So, spurred on by the recent posts about clearing out, I'm on a mission to get rid of the things i have that my mother gave me. I find this incredibly hard - it's like I'm clinging onto the last vestiges of hope that she is in some way a real mother. I'm always terrified of throwing anything away, but find it exremely liberating when I do. It's like I go into real survival stuff - it's life or death whether I keep this hideous scarf she gave me or not. And given it's that hard with the things I don't even like, with the rare things where she's actually given me something that's quite nice, it's nigh on impossible. But, as I say, I'm on a mission; have already thrown out a book they gave me as a child, which I've clung to for years and years as "proof" they cared (unconsciously) (the wolves of willoughby chase, if anyone else read that - typical story of girls left in care of wicked governess and suffer terribly but lovely parents come home in the end and all is well, PAH!); and also some of the clothes she's givne me have found their way to the charity shop this week. There's a lot to get through.
Sakura, you posted a while back about how things came to a head with your mother and your wedding, and the control issue - it's kind of dawning on me now how much controlling there's always been from my mother too. AN, I think you wrote on this too. The thing is, because my parents made me so dysfunctional in every respect, including financially/work wise, I was always dependent on them to some extent. Which gave my motehr the opportunity to demonstrate her largesse on many occasions, giving me stuff, helping me out with money, sometimes in quite big ways. This has always been something I've felt really torn about, friends in the past have commented on what a "wonderful" mother she was for helping me like that, and I found it really hard to justify cutting her out of my life when she's been apparently so supportive. But - two things - one, if she'd looked after me properly and made sure I was able to function on my own as an adult (instead of the opposite - she and my father and brother made damn sure I was completely and utterly incapacitated) then I wouldn't have needed her help, and I would a million times rather have been self supporting (like my brother was, because HE was not trapped in the spider's web) than needing handouts from them. It was sickening to be reliant for help on the very people who'd left me so badly damaged, if that makes sense. Two - she ENJOYED being still in control in that way - it made her feel good, it made her feel like she really was a good mother and she didn't have to take anything I said really seriously, because she was BUYING me. As long as she paid for me, I was still a little girl without a voice and not an adult who has to be listened to. Is that a bit how it was for you, Sakura, and why you put your foot down and said no when it came to your wedding, and why she went so bonkers when you did? I think I'm only jsut starting to get it.
My mother is starting to go crazy now in her own way because she's losing control. I'm finally no longer dependent on her/them [albeit now I'm supported by DH, but he does value the job I'm doing in looking after DS, and lets me know it]- oh but that's anotehr thing, they got so many services from me for free over the years, I was unpaid counsellor, friend, dumpee, garbage muncher, emotional punch bag, and I made them NORMAL - they didn't have to live wiht the stigma of being the couple with one living child and one dead child, they could just be mr and mrs normal with their 2 children, which made their lives great - but not mine. they both used to say to me that they could talk to me about things they didn't talk to anyone esle about, not even each other. This was in between telling me how totally useless I was. ANYWAY, i digress. Now that she can't buy me, mother is getting antsy. She wrote to me again this week - I have asked her repeatedly not to write/phone etc - and to the untrained eye, the letter might look as though there were some serious goodwill involved. But I know better. She's suggested going to see my therapist together, but what she really wants is to find a way to get her and my father off the hook while getting me back in her life (and DH and DS, though she doesn't know DS, saw him once for 5 mins only). She wants to have a nice "normal" life again but WITHOUT having to admit just how much evil and darkness there is in that family. She thinks she can find a way to sneak in under the fence, and she will say (and has said) "yes, we were partly to blame, but you were partly to blame too". Or she will say, "yes it was all down to us", but then the next day she will start shouting at me again, and I know she's only said that in the first place to "get me back" but she's got no intention of actually follwoing through. It's like a man who won't commit and when the woman threatens to walk, he makes promises he has no intention of keeping once she's back by his side. Anyway, the whole tone of the letter is shockingly cold - nothing from the heart at all - yet signed "your loving mother" becasue she has to convince herself that's what she is. When we last had phone contact, last year, she went from pretending to be all conciliatory to trying to be bullying and controlling in a few weeks.
The good thing about the letter was it's a kind of barometer of how far I've come internally, and I could see from it that I have made progress - although it's a long way from waht I would like in my fantasies to hear from her, it's better than her out and out denial that there's even a problem. She's only shifted because I've shifted, internally. The bad thing was that once again she has ignored my wishes - I've asked her not to write because it destabilises me so much, and I was thinking about why today, cause I had a sort of delayed reaction to it that was at its worst today, and poor DS bore the brunt of it as usual when she has messed with my mind. The thing is, every time there's a letter from her, I can't stop the hope from rising, the hope that this time she's written to say "I've got it! I'm so sorry! We were so awful to you and you've suffered so badly because of us and now we're going to do everything we can to put things right!" And of course she's never written that (and logic tells me she's never going to write that). But once the hope is there, it brings up all the childhood stuff - I suppose it was a childhood hope that one day I would wake up and they would come in to me and say "everything's going to be allright from now on". And that it actually would be. And of course it never was. And so I dreamed of leaving home and things getting better, but when I did they got worse instead because they had crippled me so badly that i couldn't live, and all the feelings I'd never been able to fully feel as a child started to march to the surface and it just felt like I was going crazy for a long long time. And this went on for so long, and I tried so many avenues that purported to offer help, to offer the solution, and they were just not up to the job, or charlatans, or just bonkers themselves and so they all failed me too; so I had years upon years of layers of damage building up even as I was trying to repair the original damage - more failed relationships/friendships, more self-attack, more lack of everything, and the longer it goes on the more unlikely it seems that you will ever be able to enter the world of "normal" people and have any kind of reasonable life.
So when my mother writes to me, she triggers the absolutely helpless, totally vulnerable child who was me not just during my childhood but for all those years afterwards, and I fall back into believing that my life depends upon her, that only she can save me, that if she doesn't give me the love I crave from her, then i will die. Because at the primal level this is where we come from - if our parents don't love us, and don't look after us, we risk literally dying, and with the knowledge of my "sister"'s brief life, I was always all too aware of that. SO IT'S NOT SURPRISING THAT CONTACT WITH HER MAKES ME GO INTO A TAILSPIN OF ANXIETY AND FEAR AND PANIC that manifests itself as this horrible rage and shouting at DS (especially with the lack of sleep).... but at least today i did identify it after only a couple of hours or so, and now that I'm writing this I'm seeing so much more. I have to repeat some of this, it seems so important -
When we are children, our lives are literally in the hands of our parents.
If they don't love us, we risk physical death as well as emotional annihilation.
This is terrifying.
So their love seems like the one thing that stands between us and extinction.
So we grow up desperate for that love.
And even when we have tried our best to separate from them, whatever unresolved residuals of that fear and desperation are still in us are reactivated when they dangle the hope of that love in front of us, together with the threat of the denial of that love.
Maybe too many words, but never mind. I'm just getting that the craving for their love is so deep in me because it still seemed like the only thing that could save me for so long - because I was so very frightened that i was never going to be able to "grow up" and have a normal life. I was starting to have visions of myself as an aged spinster living alone in abject poverty, if I wasn't prematurely dead. But as I'm writing this I'm getting that - hello! I did it! I grew up, I got away, I did repair the damage enough to enter the world of normal people, and even though I still feel hugely at a disadvantage quite a lot of the time, I'm there. I saved myself. I'm breathing my own air now. And as therapist said this week, my job now is to integrate the work i've already done. Fuck it. I am a powerful woman. I have moved mountains. and I am a good mother to my son, no matter how bonkers they sometimes make me. And I want to start to recognise myself!!
As always, thanks to everyone on here, for making this thread such an amazing community. And thanks for prompting me to the chucking out of stuff and all that goes with it! xx