I m trying to unravel the ridiculously toxic environment that has developed in my family.
Since my father died several years ago, my mother's behaviour has become more and more passive aggressive and downright abusive. She grew up in a very impoverished part of rural Ireland, her family of origin were fundamentalist Catholics and extremely brainwashed by the patriarchal Catholic Church which strictly ruled their lives.
Due to family finances she was sent to work as a teenager and essentially flung out to get work and send money home. She was parentified and felt a very strong duty to support her mother and siblings financially. My maternal grandfather suffered poor mental health and as a result my grandmother carried a heavy burden to do much of the farmwork as well as rearing the children. My mother being the eldest was her ally.
My mother saw her role as provider, and when she met my father she was delighted, as his ability to provide alleviated her burden. She was a handmaid to him. Ironing his shirts, sowing his collars in for him. As a child I used to polish his shoes, he was the good natured king of his castle. She saw her place and all women's place to serve men.
Roll on to the next generation, me and my siblings. My father is now dead, and my mother is a little rudderless, she fawns to my two brothers in law and my brother. Never disagrees with them (to their faces at least). The problem is, one of my BILs suffered mental health problems himself, and while he has received endless familial support from both his own family and ours, he is bitterly competitive and insecure about anyone he sees as a rival. I think he feels threatened by me, as I don't see him as a replacement leader of our family. I challenge his bad behaviour. He passes judgment and tries to manipulate my mother's finances and all family events. He and my sister stir up family dramas at family funerals, weddings, and every other event in between.
As a separated women, I think I intimidate him, independent women are a threat to the patriarchy. He is threatened by a financially independent woman, and this seeps out through nasty remarks aimed at everything and anything that might seem emasculating to him. The problem I m figuring out is my mother, now elderly, just repeats all his insecure sneering remarks, it's like she is brainwashed to support his madness. To support his fragile, insecure ego. It's like she is programmed to repeat her early teenage behaviour of blindly supporting the fragile ego of her mentally unwell father (he had been abandoned as a child, and was traumatised as a result, and then the family were poor too, which brought other stresses).
At any rate my handmaid mother plays up to the jealous insecurities of my fragile BIL, and as a result slags off her other children and plays the game of putting them down, essentially she takes on the toxic persona of my BIL. To help build him up.
It's so sad, she recently passed some heartbreakingly cruel remarks about me and my children, these remarks originated from one person, BIL. Both her and my face fell in shock when she actually voiced such toxic comments (suggesting a car crash). This is the base level that my BIL frequently goes to, he tries to be dominant by pushing his comments too far.
It's heartbreaking, and then she denies her actions. My sister tries to laugh these comments off. I feel so betrayed by all of them. The BIL driving all of this base behaviour has suffered 2 mental breakdowns in the past, and has always been supported and quietly nursed out of it, privately through his family members bailing him out and ones with medical professions medicating him.
It's just so sad it's come to this, and it's mentally draining trying to figure it all out. JUST PUTTING IT ALL DOWN HERE