Replies to '07/17 Mommy Dearest'

I’ve read these posts time and time again, thought about responding but never have.  It was easier to keep my own life to myself. Scars tend to ache more if you rub at them…  I think what makes it so hard is that even though my mother was cruel, harsh and most often unloving is that few as they were, there were moments when she could be a what I needed her to be.  Never enough to ease all the times that she wasn’t but enough to make me tolerate her and hope for more.  It never came. 

She was rarely physically abusive but oh the things she would do or say to shred my heart and soul.  I often wish that she’d hit me, at least that would end.  But the words she used not only cut when she said them but did it continuously not only as they echoed in my head in her voice but as I learned to say them to myself.   

We lived with my grandmother, who was my salvation while she was alive.  She was where I learned what love should be but she died when I was 13.  I think my mom was jealous of my relationship with her mother because whenever they would get into an argument my mother would pile us three kids into the car to go for a ride while she cooled down.  She’d rant about all her life could have been if it weren’t for us kids.  Thankfully my brother and sister, being 4 and 5 years younger than me, don’t remember these rides or the details like I do.  They always ended with her driving by the children’s orphanage and telling us that we’d be living there if it wasn’t for Grandma…  Just one of so many ways that she made me feel unloved, unwanted and unworthy.  As I grew older the threats to be rid of me never ended, they just changed.  Funny too how they were always directed at me and not at my sister or brother.  I was threatened with juvenile homes, then just the streets as I grew older. 

Needless to say I had no self esteem.  I remember asking my friends why they were my friends because I could never see any value in myself and never could understand why they would want to be around me.  I look back on the person that I was then and I know just how far I have come.   

My mother spent most of the rest of her years emotionally tormenting me but through it something in me had changed.  I found value in myself.  I found my worth and I found my pity for the woman who lived such a miserable life that the only way she felt she had accomplished anything came by her devaluing those around her.  She was never going to be what I wanted or needed her to be.  She was human, flawed, and carried her own scars.  It would have been nice to have grown up in a loving whole family but I didn’t.  It’s a nice image but we’re none of us guaranteed the ideal life, we make of it what we will.  Only we have the power to make it good or bad.  I can look back now and know that as harsh as it may have been I learned some valuable lessons and skills by having to learn to cope with what had been my life. 

My mother passed away from her own neglect at the young age of 53.  She’d sworn she would never see the new century, not hard to self fulfill when you have so many health issues that you intentionally neglect managing like diabetes.  Every time she was in the hospital I was there to help where I could, including begging the health care professionals that she was committing slow suicide intentionally by doing everything she was told not to do.  I realized that the very destructive nature she’d turned on me had been turned in upon herself.  The professionals told me that they couldn’t force her to take help she hadn’t asked for herself.  That’s when I also realized that I couldn’t get from her what she couldn’t give herself.  When she died I have to admit that I felt a huge sense of relief.  I loved her and I miss her but the constant emotional rollercoaster she’d dragged me on my entire life had come to an end.  Of course the past would always been there but there would be no new pain piled on.  For the first time in my life I felt like a weight had been lifted from me because I’d somehow made myself responsible for more than I should have ever born.  I won’t say that my life is all that it should be, it has and will have a huge impact on my life everyday but I’ve learned how to survive when others would give up.  I’ve found that simple things make me happy and I work hard to see life in a positive light.  Dr. Phil is right, there’s no such thing as reality, only perception.  I choose to perceive it now much better than I’d had to live it to begin with.  It’s a work in progress.  *smile* 

The one observation that I’d most like to make is, we as humans can be cruel, history and current events prove that, but why is it that some go out of their way to be the ugliest to those whom they are supposed to love?  What twist occurs to bring about that condition?