I moved in with my mom because of financial issues with my boyfriend last July. I had decided to get back in contact with her after she came to find me after 13 years of not seeing me. I gave her the benefit of the doubt, maybe she was the one wronged. When I met her, she treated me like a queen for a week. But I learned there were some things that were very wrong with her. She was very unusually angry at me all the time after just a week, and when I went to a wedding and drank a sip of champagne with family she didn't like, she threatened to call the cops on my aunt. She would ridicule me for not knowing how to complete tasks the way she wanted them done. I figured after 13 years I would be treated a bit better, but no. She was driving me crazy, making me feel like shit and being desperate about whether or not I loved her. She then pressured me into getting a job so I could pay her rent. Not unreasonable, I thought, but I didn't want to live with her anymore. So I left to go live with my aunt because my mom could not control her issues and act like an adult. I told her I went to live with my boyfriend because it was the only way she wouldn't flip out again about me 'not loving her' and I didn't want her vengeance. Months later, that vengeance fucking came when I had to move in with her again due to my uncle having surgery. Her therapist recommended against me moving back in because it would cause her 'emotional distress'. I was going to be homeless otherwise. She almost went along with her therapist, but she decided to 'give me a chance' so I could help her recover from her eventual surgery. It seemed we had patched things up. That wasn't the case
Living with my mom quickly became hell. It's highly apparent that she doesn't love me. I worked day in and day out doing her dirty work while she recovered from surgery, and it wasn't the surgery I was mad about. It's who she is. Normal people don't act like her. For over a month I worked my ass off constantly, cleaning every inch of the house to make sure it was spotless for her, taking the dogs out 8 times a day, spending hours washing an unending stream of dishes in a five person household. I vacuumed, I sweeped, I mopped, I plowed the driveway, I plowed the neighbor's driveways, I took the dogs out on walks, I fetched everyone else things, I watered the Christmas tree every morning, did many loads of wash, dried them and folded them, cleaned and dried every counter, cleaned and cleared the entire bathroom, throw the trash away and take it out to the dumpster. I cleaned every surface I could possibly find. But you know, that's not what bothered me.
It's how she treated me. Every day she would scream at me about something, insult me, essentially terrorize me through every waking hour. If something wasn't done, she'd be pissed off. If I did the dishes quickly, I was 'rushing them'. If I didn't do them quickly enough, I was 'wasting water'. She would angrily fix the way the dishes went in the dishwasher, but also quickly demonstrated how to put them away - too quickly to even observe it. Many dishes could fit, and because I'd only lived there for a week or two beforehand, it was difficult to remember where they went. She would make me feel like an idiot and often tell me I have no common sense whatsoever. I had never done cardboard recycling before, and she screamed at me until I broke down in tears about how an idiot could have done it correctly. Basically, you would wrap the pile of cardboard up with string horizontally and vertically. I did the horizontal one first, and at the end I tied it and decided to do the vertical one. She came over and lost her goddamn mind, telling me I don't listen and she threw the cardboard on the floor and told me to pick it up. I picked it up and she demonstrated her way of doing it, which made no difference in the final result. When I tried to explain to her, she yelled at me not to dare talk back to her.
It was a lot of **** like this that she did that wittled me down every single day. It was always something. On my second day of ever doing full chores around the house, she got royally pissed off about how I missed this and that, this and that, berating me for what was almost my first time thoroughly cleaning her house - or any house. The next day she had two of her friends come over to help - one is a professional cleaner - and in front of them she had the sweetest conversations to them while berating me. She constantly said things such as "My daughter is so incapable of doing anything that I had to have my friends come over - on their hands and knees - just to help me. It's crazy." The whole day she made a scene, and I tried to help as much as I could. She just kept insulting me to the point where, as I did often, I broke down in tears. Her friend comforted me, and my mom turned the television down to ask "Do you mind explaining to me what you're talking about?" And when I tried to explain, she said "I KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT. IF YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO SAY ABOUT ME, SAY IT TO MY FACE, DON'T GO AROUND TELLING OTHERS BEHIND MY BACK." (she talked about me behind my back constantly, by the way). I was crying and telling my mom's friend that I just wanted to leave. On many nights as I was doing the dishes for hours at a time, making sure they were up to her standards - she would talk about me on the phone. How I'm lazy, how I do nothing around the house, how she just had surgery and I'm doing nothing for her, that it's crazy land. Slowly painting herself as the victim as she sat there losing weight like she always wanted, getting waited on hand and foot. And I had nowhere else to go. I was constantly afraid of her kicking me out of the house, as it was Winter and it was absolutely impossible to live outside as we live up North.
My mother has munchausens syndrome, which means she enjoys getting attention from medical issues. She milked this as much as she could. For instance, when she got upset about any little thing, she would run over and do physical chores herself. This brought her pain, and she was definitely vocal about it. She yelled in 'agony' but still managed to say "It's fine, I'm just doing what needs to get done around the house because nobody else will do it!" She would often refuse help from me because she needed to prove a point. The entire situations were FAR overreacted. Then she would tell other people how she had to do chores because I was incapable of doing them. This was done to make me look like an absolute piece of **** daughter, and to fuel her victim complex.
One specific example of this was during a night near Christmas where there was a ton of dishes. They baked in the morning, made lunch, cooked dinner, and baked again. There were probably 70-80 dishes, and it would take some time to do. So I lightheartedly asked during dinner if my sister could help dry the dishes because there was such a big pileup. I made sure I had a sort of joking tone in my voice because it was meant to be a lighthearted take on the amount of cooking they did that day. Mom deliberately took it the wrong way. She asked her boyfriend "Can you believe she just asked that?" Later on I went to do the dishes, as I had planned, but she told me no, that she was going to do them, because "you apparently can't handle them". She said it snidely, and started washing the dishes. She complained that her hands hurt, but when I tried to help, she once again said no and that she could do it. Later on, she started furiously vacuuming, getting on her hands and knees and screaming in pain. I once again tried to help, but she told me "No, I'm doing it because it's too much for you." I later cried while asking her if I could go on a walk, and she just dismissed me. She called a friend over to bitch about me while I was away. It was this night that I regained contact with my father, and from that point on I would confide in him.
The next day she went full psycho and started cleaning the entire kitchen, even going so far as to move the refrigerator because there was a problem with the bathroom that was on the other side of the wall. She essentially took charge when she could have easily just sat down, but she needed to put on a show of pain while everyone else told her not to. This was deliberately done to make her look like a brave, caring mother and housewife who just went through surgery. Even her boyfriend kept telling her to stop and calm down. But she would tell him "No, Jeffrey. [Insert issue regarding my effort] is unacceptable, I won't tolerate it. This is too much for her, so I'll just do it instead." He insisted she was being unreasonable in a rare moment of insight, and she would storm out of the house often in anger. Her boyfriend asked me to get something out of the closet for him, but she told him not to ask that and budged in to do it herself. He became exasperated and angry and said that he asked /me/. She wasn't having any of it, and once again repeated the "This is too much for her" line. When she left the house I, yet again, broke down in tears and I told her boyfriend that I'm scared because I don't know what to do. He said she's just being a bitch. Later on, he went out to see her and I happened to their conversation through my bedroom window (which isn't difficult, she's loud as *). She told him "Scared? That mother*er should be! I'm pissed!". At this point, I was royally scared to do anything. This was going on 24/7 and I needed some way to escape the madness. I woke up every day and was frightened to go outside my room because of how she might berate and yell at me. Yet if I didn't go out quickly enough, she would yell at me more for being lazy and not waking up on her time. It wasn't super super unreasonably late, but she unnecessarily and deliberately completed my chores before I woke up to have a reason to complain.
Early on, the ornaments weren't on the christmas tree. From experience, my family had a specific way of placing the ornaments. So I waited until I could have her input. She was hardly even back home before she started screaming, asking why the ornaments weren't up. I told her my reasoning and she said "THERE'S NO SPECIAL WAY TO PUT THEM ON, JUST *ING PUT THEM ON THE TREE, IT'S NOT HARD." It's important to note that she viewed everything as 'hers'. While purchase wise, it might not be false, these belonged to everyone in the house. My father would always say "the stove" or "our refrigerator". Not her. It was "my tree", "my vacuum", "my stove", "my dogs". One time I got distracted and didn't give the dogs water while I gave them food. It was only once I did this. She yelled at me about how I'm not treating her dogs well. "HOW WOULD YOU LIKE IT IF I GAVE YOU FOOD BUT NO WATER? HUH?" She then made it a point of saying "My dogs are my life." Her boyfriend chimed in saying "Not you, the dogs." to me. This was his way of mocking her by implying how ridiculous it was to say that her dogs are more important to her than the child she had been "missing" (deliberately neglecting) for 13 years. Might I mention that she didn't spend every waking hour "looking" for me - she went off and had another *ing kid. She reset her life. As if it would be difficult to start an investigation to find me. There's no way she wouldn't have been able to find me if she really wanted to. My dad never covered his tracks. I still remember going to the police station where she would pick me up and drop me off as a kid, and the last couple of times she wouldn't show up. I would look up at my dad all happy and say "I didn't want to go home with her anyway." and we would go eat at White Castle. I ALWAYS preferred living with my dad. Living with my mom for the first few years of my life during the custody battle gave me nightmares.
Also, her boyfriend very rarely mocked her. Mostly he was on her side because she had deluded him so well. She deluded everybody. Somehow she managed to convince that many people that my father kidnapped me. It was disgusting slander. Funny how she only decided to appear in my life a few days after I turned 18 - the time she would be absolved of the responsibility of paying child support. Her goal all along was to erase her 'mistake'. She never technically lost dual custody, but since she never showed up to court the case got too long and they essentially rewarded my dad with taking me full time. When I was a kid she would leave me alone in places and even entrust me to any of her new boyfriends, who basically just wanted to **** her and didn't give a **** about me or the idea of her even having a kid. Her entire life since then has been built on the lie that she is the poor mother who had her kid stolen from her. But I could never have told this to anyone, because they were so caught up in her lies. It sickened me to the core to keep that secret.
One day she told me to vacuum while she was out (this was to hang the thousands of dollars worth of paintings she needlessly bought while on a cruise she didn't take me on, and I needed to clean behind the cabinet they had to move to fit the paintings. The vacuum was clogged, and I figured I could fix it. I tried a few ways of getting the stuff out, and read online that you could use hot water. Alright, I thought, so I went outside and poured hot water down the hose. It worked miraculously. All of the stuff was out. She pulls in the driveway as I do this, and as always, flipped the **** out. Her boyfriend said she's overreacting, but she insisted on it being the grandest tragedy of the 21st century. I asked her what she planned to do when she saw the vacuum and she said "Clean it out with my fingers! It takes hours or days but it can be done!" She had a horrible screaming fit that day, calling me an idiot, yelling louder than she ever has, belittling me, asking "how the **** I'll get the water out of it". I told her my plan, which was to use the hairdryer. She said "Good luck, it's going to take hours and I'll still see water in there!". It took me one non consecutive hour to dry it out. She checked it - not one trace of water, visually or in feeling. It was factually quicker and more effective than the way she would do it. But she just told me "You look at the internet for everything, the internet isn't always right! I've done things and I want them done the way I want them done!" Not one thank you. Not one admittance that maybe I found a new way to do what she did. Nothing.
One day I put a Christmas ornament she bought recently on a box next to the tree. It was no big deal, it was right there. But she was having this falsified panic attack accusing people of stealing 'her' brand new ornament. I honestly forgot I put it there, I knew it wouldn't get damaged where I put it. Her friend comes over as per usual, and she tells her about the ornament. Her friend recalled how I showed her the ornament, and something in my mom's head just cracked then. She called me in all sing-song like "OOOOOHHHHHH, NIIII-COOOOO-OOOOLE!" and got all vicious at mem. She accused me of deliberately hiding it from her and wouldn't listen to reason. I felt ashamed and hurt as she yelled at me in front of everybody. The daughter she hadn't seen in 13 years. Over a christmas ornament. This was the second thing she accused me of stealing that turned out, as always, untrue - I didn't steal. She admitted the first one, but not this. She thought and thinks so lowly of me. My brother was the star child and I was the scapegoat, and this also caused issues between her and I.
During this whole time, she dotted the psychotic nature with small somewhat happy moments where she would treat me ok. I never knew which 'mom' I was going to get. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and anxiety but she's also a classic narcissist case. She would reel me in and throw me back into her craziness, and during small moments of clarity I thought things would take a turn around. But that hope was squandered.
I got a job at Chipotle to keep myself away from her and busy. I had a four hour commute each day I went, and she wanted a massive chunk of my paycheck, plus the money she gave me for the bus pass because she didn't want to be bothered driving me the 20 *ing minutes it would take otherwise. After the first day on the job, she told me the dishwasher broke again - it had only been working for two weeks - and I was back to the hours of handwashing like I was used to. After I worked. While I gave her my money that I needed to save to make my own life. She was milking me of almost every penny. She knew that the little I'd end up saving would be marginal and not even worth saving. $100 a month? That wouldn't even pay for one month's rent 8 months into the job. And she drove me out of my *ing mind when I got home. Chipotle isn't an easy job, but I tried. I tried as hard as I could with her berating me for weeks. Then she decided I wasn't getting enough hours three weeks in (it's a gradual process and I was just proud to have gotten a job) so she started pressuring me into quitting and getting a new job. She even brought me home job applications I didn't want - I liked the pay there even if I couldn't see much of the money. I also wanted to get better and it and stick with the job. My mom's stress, the commute and the fact Chipotle isn't an easy introductory into the workforce caused me to get fired. I felt depressed and ashamed, and she kept badgering me to go out again. In a state of depression, I bought a dress to commemorate my weight loss (which she told me was unnecessary and a 'bad influence' because I was already 'so thin': my shirts were beginning not to fit so I decided to make a positive change in my life and make the most of things). I also bought a waist trainer and hid it so I wouldn't be accused of being a bad influence again. Finally, she gave me an ultimatum - if I didn't find a better paying job with more hours within the month, she and her boyfriend were going to kick me out. I knew it was futile to continue living life this way, and I wasn't feeling it. I wasn't ready to get another job so quickly. I needed to escape. I talked with my dad and asked him if I could move in. It took days and days of begging, but he finally conceded. I told my mom that I was going to move back in with him. She didn't seem that upset about it.
She would go out and get coffee, donuts, things for herself every day and buy marginal snacks for her kids to gnaw at. She would drink a quarter of her daily coffee and I would eventually have to dump it out and recycle the bottle. But I needed a pair of glasses because mine were broken for months and she never once mentioned perhaps getting them for me. Cruises, vacations, multi-thousand dollar paintings and frames, everyday excesses, a brand new couch (which she only got because she was jealous of her boyfriend getting something for himself) - but not one ****ing pair of glasses. The only reason I didn't get them with my money is because they wouldn't have alleviated the stress of living with her. And I would be left with nothing.
The final straw was when she screamed at me for looking up the general idea of a court case she was keeping secret on Google. She lied that she couldn't ever work again to the courts as a way of collecting money for the rest of her life, and I caught her on the phone telling someone else who was going through the same process to make sure nobody never catches them working. She was going to use this vast amount of introductory money to go on vacation while I stayed home and watched the kids and her dogs (she would often leave with her boyfriend because home life became too overwhelming for her ego. Even my brother confided in me that he was sad about mom always going with her boyfriend at fairs, leaving the kids alone to wander on their own. He missed when they used to do things together, before her boyfriend was around). I was leaving, so she'd have to find someone else to watch the kids and dogs. When she found out I looked the general terms of her court case on Google, she absolutely lost it and told me she couldn't trust me anymore. She said she wanted to kick me out that weekend, and she started rushing me out within days so it would make things more comfortable for her other kids. It all left a bitter taste.
She wouldn't even purchase the bus ticket back to my dad's. She made me sell my dress and give her my work paycard to spend the rest of the money. I bought the bus ticket and the day I sold the dress in order to do so, she rearranged my brother and I's shared bedroom and everything got mixed up. As a result, when I got packed, I accidentally left my injections behind. They were on top of my bag, but everything was scattered and so I figured they would be in there. $600 down the drain. I figured this out when I got back home with my dad.
Things were awkward at first, but my dad and I gradually got back into the swing of things. He accepts my transition, lets me wear makeup and feminine clothes, and even set aside space for me to put my makeup and extensions. A week into living there, I discovered my work paid me an extra $75 and I figured I would tell her about it because I wanted her to send some of the stuff I left behind back. She then told me that she thinks she deserves the money because of what she went through - and that same day, she emptied the card of all funds. She never sent what I couldn't bring home with me. And I decided to stop all contact with her.
I believe she uses my brother's phone to ask me questions. I got messages from 'him' two days in a row asking me if I had a job, which is something my mom would definitely be interested in knowing. Even if it was something he actually typed, it was most likely my mom who asked him to type it.
I've been back with my dad for two months now. Life is so, so much better. I'm treated like a human being. I'm loved. My dad will actually talk to me (when I tried talking to my mom while I lived with her, she would never be interested - she would just watch TV, use her phone, whatever. Never really paid any positive attention to me. Just complete indifference and no care). My dad and I's relationship has never been better.
But almost every day I'm plagued with nightmares. Sometimes when I think of my mom or anything that even slightly reminds me of her, I sink into a quick and deep hole of depression and anxiety. It feels like I'm suffocating. It's not even fight or flight, it's just...give up. And I'm trapped in those moments. The world feels like it goes grey. And I just feel empty. Dead inside. Everytime my brother sends me a text, I feel my heart sink into my stomach and I get nauseous. I feel like I'm going to throw up. I think I've been through trauma, and I've planned on seeing a therapist, but my old therapist isn't available right now. We can't really afford it anyway. Every time I saw her on Facebook, I became terrified. It's still somewhat like that. I stopped her and all her friends from seeing anything I post, but I don't block anyone because that would be too obvious and I fear what she would do/say to me if I did so. I fear her so much. But it's slowly getting better. I can finally hang out with friends again, watch TV, feel calm. I don't hide in my bedroom anymore, I'm not afraid of not doing things immaculately. I'm just living life. A week in, my dad bought me new shoes and glasses. My boyfriend bought me my favorite dress that I had to sell for the bus ticket back - it was a happy victory. You can see the dress in my profile picture!
Today she texted me for the first time in two months. She "checked in to see how I'm doing" (translation: she needs to look like a good mother by pretending to care about my wellbeing, and she wants to know if I'm doing badly to prove how horrible my life is without her; for gloating purposes.) I explained to her how well I'm doing and apologized for not being in contact with her, because I just don't know what to say. And, of course, I fear her. But I could never tell her that because of how she acts, even though she claims honesty is the most important thing on earth to her. She asked why I don't know what to say, and accused me of 'thinking she did something wrong'. She even went so far as to say she knows she did nothing wrong. (That's ****ing delusional). I got her typical condescending tone in the messages. She then asked if I'm working yet (more evidence she uses my brother's phone, because the two previous days he asked if I had a job and I didn't respond either time).
She then asked if I regretted ever contacting her. I told her no, I just regret the circumstances. She told me that 'sometimes we have to deal with circumstances, especially when running away' (I didn't run away, she was kicking me out. And I wasn't running away from my problems in the unhealthy sense, she was causing me to have serious issues and it was necessary for my health to get away from her). She then topped it off by saying that she hopes I can be happy with myself and my life choices. Passive aggressively, of course.
I didn't respond to that. For the rest of the day, I felt depressed and empty. Even spending time with friends just hours before she texted me wasn't enough to help me overcome what she did. I once again felt so helpless and afraid of her, so broken. It was getting better day by day, and it's going to continue to. This is just a minor bump in the road. But soon I'll recover from the pain she's caused me.
Thank you.
Submitted April 11, 2017 at 05:36PM by NarcoticSuburbia http://ift.tt/2nZ5B9Y raisedbynarcissists
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