They are USERS, predators, emotionally/mentally abusive and sometimes physically abusive....the list goes on.
I am reading those words Nomad posted like a little kid with a flashlight under the covers. Part of me is thrilling to the possibility that
this is what really happened, this is what is still happening and part of me is horrified that I would think such a thing.
As happened when MWM posted about the possibility of our adult children and verbal abuse, I can feel a changing, a challenging of a belief system whose legitimacy I never questioned.
I keep going back over those words. How extraordinary that Nomad capitalized USER.
Oh, and just because I said that subconsciously I
think they are likely insecure, doesn't mean I
think we should stick around for their crxp
There's that reading with a flashlight under the covers feeling, again.
I go back and forth and usually conclude that my mother is so wounded, so hurt, that she cannot function differently than she does. Since my father's death, she is meaner, more controlling.
I am blown away by the underlying similarities between abusive/dysfunctional families.
That means it wasn't my fault. It was never some shortcoming in me.
Here is a story, similar in a way to what happened with MWM's grandmother's bequest. My father had a garage full of every kind of tool you could imagine. Within weeks of his death, my mother was touring people through the garage, pointing out what a mess it was, and offering them my father's things. His clothes were given away the same way.
Nothing to family. Things that should have gone to the oldest son (a beautiful ruby ring my father wore, for instance) simply disappeared.
So many things that, like MWM posted, can hardly be believed happened and kept happening.
Anyway, my mother developed partiality toward one particular grandchild, and to my sister's husband, who has a certain amount of money and doesn't mind spending it on my mother. (As opposed to my own husband, who refuses to have her in our home.) My brother, openly shunned and discounted along with his grandchildren, confronted my mother about her unfair treatment of his grands.
That day, my mother contacted one of the fly by nights she had been taunting with the things in my father's garage. She told the person they could have this particular, huge and valuable item FOR FREE. The catch was that they had to come and get it that very day.
It was a tire changing machine. A huge thing, bolted to the cement floor, from what I understand. One of those machines used to put a tire on its rim, I think.
When my brother came to do whatever it was my mother wanted done the next day, she sent him into the garage so he would see the item was gone.
To this day, my brother still talks to my mother, and continues to service her every request.
Nothing was ever said about the item in the garage.
It was my mother who told me the story...triumphantly.
Because I don't want to feel guilty later (in other words I did this for ME) I sent him a lovely Channukah card, although it was not a personal card, and wrote a short note inviting him warmly again to call me if he wanted to as long as we treat each other with the respect we both deserve.
I love that you did this. The more clearly I see how awful my relatives really have been through telling the story here (and as each of us does when relating something like this, leaving out so many telling little toxicities) I think I will turn away from my family of origin even in my heart.
I do set boundaries and THEY can decide to cut ME off for those boundaries, but I have never told anyone, including Scott, never to call me again.
After some months, my sister did call. I was so surprised that she did so. I did speak to her three times. I don't pick up for her anymore. The last message she left had to do with how she intended to keep calling. It feels like a domination. She used to pursue me on FB the same way, now that I think about it.
Yes.
A clusterfick.
I love that.
She called him a liar and a jerk and hung up on him and he came downstairs puzzled that she had called him at all (she did not explain the inheritance to him) and he was upset
Poor kid. They have no problem victimizing even their grandchildren.
God, he stood up for me and raised his voice to her. Maybe he shouldn't have, but it felt validating to me. She hung up on him. My mother never called me again
My husband has always protected me from my mother. He has never been afraid of her in any sense. He never liked her, never took her seriously, though initially he treated her respectfully. I think that as the first son of an Italian mother, he may not have any mother wounds. My mother is neither frightening nor interesting to him. He resents the power she has over me. He doesn't like it that she could come into his home and that he would have to treat her like a queen, and in the more recent past, he HATED paying for her dinner when we would take her out.
We fought so often about my mother.
She passionately hates my husband.
"HOW DARE HE TALK TO ME THAT WAY????"
My mother doesn't do that. She talks about everyone behind their backs to other family members, to neighbors or husbands or wives of the child in question ~ or to their children. This includes my father, both when he was alive and now, when he is dead.
She secretly told my sister's second husband that my sister was mentally ill. She also told the third husband that...but he told my sister.
After he chastised my mother.
My mom is all about vengeance.
A neighbor came to me once with some of the stories my mother was repeating in a group they both belonged to. All I could do was apologize to the neighbor that she had been placed in that position. husband and I remain on good terms with those neighbors to this day.
I never confronted my mother, nor did I allow husband to do so.
My mother said the same kinds of terrible things about every one of her children and grandchildren to the man she began seeing after my father's death. As their relationship began to go South, he questioned both husband and myself about some of the things she had said, and offered to tell us more.
I refused. I was so tempted to tell him who she was, really...but that would have turned me into her. And I have fought very hard, all my life, not to be my mother. The strange thing is that now, as more and more time goes by since I've spoken to anyone in my family of origin at any length, I realize I probably never had to worry about being like my mother.
husband wanted to know, of course.
I understand what you are saying, pasajes, about having learned compassion through such painful childhoods. But the lifeview, the vengeful, contemptuous perspective of those who choose hate...we were (and in so many ways, still are) at such a disadvantage to those raised decently. I am thinking here of MWM's story about her first baby. When she was sick, and the mother saw in MWM's request for help only another opportunity to hurt her, and to reject both she and her son....
My mother did that, too.
I am able to heal from your story, MWM. The onus is not that I was not worth cherishing, anymore. I can see my mother's shortcomings more clearly in the things you have shared about your own mother, and your own pain.
I did the right thilng, I think, and was villified for it for the rest of her life.
Our mothers relish vengeance.
My mother's sister died about ten years ago, now. My mother did not attend the funeral, but she sent a bowl of beautiful fresh strawberries to the wake. That is all she sent. No card. She told us the remaining two sisters would know what it meant.
It was a triumph, for my mother.
Something about the sister who had died having made a scene about my mother having eaten all the strawberries when they were both newly married young women. The sister had planned to use those berries my mother had eaten to make something for her husband.
not mentioning me as her daughter in her obit.
I'm sorry that happened. What a childish, stupidly mean thing to do.
Your mother, like mine, could be very cruel.
That was MY siblings doing what THEIR mother wanted.
My mother uses the kids against one another, too.
Thank you for telling these stories. I can see the craziness in the mother when I read about your experiences. This is lifting a stain from my heart and my conscience. I always, always feel I could have been better, or kinder, or more understanding somehow, and these things would not have happened.
It shocks me to understand the similarities, the lust of vengeance, the disregard even of a grandchild, in our mothers.
Anyone can get pregnant and spit out a kid. Animals do it. The lowest form of creature can procreate.
You can't make this stuff up.
No. And words can never adequately describe the horror of what it was.
Cedar
