Hello,
I am new to reddit so I hope I'm posting in the right spot. It's nice to have a support group here. Just wanted to share my story which I'm sure is similar to so many others:
I grew up in a small house with my mom, dad, and little brother. My dad worked very long hours during the day while my mom was a housewife. I don't think she was a feminist, but she did not cook or clean the house. Food was the most obvious struggle, but there were so many more. I can count on my left hand the number of times we ate a normal meal together in 20 years and of those meals, all of them were heated up and thrown together. I would frequently get fed horrible freezer-burn meals like frozen lasagna with eggo waffles or else fast food all other meals. One of her favorites was pizza (English muffin with ketchup and processed cheese). I would cry, protest, and complain, but my mom told me it was my fault if I didn't like her 'cooking' No one else knew what what went on behind our closed doors.
She would be sick weekly and lay in bed telling me things like "I'm dying, I'm dying. You're going to wake up in the morning and not see me because I'll be dead." I would go into her room at night to give her a hug to say good night and she would tell me to leave because she was watching TV. Then once I'd crawl into bed, she'd yell from her room to give her a hug. She'd yell for things like a glass of water across the whole house and had to be catered to.
Whenever I'd do things she didn't like as a small kid, (I loved walking outside barefoot, but that would get my feet black) she'd yank me inside, pull my hair, slap my face, and tell me "I'm a brat from hell, I wish you never born." The hair pulling and slapping and beating went on for most of my childhood until my teen years. I just assumed everyone got slapped for misbehaving.
She ruined every holiday and vacation by starting some arbitrary fight usually over something like "did she leave the refrigerator door open, we better turnaround to go back and check" My dad's family and her family alike wanted nothing to do with her so eventually we stopped getting invited over and I missed out on a lot of fun family holidays like Thanksgiving/Christmas.
She was also penny-pinching and money hungry and obsessed with yelling at clerks and anyone who didn't give her a discount off 10 cents of dish soap or something else. She'd spend two hours driving to a store to save $1. She would come home from the grocery store with all her own food that she'd hide, and a few things for me that would quickly be eaten. I would overeat at every meal because there was always a lack of food mixed with a feeling of starvation.
She would monitor my homework everyday. She was obsessed with making me into a model pupil. She would order next years textbooks directly from the publisher so that I could study them. I spent lots of summers indoor studying. That helped me up to a certain point as a student, but that eventually led to burnout. I was left handed and would frequently get smudge marks when writing essays and she'd crumble them up, pull my hair, and make me start over.
Eventually as I teenager I rose up and started hitting back and calling her out. She figured I was troubled and abusive and once called the police on me. Everyone around her was an instigator or abusive. She would frequently ruin my mornings when I'd get ready for school. I'd have to get ready in her bathroom for some weird reason so there was no privacy. While I'm brushing my teeth, she would walk around naked and start yelling at me that I was going to be late or that I was being too loud.
She called me all the time daily in college along with long haranguing text messages and meandering emails. She somehow got access to my college email and started emailing me to do this assignment or that. She monitored when I used the EZ Pass and my debit card to see where I've been and what I did.
Her response is that I'm too sensitive and stubborn. She consistently gossips about the troubles that our family friends have in life (divorce, death, bankruptcy). In all this, my dad would stay pretty much quiet, only intervening when it became too loud to hear what he was watching on TV. A few times he stood up, but it was never enough. Today he is a shell of a person and is like a plastic bag in the wind.
I am about a year into therapy and medication and have really bounced back (that's a separate story). She came to visit me and I hadn't seen her in 2 years. I made sure they stayed in a hotel far away and that we'd never spend more than 3-4 hours together at a time. I refused to answer any question that was inappropriate and told her so. She couldn't understand why.
It is a complicated issue that will never fully resolve itself. I oscillate between the idea that setting strong boundaries will work, but there's still a part of me that just wishes she would die so that we could all move on with our lives. It's not easy, but the nice thing is that I'm completely independent and can make my own choices. Boundaries are the best.
Thanks for reading.
Submitted July 17, 2015 at 10:55PM by tub939977 http://ift.tt/1SrVWB8 raisedbynarcissists
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