This is a follow on of my last thread. I'll try to post a link later (go ahead if you can do it before me!).
So I've realised that I need to grieve the loss of a mother I never really had. I have no idea where to begin. It also just feels like it's going to be (lots more) deep pain. I've got enough of that already - a lot from her - and I'm not sure if I can face much more. I am in therapy with a good, qualified and very experienced therapist. But that's only one hour out of the at least 119 hours a week that I'm awake!
Part of this involves grieving the pretence that I mattered. I could hold myself together enough to keep going when I told myself that all the feelings I had were wrong, because she was my mother and of course I mattered and she wanted me. What she actually wanted (she's a narc with a touch of sadism in there) was a shell of a human to project herself on to.
Even when I wrote that - which I know to be true as other people have also said it - every cell in my body is digging their heels into the ground to stop the statement being true. But it is true as I, autocollantes, didn't matter to her. What mattered was her daughter - I was some kind of possession.
So I'm a bit stuck. This is truly awful to say and I don't wish it, but the process would be easier if she wasn't alive. The fact that I have to grieve everything, including the death of the hope that I do matter and she's still very much alive, just seems impossible.
I've been reconciled for decades with not mattering to my F who found her so impossible he left..and left me as a young child with her.
I've become reconciled to not mattering to "D"H who married me to have some kind of service human and who blatantly hasn't cared about my well-being, as long as he's fine (in the process of divorce now..as it suits him, of course).
But somehow this situation with my mother feels like it might make me disintegrate. I don't know what's holding me together if I truly accept I don't matter to her. I don't matter.
It's something I can't avoid thinking about. There seem to be references to mother-daughter bonds everywhere now! Passing comments even about how important they are, how special etc. And I just think "Why don't/didn't I matter enough to have that bond too." I've worked so, so hard, for years, to be wanted. And I'm just not. Lots of those people didn't work to matter, they were just born mattering.
She has actually been approached by her oldest friends and told that she should just apologise to me as she's getting older and doesn't have much time left (she's in good health for her age). She went narcissistic ballistic. And cut them off.
Thanks for reading this far. I've given more info than strictly necessary. The answers on the last thread helped so perhaps someone out there knows what I'm taking about this time too and can tell me what I need to do/hear.