All About Her

When I had my first child, my mother insisted on coming over to see me the day I got out of the hospital.  I was on two painkillers and had 15 stitches.  I was very sore and extremely tired.

I had barely gotten home and settled into bed with the baby when she came over, loudly banging as hard as she could on the door.  My husband had stepped outside to tend to our outdoor stove so she just stood there banging on the door as hard as she could to get my attention.

I let her in and she requested that I get the baby from his bed so she could hold him.  Then she asked me to get up again and get her camera out of her bag and take a few pictures of her with him.  I was in pain, obviously uncomfortable and upset at how insensitive she was being, but she didn't seem to notice.  Seeing her hold my new baby son did not make me feel at all happy.  Instead I felt an intense urge of protectiveness come over me.  I wanted to snatch him back from her, run to my room and lock the door.  

She had called asking if I needed anything from the store because she was coming to see me.  I did in fact need a specific type of sanitary pad and asked if she could get them.  She agreed.  When she gave them to me though, I discovered that she had purchased the cheapest brand she could find that were not at all what I said I needed!  My mother gave birth 5 times; of course she knew what I needed!

Even my first child was all about her and how she was a grandmother.
He wasn't even "my baby" to her.  She kept saying that he was "her grandchild" like she owned him.  

That Lipstick Makes you look like a Slut

I remember once trying on a shade of my mother's lipstick.  It was called "Twig."  I put it on in front of the mirror one morning with my mother while we were getting ready for school.  She looked at me and her whole demeanor changed.  She snapped, "That's too dark for you.  It makes you look like a slut."  I was ashamed and wiped it off.

My mother soon decided that was her favorite color of lipstick, and even ordered several more just like it from AVON.  I never could understand what was wrong with me.  She said, "You don't want to go to school looking like a trollop."  Obviously as a teen girl I was trying to find out what DID look good on me.  I realize now that she was jealous.  That lipstick made me look older and quite attractive.

As I read more about Narcissistic mothers I am able to recall specific instances that I held onto and finally make some sense out of the fog I was kept in.  

Going Through the Museum

The purpose of this blog is to provide a place to put my painful memories.  I realize now, that if I do not have somewhere to let them out, look at them, acknowledge them, and finally leave them; I will forever carry them inside of me.  It is my hope that by writing down the stories of my life that have caused me to carry around so much shame, guilt, and hurt, that I can inspire others to do the same.

There is no shame in telling your story.

Because abuse survivors carry around so many lies about themselves, embedded in their psyche from their abusers; I want to start with some truths about myself.

This is incredibly difficult for me. 

Even as I type it out, I feel the potential judgement.

I worry what others will think about me when they read this.

Its ok.

I will not live like this any longer.

This will only get easier if I take the first step.

I'm tired of pretending that what my mother did to me didn't hurt.

I'm tired of not feeling like it was ok to share what happened to me.

I am tired of having my mother's words echo inside of my head every day.

I am tired of caring that family and friends believe her lies about me.

   

My therapist has explained that part of what I need to do to heal myself is to revisit those old memories where I had assigned blame to myself, and forgive the innocent and defenseless child that I was.  I have tried to do this for a week now and my brain shuts down when I try to pull old memories up.  I think this self preservation mechanism is an old imbedded habit.  My brain knows I cannot handle the pain of just randomly strolling through a lifetime of hurt, so it will not allow me to do it.  I can remember the very basic part of something, and my brain shuts it down.  The only way I can access a memory is to feel the emotion tied to it.  So if something happens right now that causes me feel an unpleasant emotion, I can suddenly flash back to the other times I have felt that emotion.  Once I can revisit the memory and acknowledge what I felt, I can determine why I felt it.  Then I can determine if what I felt (as a child) was accurate.  Did I feel like it was my fault that my 2 year old brother wasn't buckled into his carseat and fell out of our moving vehicle into the road? Yes.  Why?  Because my mother told me that it was my fault for not buckling him in before she started the van and drove off.  Was it really my fault?  No.  I was a little child who should have been taken care of by an adult.

There.  Now that is laid to rest.  The guilt I had assigned to myself for being a horrible daughter and sister can be squarely placed back where it belongs: on the adult who put 5 little children in a vehicle and drove off before making sure they were safe, my mother.

I have carried the guilt from memories like that around in my head, blaming myself for things that were not actually my fault.  These inaccurately assigned emotions of guilt have made me as an adult feel like I always have something to be ashamed of.  I cannot just suddenly pull every inaccurately assigned emotion out of my mind and flag it to be fixed.  

This is something that will take time.  My frustration at the moment, is that I do not know how much time and I desperately want to be assured that there is an end in sight.

It is my hope that by writing and typing things out a little at a time, I can give memories to these old unwelcome friends of mine named anxiety, depression, and raw fear.  I do not like showing my emotions because I often feel like they are out of my control.  Emotions are not logical and I am a logical person.  A person cannot logic their way through accurately functioning emotions, and my struggle in particular seems to be that my emotions are not quite functioning properly because I was raised by a mother with a personality disorder, who took a great deal of pleasure in toying with mine.

The one thing I have always been able to take solace in is my mind.  Emotions can be played with, but I always knew that what my mother was doing was wrong.  My mind was never fooled.  I can remember many times as a child I would not understand the meaning of something so I would quietly commit the word, phrase, or conversation to memory so I could remember it when I got older and understand the meaning of it.  I remember many times that I finally "got" the meaning of something and was able to immediately tie it back to the event I wanted to understand.

In many ways I am doing that exact same thing now.  I have finally been able to attain the proper lens through which to view my past.  The knowledge that my mother has a narcissistic personality disorder has given me the codebook to decipher all of those things that for far too long never made sense.

This is the beginning of me cracking the code to all of the things that have made me, me.