Hi there,
I wanted to ask if anyone has experience of, once they became a Mother, finding it difficult to reconcile a past abusive home life from when they were teenagers or children?
I am not a victim of sexual abuse or violence, but of mental and emotional cruelty from my mother and her partner, which I experienced in a very intense and traumatising way from ages 15 to 18. At 18 they threw me and my belongings out (quite literally).
I lived in an incredibly opressive, obsessive compulsive-driven home, where I was not permitted to have friends my mother and her boyfriend didn't approve of i.e. no one from the council estate behind our cul-de-sac (sorry Carolyn and Gabriel, for that day) (yes, pathetic isn't it). I had neither smoked nor taken drugs or had a serious sleeping-with-him boyfriend. But I was so severely restricted that I wasn't permitted to ever stay at friends houses for sleepovers as I "had a perfectly good bed upstairs" (him).
I was not allowed to express myself through the typically teenage way of dressing badly and was even once frogmarched back to a jeans shop after I purposely bought jeans 2 sizes too big (it was the Happy Mondays phase and I was 16). The house I lived in was clean to the point of, well, I'm sure you can imagine. But imagine being a girl going up to her room after doing the washing up, only to be called back downstairs by your Mother's boyfriend and being told to "wipe the drips out of the sink NOW". Or being given your book that you left on the coffee table because it was "cluttering the place up" (him).
My Mother had a very bad temper at this stage in her life and when we shouted, she stepped things up a gear by regularly hitting me over the head with her flat palm. When she wanted to get a point across to me she would jab me hard in the chest with her finger to emphasise the words. There were many times that I ran up the stairs to the bathroom after she lost it and became violent. When I was 17, I told her that if she hit me again I would hit her back and she replied that I wouldn't have anywhere to live in that case. This became true 1 month after my 18th birthday and I didn't speak to my Mother or her partner for 10 years to the month. She came back into my life when I experienced a difficult divorce and my Father went to tell her about it, and reconciled us (this was not my decision, but his).
I could go on but I need to get to the main point. Which is, when I was pregnant, I was delighted at the thought of my Mum becoming a grandmother. At the weekend, they were kind enough to offer to look after my DS so myself and my DP could get a full night's sleep. I could not sleep in that house. I spent most of the night reliving the horrible things that had occurred there. Because you see, nothing had changed. The tense, stifling atmosphere was exactly the same as it had always been except before my DS was born, I could live with it. Now I wonder how they could have behaved like that towards me. Is this because I am now a Mother myself? I made the fatal error of becoming angry on the Sunday morning and implying that I hadn't been able to relax because I kept remembering stuff. My Mother's response, as always, was to tell me that the "issues" were "my issues".
I accept that they are but I also accept that I will never get over what they did. How can I try to ensure a constructive (and most importantly, safe) relationship with them for the sake of them seeing her grandchild?
Any advice welcome.