Hope the tone of this wont offend...
Just here for a rant... found an old thread on the subject of 'not all mother's love their children but most people think you are crazy if you suggest otherwise'. It resonated with me so much I wanted to start a similar conversation just for the SHEER RELIEF of being somewhere that people know that some mothers are the polar opposite of the fairy tale stereotype. I guess maybe stepmothers and mothers in law take the rap, and are the accepted 'shadow mothers' in society. But woe betide you should dare to besmirch the hallowed one who bore you...!!!!!!
I wonder if it is because the pain of maternal rejection is so profound, that society cannot handle it... tooo unpleasant. Let's brush it under the carpet and do this ;D and rejoice in false celebration of the Teflon mama's. Covert's being triple coated with Teflon that they apply themselves whilst howling at the moon.
Yes, I can feel for her troubled childhood, but cannot feel sympathy for someone who stubbornly refuses to address things despite having conversations with me about how crappy it all was for her.... she is a martyr who cannot bear to give up her cross.
A little anecdote about my supposedly 'loving' mother....
She agreed to drop me into town for a rare night out with a friend. I had gone to a lot of effort to get ready and felt quite nice. No comment on entering the car. After a while she said ' oh I went to a party last night. There was a young woman there, a friend of my friend. She was soo beautiful! She looked really stunning you know, she was dressed so well, so elegant she was...' This went on a while....
'Oh'. said I
Silence.
'Mum, don't I look ok?'... ( I fell into the trap of letting her know it had bothered me. Years before I knew about Narcs)
' Oh goodness!' said NM.' Of course you do!! How awful of me not to say... I should have said, yes, you look lovely dear. '
I left the car, not so sure I looked ok any more. I will never forget this calculating ( and very often repeated tactic) example of a mother clinically rejecting her daughter, whilst ensuring that she could slither out of it, excusing it as a moment of absent mindedness.
Loving mother?
Hah.
Don't make me laugh.
:fallingbricks:
:hug:
Thankyou threeroses... I really hope so. Get so tired these days... it is exhausting. Even when I don't think about it which I try not to, the stress is in my body.
i hear ya, clarity, about the stress being in your body. i've gotten some of it out, but there's plenty more. could that be part of all this rumination crapola i work so hard at avoiding, but it keeps coming back? hmmm . . . i think you hit on something for me. thanks. big hug!
So true...how the 'mother's taboo' is yet another setback many here experience. I learned long ago to avoid trying to explain why the very mention of the m upsets me so much. It creates more pain I don't need; thoughts about it usually roil within to where my heart feels engulfed in the sadness, anger, and hopelessness.
Still, here there are people who do understand, so for Clarity and everyone else affected by this, here's a collective sign of mutual support:
:bighug:
I call this the Motherhood Myth, clarity. It's quite simple: All mothers love their children. That's it.
I know, it doesn't make sense for a woman to be pregnant, carry the foetus for 36 weeks of watching her nutrition, limiting alcohol, preparing a layette and a cot etc etc... then offering cruel contempt when the babe arrives. It doesn't make sense, of course it doesn't. But a whole lot of us on this forum know it happens.
I managed to deny it myself until I was all of 35 and there was a devastating Final Straw. My first therapist some years earlier had made it explicit to me, but I was still trying to work the unworkable. Denial on a monstrous scale, matching societal sacred cows.
I hope in years to come there will be Mother's Day cards and Mother birthday cards that tell it like it was, for all the unloved children who still feel the obligation to acknowledge the day, are still afraid of repercussions if they don't. I remember those years of looking through the wishing wells and dicky birds, the sickly sentiments, how damned long it took to find anything I could bear to send.
We probably need ambiguous wording. I loved one response (I think it was Kizzie's) on a thread where one member was struggling with what to write on the card to accompany funeral flowers. It was along the lines of "We will never forget you". Very mild, considering the 'recipient' was dead.
Yep, the truth needs to come out. Not all mothers love their children. Many are competitive and hateful, especially with daughters.
Clarity, more than once I've thought you and I must be twins. In her one fauxpology, my mother said: "I don't know why I treated you the way I did. Perhaps I was jealous, you were so beautiful."
A good mother might delight in that, right? But oh no... ours had to attack it at every opportunity.
Oh Candid, the card thing.... those parental celebration days make me heave. And yet.... for the past many months ( oh, actually that would be 5 years?!!) have been sending mum those exact schmaltzy cards with loving messages ( excuse me while I throw up) as I fawned and fawned without realising, congratulating myself for being able to transform the relationship ( excuse me while I have a coughing fit)... and on my 50th a few weeks ago, NM gives me one of those 'born in 19--' cards, as impersonal and mass produced and generic as possible; she didn't write my name anywhere on the card or envelope, and the contrast was just deliciously ;slap me in the face with a wet haddock' enough to wake me up from my fawning slumbers ( along with a whole loads of other details that added together made me STOP denying things AT LAST...)
Would quite happily go back in time and rip every one of those schmaltzy monstrosities into confetti.
Had visions recently of her funeral and all sorts of satisfying moments when I reveal to all and sundry ( there will likely be masses of people there, as she has an obsession with this, always tells me when there were 'sooooo many people at the funeral!'when she has been to a 'good' one - it is her measure of a person ) that she was the mother from *. Of course, that is not likely, but I may find subtler ways to drop the hint.
If I go before her, she will be mortified at the lack of people at mine ( self isolation not being very conducive to amassing weeping mourners ;)) and I will have a snigger watching her from my cloud, as she cringes about my 'unpopularity' and the terrible burden of having such a misfit as a child.
Grrrrrrrrrr.
Quote from: clarity on July 11, 2017, 05:02:09 PM
And yet.... for the past many months ( oh, actually that would be 5 years?!!) have been sending mum those exact schmaltzy cards with loving messages...
Are you planning to give that up, hmm?
Quoteshe didn't write my name anywhere on the card or envelope, and the contrast was just deliciously ;slap me in the face with a wet haddock' enough to wake me up from my fawning slumbers ...
:rofl:
Well, am going to have a really long think about it...
:doh:
Err, YES!!!
Quote from: clarity on July 09, 2017, 05:33:32 PM
Yes, I can feel for her troubled childhood, but cannot feel sympathy for someone who stubbornly refuses to address things despite having conversations with me about how crappy it all was for her.... she is a martyr who cannot bear to give up her cross.
Sing it, clarity!
Having only just realised in the past few weeks how damaging my own mother was, that right there describes her to a t. HER life has been so horrible. SHE has endured so much. EVERYTHING is someone else's fault. She always has to be in the most pain, with the most problems, the hardest life. Puh-lease! It's like suffering is a competition and she has to be the winner!
Yesterday, at the mere suggestion that she had done things to hurt me, she became angry, defensive, and rude. I know now, she's not going to change. And beyond all the anger, that just makes me sad.
This is such a common theme here. It seems to be such a big factor for so many of us in developing this horrible condition, and there does also, often seem to be a link with sexual abuse via extreme isolation, inability to develop boundaries, lack of protection, and neediness for affection.
I spent years having to read dozens of cards to find one that didn't have a whole lot of extreme schmaltz about about a mother's love, dedication, selfless devotion etc. for mother's day. I always knew she didn't love me at all. Sometimes I couldn't find one and had to buy a blank card. Yet I loved her, and always chose one I thought she'd like and wrote in it lovingly, always spent a long time finding a gift I thought she would especially like. A post above reminded me that when it was my birthday I always got a card that looked like the cheapest she could find, and one I would be guaranteed to not like, and there was no message, although my name was in there.
Last year she gave me a raincoat. I know it was one she'd bought for herself but decided she didn't like because the pockets were full of hankies and sweet wrappers.
Oh big and loving hugs to all we poor motherless children.... :bighug: :bighug:... to some that would sound so over the top but this is a devastating reality that takes us years to realise and be able to face.
Tomorrow is big day for me post denial breakthrough first meet. Have told little me she can hide behind me the whole time and I will protect her which went down v well and has helped me feel stronger.... but still got the collywobbles. So good to know I can report back to base camp after I go over the top!!
:spooked:
along with the overt abuse, may i put in a word for mothers who simply kept quiet, out of the way, did their jobs as wife and mother by having an impeccably clean house, doing laundry by hand, hanging it outside, (we didn't have automatic washer and dryer back then - just a wringer washer and a washboard) and not teaching us anything about it? 'you'll have all your married life to do these things', but no domestic goddess was i.
our family was devoid of hugs, gentle touch, gathering in when distressed. also devoid of adult disagreement - in 21 yrs. living with them, i saw them have a fight one time. i didn't even learn how to disagree/fight in a relationship. my dad told me once 'you're mother would die for you'. i almost died for my narc daughter.
trauma and abuse come in so many different forms. friends and cousins wished they lived with my family cuz it looked so wonderful compared to what they were enduring. unfortunately, it stunted me in so many ways. when i've talked to my best friend about my c-ptsd and my parents a few years back (she spent a lot of time at our house) she pooh-poohed everything i said.
the mother taboo is alive and well, even with those we believe will believe us. they usually don't. my parents are both dead a long time, but i really feel for you who have to continue to struggle to 'honor' yours. i have no idea what my relationship with them might have been like over the years. hugs to you all.
I've got a new moniker for Mother Superior. Sacred Cow.
San, my own Sacred Cow also prided herself on a house in which not a mote of dust could be allowed to settle.
I've always said and believed that open heart surgery could have been safely carried out on our kitchen floor, when I was a kid.
In my quest to rid myself of the ickyness that comes with all this, I did some poking around and found this article. It may not work for everyone, but I figure any resources that we can share are a good thing :)
http://www.narcissisticmother.com/angry-at-a-narcissistic-mother-part-ii
Thanks for that, songbirdrosa. It leads to http://www.narcissisticmother.com/piper-score, for all those whose mothers were so covert we sometimes think we made it up.
I got six reds and one yellow. :aaauuugh:
Tidiness was the thing for our NM... her way of controlling things, of course we were just another thing to tidy and keep 'nice'.
Apart from public occasions when she needed to be the 'star'. For one huge such event, I, aged 11, awkward and self conscious was made a brown waistless tent dress out of jersey slub, and wore that with my tan tights, and black school shoes. NM had a 'shop bought' designer pale green chiffony thing. She beams out of the photos on that sunny spring day, while I am rigid and mortified, not really knowing why then. Of course, the story about this now is ' but you CHOSE to wear it!'... and it is laughed at. It's a useful memory as it helps me to stay strong when I need to.
I remember going to buy my first pair of grownup sandals for the school disco. She was in a FOUL mood the whole time. Hated me to grow up, to be blossoming. I felt guilt and shame for wanting those shoes, but loved them too... agony. I knew something was missing ( shared happiness and excitement at rite of passage, her pride in me) but didn't know what.... big feature I think is that most of the time we didn't know why we were unhappy and so it was inevitable that we would consider ourselves idiots or ungrateful or greedy.
Trying to exist between the narrow confines of NM and PAF's expectations, no room to move, to breathe, to express myself without fear, to grow into somebody authentic.
Our family too .... a ''model'' from the outside. But a model is all it was ... a mock-up, like one of those film sets that is just cardboard and props around the back... people would have been so shocked if they had known how devoid of love it all was. No wonder we kept quiet though- it even fooled us .... almost.
I thank God that there was the niggle in me that kept me rebelling against it, though sometimes that rebellion was the tiniest blue flame.
Candid, I got six reds and a yellow too! I didn't think it was anywhere near that bad! :stars:
Clarity, that sounds dreadful, it's wonderful that you still had an inkling that something was wrong, though. My mother was the opposite. She would never do any cleaning (unless it was her own bedroom when things were getting mouldy), and she expected me to pick up her slack. Every other day it was 'do the dishes', 'vacuum the floor', 'mop the bathroom', 'tidy the kitchen'! And if I didn't she would yell, scream, insult me, call me lazy, tell me how much of a burden I was. To this day, I still have trouble with tidying things because she basically made me afraid to do it!
I think I've experienced this too. I always felt like something was wrong despite my mother's effort to make everything (including me and siblings) look perfect, nice, tidy. I can't tell if it was out of narcissim that she did all that she did but at times, my sister (who is the only person I can count on really) wil tell me that she doesn't think our mom loves us and it makes me very, very sad. Like, my life is a lie. Plus, getting bombarded everyday with messages that tell you that a mother always loves her children and images of ''perfect'' families makes you feel all the more invisible and like what you're experiencing can't possibly be true.
Glad this thread got revived. Took that little scoring test and what do you know, six reds and a yellow. I didn't think it was that bad either. >.>
Reading this thread has reminded me of a bunch of stuff though, in a good way that's helping me come to terms with things that have happened, things I've forgotten. Like the time when my mother said I wasn't feminine enough, that "why can't you just act like a normal girl?". Or calling me a 'dag' a few times per week because I enjoyed wearing baggy trousers and hoodies since that made me feel comfortable and safe.
Also SUPER glad that this thread is back because it speaks to my soul. Growing up with an NM and trying to heal is SO MUCH HARDER because of the prevalence of this Mother Myth. This is a big throwback but Clarity, I think you're exactly right when you said that "maternal rejection is so profound that society cannot handle it." And I wonder sometimes if even victims like us, specifically, can't really process that rejection because of how badly we wish the myth was true. The same was we buy into all the horrible thoughts NMs put into our heads, we buy into this idea that all mothers - even ours - really do love us and we just aren't seeing it. I mean, *, I got reds straight down the board on that quiz and I immediately found myself going back and knocking down some of my answers because it couldn't really be that bad, right? It's just so tragic that any of us should have to question our actual experiences just because society says mothers are supposed to be some way.
Rant over, haha. Love to all of you other motherless friends :grouphug: It's a tough battle but I'm happy to have found this group so we can try it together. You are believed here, and you are valued here.
6 reds & 1 yellow too, even after all this time.
G
My therapist suggested that I write a fairy story about some stuff that was revealed in a sandplay session - How would I refer to m? I came up with "Evil False Mother" I found it fitted rather well! (Hindus have the concept of the "terrible mother" which perhaps was somewhere in my mind when I came up with this title.)
I managed to bypass m-day most of my life by refusing 'to engage in marketing hype' which I actually believe is the case - luckily it was one thing she did not like either... so I won a minor bit of breathing space... She was able to justify to her friends (and place herself on a throne of uniqueness) by explaining that her daughter had seen through the marketing hype (yours had not). I wish I had seen through her hype years before... the anti-m day things started just out of instinct ie before I 'got the picture'.
Even though m had had a crap childhood it was never talked about - she had risen above it and was now perfection itself!
The stories of the perfect house rang so true - our house had to look like a film crew could turn up any minute, as our house was featured in a home magazine (which made her so awfully proud) it was always possible another would turn up. One story m loved to tell was of a dinner party where she dropped the desert and a guest came in and said 'don't worry, just pick it up, your floor is as clean as a hospital no germ could possibly remain alive'...she basked in the perfection of her clean floor for years.
my goodness, it feels so good to tell these stories in a safe place...
Yes, the Piper questionnaire is pretty spot on, I do it every now and then when I am forgetting how bad it was - all red. I get her newsletter every few days - it is really excellent...
I got red right across the board! Yikes. After all this time.
Though a lot of what is written about narc mothers doesn't fit mine at all. So I'm a bit confused. She fits Borderline Witch description better. Pretty dysfunctional, whatever way you look at her.
Quote from: green tree sky on November 03, 2017, 04:18:17 AM
I wish I had seen through her hype years before... the anti-m day things started just out of instinct ie before I 'got the picture'.
It's really interesting how your gut instinct told you that something was wrong before you really understood what was happening to you. You'd think that being raised the way you were - which sounds awful, by the way - your mind would be so used to the "wrong-ness" that you wouldn't even notice, but somehow your natural instinct told you otherwise. It just goes to show how powerful biology is when it comes to trauma and stress. I hope that this makes it easier for you to recover and grow in strength.
Thank you Resca: You are right that somewhere there is a little spark within the biology - the body's wisdom... strangely though it is a double edge sword as that body wisdom is also the thing that helped us create (now-unhelpful) tools when we where children to get through the * of being a child in a dysfunctional home.
I was really confused about the feeling of 'wrongness' when I was a kid but I did think it was that way for everyone.
Blueberry: I did read about Borderline witch and they sound pretty dysfunctional indeed and very confusing, it must have been awful. I am sure there are huge variations in our FOOs for our experiences to not always fit with other's stories, it does not make your experience less real.