I have a very difficult relationship with my mother. Everyone thinks she's lovely, a doting grandmother, everyone's best pal and confidante, a pillar of the community. Even my best friend, who worked with her for a while, didn't really believe me that she wasn't like that all the time.
There's another side to her too though. Everything I ever did was about her; if I misbehaved, I got 'why do you do this to me?', when I finally did something she approved of, I got 'at last you've done something I can be proud of!'. I was 18 by then, had done well in school and was in college, but apparently none of that counted. When I told her I was pregnant, I got 'but I'm too young to be a grandmother!'. She was 58, I was 29 and had been married for a year. When DS was born he was terribly sick and we were told that if he made it through he would be terribly brain damaged. The NICU had strict rules about visiting which meant that she could only visit when DH or I was there. She rang me when he was 5 days old and said that they couldn't mind DD any more (they had been our childcare for two days a week) because they were too traumatised by what was happening with DS. Then she went to the NICU head of shift and told her that we were forcing them to mind DD all the time so they never got a chance to see DS, and asked for an exeption from the rules so they could see him without us. She told me that it was good that I didn't have PND after DS's birth because when I did after DD's I 'made everyone's lives very difficult by not letting them see DD' - I had begged them to visit more often because I was alone all day with no car to go anywhere and I was desperately bored and lonely, but that's not the way she remembers it. I was diagnosed with depression at 19; she told me I wasn't depressed and took my prescription for antidepressants away. Shortly after that I dropped out of college and was unemployed for a few months. After the usual 'why are you doing this to me?', I was asked every day why I had no job yet. Not because I needed one to get my life going again, but because she was so ashamed of me that she was lying to everyone in her life about me. She refused to tell anyone I had dropped out because it was too embarrassing.
She has always tried to maintain complete control of my relationship with my sister. She would never discuss DSis with me at all, I was told her life was none of my business. She forbade me to discuss my wedding in front of DSis in case it made her feel bad because she was single. Even now she insists on being a go-between, she gets in a huff if we contact each other without going through her, with the result that my sister and I have no real relationship at all.
She controls my relationship with other family as well; she loves showing off my kids to extended family but always does it on days when they're minding the kids and we're not around. I've tried to invite family to my house to meet them but she always comes up with reasons not to. I suspected, and my sister recently confirmed, that it's because she's ashamed of my house because she thinks it's too small and shabby so she doesn't want relatives to see it. When she introduces us to people, she introduces the kids first and gets them to chat with whoever it is, then waves a hand towards us and says 'oh, and these are their parents'. When I was pregnant with DD she introduced my bump to someone as her first grandchild, then added 'oh, and that's her mother'. I know it sounds innocuous and as if she's just a really proud grandmother but it feels very much as if she just doesn't care about me or DH and is only bothered with the kids now.
I think there's an expectation that I follow her script. She prefers me not to be coping well. She seems to like me to complain about having no time or too much housework or whatever; she'll be sympathetic and tell me she remembers how hard it was for her. I think she likes to feel she's helping. But when things are going well for me she seems to get almost angry about it.
It's like everything is a carefully calculated act to make people see her in a particular way, and it works very well for her. But she says awful things about people behind their backs; she thinks everyone is inferior to her. She used to tell me that all my friends were mean and I shouldn't talk to them any more; the one friend she couldn't possibly label as horrible she said was stupid; she used to call her Pheobe behind her back because she thought she was flaky (she's really not!). She lets people confide in her and then laughs at them behind their backs. She uses people to get what she wants but doesn't appear to genuinely like most of them at all, and she does her best to destroy my trust in people other than her. I have almost no friends because I was in my mid twenties before I realised that she was wrong and that not everyone was two-faced and awful.
5 months ago (on a long anticipated holiday - my first trip with my kids which I had been planning for a year and was hugely excited about, to a destination which my parents would have loved to bring us to as kids but couldn't afford it) the whole family had a massive row and my parents and sister all said that they think I'm a really nasty and unpleasant person and very hard to be around. Apparently every time they leave our house 'the air in the car turns blue with f-ing and blinding' they do because I'm so awful. They think I'm incapable of parenting my children and that I use the children as weapons against them. My father said that my sister has been telling him that she feels very unwelcome in our home (despite us giving her an open invitation to come over every week for dinner, giving her a key to let herself in if she gets there before we get home, and buying her a pair of slippers so she'll be cosy because we know she feels the cold - we really do try to make her feel at home! I had thought it would be good to try and see each other away from my parents to try and repair things a bit, you see). So she's been seeing the children in my parents' house when we're not around, and doesn't come to our house any more. The row ended with my sister sticking her face in mine and hissing 'I hope you enjoy your perfect holiday in xxx - it's your own fault it's ruined!' and storming off.
Five months later it's very obvious that they're still angry with me but I don't understand exactly why, or what to do about it. I just can't get past all of this being said. Everyone else in my life thinks they're nuts, that I'm nothing like they've said, and that I'm a good parent. My instinct is just to see them as little as possible (for my own sanity!) but that will just be interpreted as using the kids as a weapon. They're so very, very convinced that I'm awful that avoiding them will just be seen as more proof of that. And they're absolutely mad about my kids - I don't want to deprive them of that. But it's really hard to be around them, wondering if what I'm saying is terrible, and whether they'll be bitching about me again as soon as I leave.
Help me make sense of it all, please? (and apologies for the enormous length of the post!)