I've been lurking in this thread for a while and decided to share my experiences. This post is a very-very long one but I just have to chuck my thoughts down so I appreciate anyone who reads it all through! Also new account used due to what I have written.
I don't even know where to begin as thinking it, let alone typing it, just makes me feel even worse about the shambles of my parents. It isn't even about any drama in the here-and-now (it can happen anytime though) but about previous issues that have created the ongoing feelings I have towards them.
I read with interest in January's thread about the body giving out and I think this is where I am at now; In the past 6 months it feels like I have been hit by a ten-tonne lorry and I cannot seem to climb out of the pit of despair I am drowning in.
I am an only child and I have had to shoulder and burden their behaviour for years and I think my age (44) and an incident last year (mentioned below) has broken the final straw. I think my mind is just spewing all this out there now as some sort of mid-life crisis or mental breakdown.
I have a very complex and horrible illness that leaves me over run with fatigue to the point where I feel extremely hungover (having not drank alcohol) and with what feels like a very severe cold over running me. It is extremely debilitating, can last for days without prior warning, and I have only just this past year discovered what it probably is. This has driven me to the point of total despair because I don't think I can mentally or physically cope any more on top of this flooding of memories about my parents.
I think it has taken me so long to figure our due to my father's martyr-complex when I was younger. He, and to an extent my mother, always had it worse in every single scenario which has led me to diminishing my own feelings of how bad I feel. I am sick of reading about how resilience is a virtue: in my case it has meant figuratively dragging myself over the hot coals and broken glass even when I was really ill (adrenal crisis).
They have never given me the full facts of my illness and the awful, undignified and cruel operations that were performed on me when I was a baby and up to a young teenager. I have tried to find out but notes from the 1980s and early 1990s are almost non-existent in terms of detail which has added even more anger to my plate.
They have never been honest to me and made me go through things that no child should ever have to do but what hurts the most is my mother never comforted me then or now: Never an arm around me; or calming words where I felt protected. She would just sit there in the hospital moaning about the waiting time whilst I sat there absolutely sh*tting myself as to what would be done to me today (she never told me what sort of appointment it would be you see...). Even at the age of approx 9 I had been conditioned to protect their moods and feelings. When doctors asked me if I knew why I was in the inpatient ward I would say “yes” when I had zero clue. When I came round from anaesthetic and felt sick she said to keep quiet or we wouldn't be able to go home. Charming isn't it?
Even today where I have wanted to talk about it she shuts me down. She is so emotionally immature that she cannot talk to me about 'grown up' subjects.
She has shown more emotions towards the dogs she has had over the years. They completely envelope her world and she was always at the vets with them and coddling them; if I dared say I was ill she would say things like "You know [name] isn't very well. You always choose days like this". Lovely.
I brought it up with her last year and how she should have let me have a voice to say no to this demeaning and frightening procedures and guess what she did? Put the phone down.
We have this once-a-week phone call thing going (she doesn't do texts or emails so I have to phone which sends my heart into overdrive) and so the following week I didn't call her. She put the phone down on me so I though fuck it. Another week went by and another week and nothing.
We had pulled the landline phone out at the time due to an excess of junk calls but both me and my partner have a mobile phone so she could have easily called me. Anyway, my partner checked the phone about 3 weeks later for any messages and guess who had left a message? My wonderful tactful father. In his best diplomatic phone voice he said, I am paraphrasing but it is pretty much as it was: "If you don't want to speak to us any more when we have done nothing wrong then we will up and move and not tell you where we are going". A completely reasonable and calm response. People who say men are less emotional than women can go whistle quite honestly.
I stupidly phoned them and my mother in her usual I-must-keep-father-calm-no-matter-how-shite-he-treats-our-only-daughter said it was "water under the bridge" (it isn't for me) and that she had told him off when she found out he'd made the call. I will believe the Earth is flat before I believe she grew a spine to do this. She has never stood up to him and I know for a fact that she had not told him she put the phone down on me (another throw daughter under-the-bus moment). She witnessed him shouting me into the ground on so many occasions without uttering a single solitary word of defence for me.
My parents are the complete opposite to each other and yet seem to fuel each others awful personalities and behaviour. I honestly have no idea how I even exist to be honest having seen them together for 35+ years. She is meek and he is like nitro glycerine on a cracking icy lake. She has enabled his foul behaviour towards me by never standing up to his, quite honestly, deranged anger attacks over little-to-nothing - it was never physical but insanely over-the-top followed by days of silence (I never grovelled for his forgiveness you see).
I despise myself for not standing up to them and it is eating me alive. I know a young me should never have been expected to stand up to them but I still cannot forgive myself for this. It has also had the effect on me now in that I am over-aggressive; I will not be that meek and mild woman like my mother but have gone too extreme.
There is a tonne of other awful things but the length of this post in pretty ridiculous as it is! Thankyou to anyone who has made it this far. I really do appreciate it.