DM used me as a financial crutch and where to go from here

[CassetteTapes]

I posted about this a few months ago and got almost unanimous YANBU. I have now raised my issues with my DM and am at a loss at where to go from here. I’ll try and do a rundown without this being too long:

My parents divorced in my late teens and when I was 20 my mum put me under duress to buy her council house with her. I’m an only child. My dad had been extremely abusive alcoholic and I was at a crossroads in life at that point, only earning 10k in a retail job so not really in a good position. However she promised me that we would sell the house in 5 years and split the proceeds - I trusted her and as a hopeful yet skint 20 year old on min wage I thought that it would work out ok.

After a year, I got a much better paying shift work job and I moved out to flat share with friends. This was partly to be closer to work for the earlies and lates, but also because my mum and I were not getting on too well and at 21 I needed to get out. She did not want me to go, I promised to still pay half the mortgage as we were tied in, but She gave me a hard time and in the end I agreed to pay half the mortgage plus another £125 per month on top towards her bills. She was working full time in a decent job and with maturity I now see that this was crazy and almost as though I was paying maintenance to my own mother.

I paid this money diligently and faithfully without missing a payment for the entire 5 years. Obviously I also had my own rent and bills to pay on top. Halfway through at the age of 23 I moved in with now DH and had my DS. We struggled for money during this time and I had to take a short mat leave. My mum asked me for extra money for home improvements twice, citing that i had to pay because it was my investment too and I would benefit when the house was sold. It was hard to pay the extra and at one point I was selling my old toys from the 80s to make the payments to her.

Finally the 5 years were up, DS was 18 months old and money was very tight as we were paying £700 a month childcare, I’d had to take a promotion for extra income which was exhausting me. DH also had a son who was very ill at this time so we were going through a stressful time. Sadly my mum said she had changed her mind on selling the house and said she wouldn’t do it as she couldn’t afford to buy elsewhere. This put me in an extremely stressed situation as I did not know how I could continue paying her the £350 per month without being on the breadline.

Eventually her partner offered to buy me out of my share which I felt I had no choice but to accept, he added up all my payments over the 5 years and added another £2k on top, this was the final offer and they said they could afford no more. It was all done officially and I remember the man at the mortgage company looking at me intently and saying “are you sure?” At the time I was grateful to get my money back in a lump sum during my time of need. But effectively I gifted my mum’s DP a fairly large amount of equity. My mum used to say that he would pay me some more money one day but those promises dwindled off, as he bought new cars and things like that.

Fast forward 11 years and they are getting ready to retire with lots of investments, which it turns out they have been building for years. My mum talks about her money all the time. I don’t need the money now, DH and I do ok so it’s not about that. I am deeply hurt that I have been used like a loan (when I couldn’t afford it). I am hurt that my mum pulled the rug out from under me at my time of need, and then sat back and watched me sign over my equity to her partner, when all the while she had money in the bank.

I have told her how I feel and obviously it has blown up, she was crying and apologetic at first but has switched since to very defensive and keeps saying that they have not profited. She is now putting several thousand in my children’s ISAs. She says that I or the kids will inherit the house anyway in the future. I appreciate all those things and I see that she wants the issue to be done and dusted, so I am trying to patch things as best I can. I don’t want any money.

But I still feel so hurt and my self worth has taken a real knock. I had to put aside all my travelling dreams that I had when I was 20 in order to pay all that, and now I’ve realised that none of it really need to happen. I am a little bit scared of what will happen the next time I see her DP as he has form for a bad temper. So far all I’ve had from him is a crappy text saying No Comment in any of it.
I keep thinking back to when I had my DS - she didn’t even come to the hospital to see us, her first grandchild, and I was handing over all that money each month. I just feel so very wounded, like my needs (and her grandchild’s needs) have never mattered to her.

I am NC with my dad also due to his abuse, and an only child. There’s no other family member I can talk to. My DH is supportive and also horrified at what happened, I did not really bother him much with it all at the time as his son was so unwell. How can this repair?

Thank you all so much, you are all very lovely and some of these posts are so detailed and helpful. Thank you for taking the time to post this information for me.

The parentification/spousification has already been mentioned by the counsellor. We seem to flip over so that sometimes I am put in the parent role and I have to take care of her, and then other times I am in a child ego state, ie terrified of disappointing her or getting told off.

It’s interesting regarding cluster B personalities as I have read lots about this in the past when facing up to my dad’s manipulation but I never really saw my mum as one of them. On the surface she is nice and kind. She is actually seen as an extremely benevolent person doing kind things in the community.

It seems as though this unloving behaviour has only happened with me. She was loving to me as a younger child. I wonder if something happened to her psychologically during the abusive marriage and she displaced her resentment onto me because she couldn’t put it onto my dad. I’ve always felt like she checked out of loving me when she checked out of the marriage. This has made it very easy for her to take money from me etc.

I intend to stay NC with her but am feeling an extreme sense of unease at the moment with everything and I can’t imagine what’s going to happen in the future.

The good things are that she is not embroiled in our lives that much, she doesn’t have a key, we stopped the DC having unsupervised contact about 6 years ago because of her DP strange behaviour. She doesn’t ever babysit or anything, she’s fairly disinterested. So we are unaffected day to day.

Remember that people like your mother throw insults and comments that are the worst THEY can think of at you.

Projection if you will. They throw at you what THEY are scared of. So the money grabber comment is proof to you that she KNOWS what she is.

Take her at her word re Christmas, don’t invite or involve her in anything from this point on.

You will feel soo much better with her at arms distance

Keep the money, it’s yours. And then some

Never so apt has a saying been than “too little, too late”

Turn the page and move on without them in your lives- the sky won’t fall in, it will actually be an awful lot better

(((Hug)))

Keep talking this through with your counsellor and your dh. It isn’t easy, it won’t be easy, but you have to do this and it will be better long term.

It could be, as you say, that her own trauma has meant she has victimized you rather than see herself as the victim, but whatever the motivation behind it her behavior has been abusive.

My MIL can be very charming and likeable. One of the ways we manage her behavior (she has no diagnosis and doesn't see herself as in need of psychological help) is having strict boundaries around how long we see her, so there is a definite beginning and end (I am not suggesting you see your mother). My MIL is very volatile and has a history of broken relationships with friends, family and her husband.

I would also ask though why your mother continued in a relationship with your father when it was clearly so damaging for both of you? It sounds like the marriage went on for years with this behavior in the middle. Did she try to get away or protect you at any time?

It really doesn't matter about any diagnosis, it just helps to recognize certain behaviors clearly spelled out as dysfunctional, as it helps you, who was the victim of these behaviors to understand there can be patterns. That's what I meant when I said the reading helped. It was shocking to see some of her behaviours described in detail and also a relief. They could seem so confusing and I wasn't familiar with those types of behaviors so just didn't know how to respond. My MIL definitely guilts my DH and does the classic FOG (Fear, Obligation, Guilt) triad. So by reading about it I have been able to put into words what is happening and describe my DHs feelings and experience "you feel guilty and therefore obligated to do what she wants" do he is able to recognize if he is being emotionally manipulated. I also started to understand how much fear he had under it all, as my MIL can rage with the best of them which I can only imagine was terrifying for DH as a child.