t be champagne because “I don’t really think there’s anything worth celebrating”. My mum always told me that I would have to be twice as good as everyone else because I was a woman and had a disability and if I wasn’t better than the best no-one would ever give me a chance. I do realize that her motives were well-intentioned but I think that she took it so far that eventually she actually started to believe that I was as crap at everything as she consistently told me.
We didn’t have a hugely close relationship as I was growing up as I was sent to boarding school from the age of 5 and hence when I got older I found talking to friends was easier than talking to my parents. She resented this a lot, even does to this day and calls me strange because my sister tells her everything and I really don’t feel the need to.
I think that although she did want me to be independent, she never really thought that I would be, and thought that I would need her for a lot of things. I am fiercely independent and although I’m not afraid to ask for help I don’t feel the need to rely on others as I’m perfectly capable of doing most things for myself, and she resents this.
When I was pregnant with my DS she told me that I would need her for a lot of things and hope that I would be able to cope. I didn’t actually need her at all, and coped very well, she even told a friend of mine that I coped better than my sister did, but she would never ever admit it to me.
There have been lots of little things where she’s given me the impression that she thinks I’m incapable, and it’s always got me down somewhat, but I think that the clinchers have come recently. My sister had another baby yesterday, a ds. My mum and dad have taken a month off between them to help her once her dh goes back to work. I pointed out that I live just round the corner and that I’m always there if she needs anything, to which my mum replied that “well there’s nothing you can do really is there!” I said that I could shop for her, take things round, pick up her ds from nursery if so required and she just said that “oh of course you can’t, how can you pick up her ds!” I said that I could do it in exactly the same way I pick up my own ds, I could get him and we could walk back to my sister’s house, that I shop for myself anyway so shopping for her would be no different … etc etc, and she just refused to acknowledge any of this saying “it’s just better if we’re there”. Then yesterday she asked me if I was going to have any more children and I told her that we’d been trying for a year with no luck and she said “well maybe it’s better, I don’t know how you’d be able to cope with two”.
Thing is, I can understand to a degree if a stranger who didn’t know me had some misgivings about my abilities until they got to know me, but she’s not a stranger, she’s my mother fgs! I have friends who I haven’t known for that long who have been happy for me to look after their children, people who have left their babies with me at toddler groups while they go to the loo or run after their other child, and when I’ve told her about this she’s totally horrified.
The things she says are just so hurtful because I know that she really believes I’m useless and yet everyone else who knows me knows the opposite to be true. If I stand up to her she gets very defensive, so generally I just keep it shut and winge to dh instead. But the comment about how maybe it was best I couldn’t get pregnant is just the limit imo.
Sorry this is such a long rant, and well done if you’re still reading. I just don’t know what to do about her any more, apart from shutting her out of my life completely.