NCcd for this because it’s very outing but I’m a regular and just looking to canvas opinions (informed or otherwise) on my mother’s behaviour because she leaves me baffled. Is she mentally ill, a bad person, something else?
This will be long because I don’t want to drip-feed and I need to explain the range of her behaviours.
In a nutshell, she’s always lied (big lies: that she’s inherited a house, that she’s got cancer, that she’s had a heart attack) and had some form of drama version of Munchausens - she loves to put me in danger. Example 1) she told my abusive ex that I was having an affair when I actually wasn’t– she did this on multiple occasions and even phoned him after I’d left him (for hitting me, again) to tell him this. Example 2) when I was a teen, we were arguing and she suddenly shrieked and started screaming like I’d attacked her – I was a good three feet away. My stepdad ran in and grabbed me by the throat and pushed me onto the sofa to protect her. She continued to act like a victim.
She’s run up debts in my name. She lies about me to other people. She doesn’t hold onto basic info about me – what my degree is in, what my job is. I’m often amused when people tell me what she’s proudly told them that I do for a living (which is actually less impressive than what I actually do!)
So that sort of thing.
She also tells me that she loves me more than anything, she gets drunk and cries talking about how much she loved me when I was born.
My brother has gone NC to protect his family. She was constantly telling his children that she was sending nice gifts to them and nothing would arrive.
I’ve barely seen her this year but the interactions we’ve had have been so careless on her part. I finally left my abusive partner for good and moved into my own house. I didn’t ask her for any help – I never have, except for one thing. She happened to have a Currys voucher of mine at her house and she lives near to the store (I don’t) so I asked her to go in and order me a washing machine – I told her which model etc. I didn’t have one so was handwashing my clothes. She messed me around for two months not doing this and eventually, about the tenth time of me asking why she hadn’t sorted it she hissed down the phone ‘I AM DOING MY FUCKING BEST!’ Clearly not. She then ordered it but sent it to the wrong house.
It’s like she can’t be bothered to just focus for ten minutes on doing something for me. She literally cannot get it right.
This weekend, she was supposed to come to mine on Friday (haven’t seen her for months) and at 7.30 I texted her to ask where she was. She said she’d text me ‘at 6’ to let me know if she was coming. I said that it was an hour and a half past six. She replied saying that she thought she was coming Saturday night, not tonight (Friday – a day that we’d repeated multiple times in our arranging of the evening). So I said, ‘fine, come tomorrow’. Yesterday afternoon she texted me to say that wouldn’t be coming because she was ‘too hot and struggling’. She’s not overweight or disabled or anything (no offence to those two groups – I just mean she doesn’t have a justification). And anyway, she’d be driving, not running a marathon to get to my house.
So I’m just wondering, wtf is wrong with my mum? Does anybody recognise this type of behaviour? Does it have a name? Is she just a fuck-up?
I could literally continue writing this post for days but I’ll leave it there.
FUUUCCCCKKKKK that was cathartic!!!
Gold stars for everybody that made it through!
