Whispy my mum says she coped with 3 but clearly she didn't. It's interesting how my parents can rewrite themselves. She claims that no-one helped her, but she definitely dumped me on my nanas every weekend.
My father likes to portray himself as a loving dog owner. But I can remember vividly how he used to take our dog out to the woods so he could 'teach him to behave'. He used to beat that dog with a stick. He beat our old cat becuase she became incontinent. And yet now he likes to give the impression of being the mild-mannered gentle dog owner. Maybe he is now, I don't know.
The rages my parents would go into do not bear thinking about. But it was the causal hitting, pushing, poking me around, the subtle ways she had of making me trip over and the look of satisfaction on her face, it gave her pleasure. Then she would say 'oh I didn't hit you hard' etc. etc. Sometimes she did hit me hard, sometimes she didn't, but it was those looks of pleasure that hurt the most. I think it really damaged my sense of self worth. It also led to a lot of my confusion as a child, because someone you love so much gaining pleasure from being mean to you really messes with your head.
I still feel a bit of a fraud talking about these things- like it was not my life. I wonder if this is purely because of the 'gaslighting' of my parents, or if it is do do wit withdrawing from it myself as a form of self preservation?
wtsa, I was thinking about the sibling thing, and I think a lot of my problems stemmed from the way my mother dealt with normal, natural sibling rivalry.The way she talks about it is very strange, alomst like I should be blamed for it- it was my fault becuase if I hadn't been born my sister would not have felt jealous, and her way of dealing with it was to be rejecting of me, to always make sure my sister felt better than me, had nicer things,was the only beautiful girl, clever one etc. My sister, according to my mother was jealous of me being home with my mother when she went to school- so she would make her feel better about it by telling her she never played with me or took me anywhere- which was true, of course. But I don't know which came first.
It was so damaging because it fed all my sister's negative emotions but never allowed her to process them and put them in proportion. I've seen it in a much miilder form with one of my Ds's friends. His father gets him anything another child has,I presume so he doesn't feel jealous,but of course all it does is give a massive validation to feelings of jealousy, becuase if his father thinks it needs to be gratified it must be a really big deal, to a childs mind. The result is that this little boy always has to have ten of whatever someone else has. He can never just say'oh that's a nice thing, lets play with it' like my son and his other buddies can,or even just say 'I wish I had that' and let the feeling pass. Other people having stuff becomes a great source of anxiety to this boy. And I think in a similar way my sister is trapped in this loop of needing to feel better than me, or know that I have less or whatever, so that she can feel ok and loved by my mother. Does any of this make sense? I don't know.