What to do with an abusive birth mother?
I have this “intense loyality” that is common for adult children of alcoholics. I was so loyal to my birth mother, who will from now on be refered to as D., I was so loyal to her that up until now I have continued to put up with her dysfunctional and disrespectful behaviour. But now, I’m done.
On the one hand, I feel so done that I know it must mean that I have reached another level of healing because I feel whole. I feel strong. Of course I feel nervous too, but I have this internal force of power that has given way to such a conviction in me to no longer let her use and abuse me and my husband so that I can protect my own daughter, G. from ever being used and abused from her.
Where I’m at right now with her is that I live in a house that she bought for me and my husband to live in when our daughter was born 4 years ago. Her husband co-signed for the house. Since then, he’s returned to drinking (after being sober for 20 years), he’s cheated on her for 2 years, AND SHE DIDN”T LEAVE HIM! She stayed with him and went into this very co-dependant lifestyle that alienated every one else in her life, expect for my younger sister who is also an alcoholic…she gets a long really well with D. is it any wonder?!?!
So anyway, last June I miscarried and then my health never recovered. I got sicker and sicker and we didnt’ know what was wrong. I had to shut down my home business and was home with my daughter all winter suffering from stomach aches, fatigue, mal-nurishment, headaches, dizziness etc etc. It turns out I have celiac disease but I didnt’ know that at the time. Anyway, I really really really needed D. during all this illness and guess what!!! She neglected me — AGAIN!
Of course, she has this very manipulative way of making it not looking like she’s neglecting me. Like saying, “R. I’ll help you anytime you need help”…and then when I call her for help she tells me how busy she is and this is not a good time, or she agrees to help “tomorrow” and then before “tomorrow” comes she calls to let me know something else has come up. Urg!
So the thing is, she’s neglected me physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually for my entire life and has always treated me as second class citizen to my younger sister A. And for some reason, I just kept forgiving her. Forgiving her. Forgiving her.
I’d be all compassionate and think, “Forgive her, she had it rough growing up and she’s doing her best. Give it another go.”
But that all fell apart this winter when I needed her, when I was suffering so much every day and was really not sure if I was going to make it to the next day. I needed her on so many levels, for months, and she never ever came to help. She just fed me all these lines and had so many excuses and when I tried to talk to her about it she’d get mad and defensive and call me names!
She’d call me names?!?!? I was like, “Mom! Grow up…who calls people names anymore?”….I’d think it but I wouldnt’ say it of course, I’d be all tactful and respectful and have this attitude of “let’s get to the bottom of this…let’s work it out…” and then, one day, about 2 weeks ago it all became clear…..
It won’t ever get worked out. She’s always been like this and may be forever. She doesn’t “get it” and she has no interest in trying. She’s used me; she’s manipulated me; she’s lied to me; she’s abused my trust; and the list goes on and on.
And as my husband and I talked about it I realized that this is it. She will never be who I want her to be. She will never mother me. And I’m not going to wait around anymore as the patient little do-gooder hoping that she one days sees me and acknowledges me and says sorry for the years of abuse.
Fortunatly, my husband sees her for who she really is too and we were able to make a plan. The new plan is…no more contact until/unless she is willing to talk about things “for real” and is willing to acknowledge the behaviours that she has that are very disrespectful to me, my husband, and daughter.
And I never said that she couldnt’ see my daughter, but when she emailed me repeatedly asking to see her I said she could come at Tuesday at 10 and she blew up…(she hates when I “plan” for things and hates to “be controlled”) but that’s one of the things that my husband and I are doing now with her to set boundaries clearly.
SOOOO she calls my father who lives on the other side of the country and must have balled to him saying that I “wouldn’t let her see her grand-daughter” and then he writes an email to my husband (SUCH DRAMA!) asking why oh why can’t D. see her grand-daughter…and it is all laughable…because that is just her little manipulation.
The difference is this time my hubby and I are doing it differently. Detached from her outbursts. Detached from her predictable sneakiness.
However strong I feel, there is still a part of me that is afraid that she is going to barge down my door. Getting her upset in my childhood was BAD BAD news and I can feel my little inner child just quivering. Rational thought says she wouldn’t do that…but still I feel the fear.
What would I do? Not engage in her banter, I would ask her to leave and come back again when she’s calm and able to talk…and then I would call the police. I just would because when I was a kid I didn’t know that I could have done that and I wish I would have been taken out of that abusive home and raised in one that was loving and kind. But now I know I have rights and I do not need a screeming yelling woman on my property and I can ask the police to protect me. I dont’ care how it looks to the neighbours.
It’s not fun to be on this side of recovery…but it is EMPOWERING. I feel empowered and more whole than I have ever felt before. Now, the woman that birthed me is seen for who she really is, a sick and diseased woman who is 54 years old and has continued to make choices for her entire life that have only been self-serving and have been very hurtful and neglectful of my feelings and my being (as well as others around her).
And for the first time in my life, at the age of 31, I am free. Deeply free.
It’s new and strange but wonderful.
What am I doing here?
Ahhh…the relief of writing in blogsphere without being known. I got the idea from November Blue (www.novemberblue.wordpress.com) of writing anonymously about recovery and so I started my own recovery blog. Hers focuses primarily on her eating disorder but that is only one element of a life with difficult parents and difficult life situations. Though I’ve never had an eating disorder I have a few illnesses of my own.
I’m sure I take the record for being the “luckiest” grand-child alive since all FOUR of my grandparents became alcoholics before dying –all before the age of 80. My last grand-parent died when I was 18. She used to sit around in her smoke filled house with the curtains drawn and windows shut complaining and gossiping about the neighbours as she poured herself another scotch or whatever it was. I didn’t like going there as a kid but I tolerated it. When she died, I fell on my knees with my head in my hands and cried not for the loss of her, for she was a woman I had never really known, but for the loss of a total generation of elders.
Now I often think of them as my Grand-Parent Unit. I ask for guidance. I beg for explanations. I seek for solace. Because the only legacy they have left me is that of alcoholism. Though I haven’t drank in 11 years, I still feel the sickness in me. It’s in my genes. It’s in my DNA. I can’t escape it. I can only try to cope with it.
And cope with it is what I do, and what I did, growing up in a home with an emotionally constipated and broken mother and an emotionally vacant and borderline personality father who drank and hid it. Sometimes I don’t know how I coped with it but I did and now I’m here to write about it.
Why “Purple Chasm”?
Chasm because of the great divide…and because of the valley inbetween the great divide. Sometimes is seems that the ache I have in my soul and spirit extends down, down, down into the depth of a chasm within me and sometimes when I’m least expecting it out comes a feeling, an emotion, or a behaviour that was lurking in the dark of that chasm that I thought was long gone along with my childhood. There is a very specific spot. A pain spot. I feel like I could even touch it but it’s not like that. It’s internal but just as real as my eyes.
Purple because its one of my favourite colours. Purple for royality, weath, nobilty…and purple for pain, shadows and ghosts. Purple for hope and vitality and change…and purple for hurt, bruises, and sorrow.
Purple Chasm…a blog where I can write what I want when I want. A place where I journey the crevasses of my soul in my path of on-going recovery. 11 years sober but 11 years of dissassocation and pain. 11 years of confusion. 11 years of remembering and forgetting. 11 years of wondering what was the point of this all?
I grew up with two people who should have never had children. But they did and the two of us should not have survived but we did. We survived and we should not be sane, but we are. And in that sanity I have found hope and freedom and an on-going question that says, “Why did I make it? And what did surviving such childhood abuses do for me? How can I use what I’ve learned to help others who are going through the same thing? How can I use what I’ve learned to stop it from happening to a new generation of children?”
I have questions that may be never answered but now I have a forum to write them in and that gives me a new sense of determination on my inner path towards “normal” whatever that even is.
