My Mom And I Get Along Now....This is long.. Comments Closed
This post could be triggering to abuse survivors. Please use caution...
I want to say upfront that I will be closing comments on this post. I am going to talk about my mom, and I still struggle with PTSD from some of the things I went through with her. Even if people were to comment in ways they couldn't see as hurtful, there would be a possibility of triggering my PTSD, so I am closing comments. I am saying this at the beginning in case whoever reads this would rather not read something they can't comment on. This will be long, as it covers both my mother's and my own abuse.😔
My mother was an abused child herself. Her father abused her. In his defense, he was abused, too, and my mother abused my brother and I. My mother was also neglected by her mother. When my mother was little, her mother would go to the bar and leave my mom(starting at about 4 years old) alone to fend for her 2 little brothers and herself. This was after her mother and father divorced. 😔
There was rarely any food in the house, and my mother and my Uncles, before they passed, would fondly remember how my mother would go outside and gather dandelions to make them dandelion soup. This is how they survived. Sometimes my grandmother (their mother) would leave them alone for 2-3 days before she would come back. Most of the time, my mother and her brothers lived with their grandmother, just as my brother and I lived most of the time with these same people ( our great-grandparents). 😔
Anyway, my mother was abused by her father from a young age. When she was 12 years old, she ran away. When she got off the bus, as she tells us, the pimps saw her as green, and in no time at all, she was a working girl. When she was 13 years old, the 2 men she was with robbed a gas station, and they picked them all up. They put my mom in a girl's school for her role in the robbery, and to wait for her father to come pick up his runaway daughter. She told me she was completely numb to all emotions when she ran away. 😔
Well, she got back home, returned to all the same crapola, and started drinking. She was 14 by then. They had a place in our hometown, back then, that they called Alice's Rock House. This woman named Alice would make available booze and drugs, and young girls and men would come and partake. My mom said sometimes she would wake up from being passed out to find a cousin on top of her. That is why when I found out my parents were related, I was kinda freaked out. However, they are more distantly related (around the 2nd cousin area).😔
When my mom was 15, she got pregnant with me. Although the adults tried to force her to name a dad for me, she said she couldn't. Everyone figured it was just because of how she had been living, and no one really questioned it. Later( through DNA), I found my dad. My father was the same father that my 1st cousin once removed had. You see, this man had gotten my grand aunt (disabled) pregnant at 15 years old, and then came back to my family line and got my mother pregnant at 15, too. He was 25 years older than my mom. Given my mother's reputation, no one cared anyway. My mother, in reality, didn't name my father because my father was so hated by the family for what he had done with my grand aunt that naming him would have made my mother's family disown her.😔
I was born on my mother's 16th birthday. She was drinking (She drank through her whole pregnancy. She didn't know better), and I was born drunk. They took me and put me in a private nursery immediately after my birth. I was set to be adopted. The family had all decided this, and my mother was a minor, so back then, she had no say in this. 😔
The only one who didn't know I was to be adopted out was my great-grandfather. When he found out, as the story goes, he came to the hospital and told them, "No great-grandchild of mine will be adopted out!" and he demanded they open the curtain on my nursery. It was a good thing, too, because I was blue. I hadn't been breathing, and no one noticed. 😔
Well, within a month of being released from the hospital, I was living with my great-grandparents because it became clear very soon that my mother wasn't able to mother. They told my mom she couldn't have me back until she got married. So when I was 6 months old, she married a man who needed to get married because he preferred men, but didn't want his parents to know. So they married. I am told that he really loved me and took very good care of me.❤
My mother couldn't tolerate the marriage, though, because she had to go outside the marriage to get her needs met (and her drive was high), and for some reason, cheating wasn't something she could live with herself about. Before they divorced, my mother got pregnant (not from her then husband) with my little brother, so my little brother carries this man's last name.
Life didn't get any easier after my mom's first divorce. Now she was 18 and had 2 kids. There was one step-dad and a step-brother, and another divorce before my mother met the nightmare of our lives. When I was 4 years old, my mother married the man who had been married to Alice, from Alice's rock house. Alice had divorced him because he had abused her daughter, but he didn't get out of her house without getting shot in the ear...My little brother and I weren't allowed to chew ice because it hurt the ear he had been shot in. This man abused my mother, my little brother, his own son (my step-brother), and me. He abused his second wife's daughter, too, as I have already talked about. I'm positive that there were probably others as well. I forgot to mention that before this man married my mother, he was with my grandmother( my mom's mom). He was a real predator.💔
Why did my mom marry this man, knowing all this? Because it was normal to my mother for fathers to be with daughters. She didn't see a problem. She hadn't minded being abused, and didn't figure I would either. She was dead wrong about that, though. She always projected how she had felt as a little girl, about things, onto me. This is why she had no pity for me. She figured she had deserved her abuse, and I deserved mine too. Now I am going to stop here about my abuse because I don't want to have to make this an adult post. I want to try and keep it as mildly adult. So nothing else can really be said on this post, except that my little brother and I were abused in all ways possible.💔
I didn't talk to my mother for 20 years because my PTSD was so bad that just hearing her voice triggered me. I also needed time to work through and get over all the abuse I have lived through. Now, though, I talk to my mom on the phone almost every night. I still get triggered sometimes, and when I do, I don't answer the phone for a day until I am grounded again. 😔
The thing about abusive parents is that most of the time, they were abused too. They (the therapists) told me that I would grow up and abuse my kids, too, but I always knew they were wrong. They were dead wrong. If I ever got anything right in life, it was that I broke the line of abuse in my family. My kids never knew any abuse. However, being too overprotective ( as this is what I became of kids, all kids) had its own set of problems. 😔
So, as part of healing from the abuse I lived through, I had to see everything from my now adult understanding. I had to see that my mother was abused, too. I had to see that my mother was in the state mental hospital 3 times and was a very mentally ill woman, finally being diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder). I had to see my mother as the broken little girl she was. Once I did this, there was no way I could feel anything except pure forgiveness, deep love, and the wish that I could have protected her.❤
The terrible thing about all this, though, is that my mother is very old. Her father has been her guardian since her first time in the state mental hospital. He turns 96 this year. My little brother just got out of the Penitentiary, so when my grandfather dies, more than likely I will be asked to become her guardian. I am not sure I will be able to do this, though, because she triggers me still. I want to be the bigger woman. I want to be able to take care of my mom, but I really don't see how I can. If I'm triggered all the time, it wouldn't be good for me, my mother, my Husband, my kids, or my grandkids. I wouldn't be able to leave my mother alone with anyone, even our dogs. That is a story for another time.😔
Anyway, this became a long post, and all I really wanted to say is that people hate abusive parents, but abusive parents were once abused kids, too. The key to overcoming the trauma of your abuse is seeing this, and letting this knowledge make you understand more that you were not unlovable, you didn't deserve to be abused, and it wasn't your fault. It makes it easier to forgive your abusive parents, so you can heal.❤
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This post is closed and no longer available for commenting.
