SORRY IT'S SO LONG. TLDR; my mom is very vain, pointed out hurtful things about my appearance my whole life, tells me I am sensitive now that I speak out about it and is weird about how much she shares with me. She makes me feel like her best friend or spouse in the way she has vented to me since I was young. What's below only scratches the surface.
Don't know if my mom is one, This is mainly because my mentally ill father was a narcissist and before this, the sexually abusive stepfather raising her was also one. She’s had a life of experience in dealing with narcissists herself and has always been quick to denounce them or accuse others of such. Now that I'm older and have spoken out against her, she has called ME crazy, pointed out that I don't even cross her mind enough to care, and compared me to my father who is mentally ill. I just need to know if I am actually crazy here because becoming my father is a worry of mine.
I always felt confused by this growing up because, if she was able to see the signs of a narcissist, and blatantly hated them, it could make no sense (to me) that she’d allow herself to be one. Therefor, I rationalized through anything she did.
She’s never sabotaged my success, she’s always helped financially or done things for me before her. I feel guilty writing this because I know there are worse parent situations some of you have gone through and I also feel guilty because I appreciate what she's done. She is a giving human in general.
My whole life she’s treated me as her best friend, I am the eldest of three and from a very young age she’d rant to me about my dad being horrible or vent to me about her own father. Her life in general was something she was always telling me about and when I was young I thought she was just a **cool mom** who I was close with. She was very open and I thought it was because I was mature or maybe it was for education's sake.
She also has bad anger issues and has a history of lashing out or getting physical with my younger brother and I whenever she was in a bout of anger. I never thought the physical punishment affected me as much as the things she said to me. She’s always been very much about looks. My mom is pretty, fit and young (had me at 16)
I have a distinct memory of myself in kindergarten, wanting to wear overalls with my hair up (so boys wouldn’t try to bother me or look up my skirt) and her yelling at me telling me I’ll look like a boy and I always do. Growing up, she’d make note that my cousins were weirder looking than me, and at one point, she started talking about how chunky one cousin in specific was getting.
It wasn’t until later on (5th grade maybe) I began to develop a belly and shed do things like pat it as she walked by. I was slowly growing self conscious of this and then finally one day she tells me I’ve gained a stomach and she jokes that this is her karma for talking about my “fat cousin”
Grade 6 rolls around and I want to stay up to watch shark week. She starts to tell me I can stay up if I agree to work out with her. And I’m like okay COOL THAT’S A HELL OF A DEAL. No brainer. So I spend that entire school year working out to extend my bedtime for whatever show I liked at the time. This is also when I first learn about depression as I begin to have depressive spells. I attribute this to my dad.
Grade 8 to freshman year rolls around, I’m starting to have my best friend come over and this is about when my physical appearance begins to bother me. I mean I’m a girl in middle school.
I still dress like a boy at this point and my best friend is very confidently girly. I want to be that way but I just feel like I’m drawing too much attention. I find a nice middle with a bit of dye, mascara and a face powder.
My mom tells me always about how pretty my friend is or how cute her sense in style is. She compliments me too but no where near as much or often. At this age, she is always telling me I look a little chunky, I look swollen, asking if it's my time of the month, and sometimes asking if I’m pregnant because I just look “too swollen for that to be normal”. While when my friend comes over she says things like “I’m so jealous! You’ve got such a cute shape” or “ohhhh to be young again”. During this time I am a problem child, not going to school, lashing out at teachers and other kids. I am very upset with my father and very depressed. I'm begging to see doctors and she tells me that they'll only drug me in to a zombie. and then she gets pregnant with her boyfriend’s baby (my sister).
My sister is a very bright and girly kid. My mom plays dress up with her saying things like “I can’t believe I have a girl! And as she grows, my mom treats her more motherly than she ever did with me. It begins to feel (comparatively) that I am a friend of the family, and my siblings are the children. I begin to attribute that to her being 17 years older and knowing better as a parent. I figure she was just very young. As my sister grows older, so do I and it begins to feel more and more that my mom hates me. In her bouts of anger, Fights with her become more physical and she is pushing me against walls, pulling my hair and telling me things like I am not her friend and that she won't hesitate to suffocate me, tie me up and let me wake up in a desert. I began to feel confused. If I'm not her friend, and I'm not her daughter, then what am I? Arguments with her growing up were always calling me pathetic, a loser, crazy, saying I am just like my father or my father's family, I am too sensitive, or that I am selfish. I knew to some degree I was very careless and ungrateful though.
I go about high-school accordingly, eventually falling in to a "relationship" with an older and abusive boy who also has abusive friends, a weird uncle and a generally bad crowd. During this time, there is absolutely no way of knowing that I need help as I hid it very well but I have a distinct memory of her finding out her best friend is in an abusive relationship at the time. She turns to me and says that the strongest girls she knows always end up in them and that they're essentially stupid for staying. It turns in to a really long judgmental conversation about how she doesn't understand women who stay in those sorts of things. and I remember just going to my room and bawling my eyes out thinking I did this to myself and I would have to reap what I sowed.
I am 20 now and still living at home (moving to Newyork to finish school soon) but when I graduated high-school 3 years ago and began college, I completely began to distance myself from my mom. I was getting out in the world and learning so much about PEOPLE. I had to unlearn a lot of my immediate biases and I just couldn't help but shake this feeling like she had instilled some permanent negativity in me about men, self love, standards and judgement of others. I was always very independent and as a woman I flourished in it, did a lot of traveling, learning, laughing and had an insurmountable amount of self growth. I care a lot less about how I look and I am fairly confident. However my mom still will randomly tell me I have gained weight or if I go out without makeup she'll ask " You're not even going to get ready?? or say "You're going out like that?" This holds a lot less weight not that I am an adult and just shrug her off. I have been through and done a lot to not care about things like that and Eventually, I came to meet my wonderful boyfriend who is amazing in every regard, INCLUDING uplifting me as a woman. For me things felt like they'd been FINALLY falling in to place until about 8 months ago.
I had a miserable high. I was crying, throwing up, paranoid, hearing things and I felt hate in my heart that I had NEVER felt. My mom came down in to my room and starts trying to help because at this point I am shaking and I can feel my whole body doing so. What I remember is fuzzy but I remember her saying to never bring drugs around her kids ever ( my younger siblings) and I remember asking if she hates me, her saying that she just hates that my stepdad was right about who I am. (I still have no clue what that means) I remember at some point saying her approval mattered to me and at another point saying I found some body who loves me. There's a final point I remember before entirely passing out where I told her she was a bad mom for not paying more attention to what I was going through and that was that. The next morning she tries to bring it up and I say I have no interest in doing so and that it never happened. I still don't know what I told her. That was weird for me because I do not and have not ever shared with her. Anything she knows about me is via social media or going through my phone secretly.
It's a few months after that incident and I go to see a doctor for medication. My mom insists on coming with and after the appointment, she asks what I said. When I explain the way I went about things she shakes her head and I tell her "don't do that." It sparks an argument that ends with her saying she wants to drive my side of the car in to the diesel next to us and let it crush me. That crushed me. That was it for me and since then any time she wanted to talk I told her she needed to see a therapist or speak to a friend and I would not be there for her emotionally as I didn't think it was good for me and that we need to just not be as close. This offends her.
She boasts about who I am now, my goals, things I am doing and what I've done for myself as an animator/artist but I can't help but feel that one on one she holds some animosity for me after the incident. When ever I leave out of state to New York she will get very needy and constantly ask what I am doing or start to rant about how much she hates her life. I know for a fact she also checks the location on my phone as our phone plan lets her. A few months ago when I was away from home, she sent me a long text apologizing for never putting us first and only putting men first. She said she had wasted her life relying on men and in turn had screwed me and my brother up. She was saying she was depressed and financially stressed and this sounds so horrible but she ruined my trip. I felt like I was finally away from her and she picked the best worst time to ruin things for me. I had always cheered her up in these instances and when she had sent this I couldn't help but feel it was selfish of her to do, because she knew i'd feel obligated to say something helpful. Spent that night worrying about her mental state and how it would affect my younger siblings. ( who I worry about leaving when I move out, as I don't want them to step in as her emotional crutch. It is a tiresome job) When I came back from said trip, she was going out partying or drinking a lot and it was weird. I was left having to care for my sister every weekend and at some point she had said that my trips to New York just make her realize how much she doesn't do. I started to feel like I couldn't go out there again because it would end up with her leaving my siblings at home alone often in the way she was doing.
This led to a fight a few weeks ago about how I feel trapped here because I don't want to leave them and that even when I try to go out of state she will say in advance that it's fine but when the time comes, she attacks me. I told her I shouldn't feel like a co parent and that our relationship is unhealthy and she told me I don't know the first thing about unhealthy relationships and that I am lucky she isn't as bad as she could be. We pretty much don't talk now and if she speaks to me I am very short. If I speak out she accuses me of manipulating her like my father did and I always worry that I am unknowingly do it so I would much rather just be quiet
I've been feeling bad about it and have to wonder if she is a narcissist or I am like my father. It's weighing on me heavily and I just don't know where to go with this. I know I'll be gone soon but my heart feels massively unresolved and also I love my mom and hate to leave my siblings.
Submitted March 25, 2019 at 10:52AM by MyFavoriteWinter https://ift.tt/2UYcNEE
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