Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Marking Off the Days...

They sent home a calendar in Steven's backpack today. I decided to put it up on the wall. I can't use it for the purpose they intended (it has suggestions of things to do with your children, but Steven is not developmentally ready for that yet), but I am using it to mark off the days.

I'm reading a book on Borderline Parents, and it's sad that my mom embodies all of the subsets of the borderline person (waif, queen, hermit, witch). I feel kind of upset that I'm back to reading books on psychology to validate my experiences. To keep telling myself, "It did happen".

I spend my days looking for work and meticulously cleaning up after myself. Mom is rarely home. I guess she feels driven out by her child who is trying to be invisible. Read up on BPD, the histronics these people exhibit is insane. What's really scary is that I could become just like her. So I have to watch how I deal with my son, how I deal with others.

I've been re-evaluating my relationship with my brother today. I've always considered us to be close, hell Mom forced us into it. But I am hurt by the fact that he can only admit Mom's abuses to me in private. When asked to say it to the family, he claims they already know. Well if they do, then they must think it's all okay...because no one has ever spoken up in my defense. The women in my family on my mom's side are notorious for trying to screw with their children, especially their daughters.

I've ceased communication with my brother, because each time I try to break free of my mom's abuse, he tells me I'm just like her. That's his way of keeping me quiet. Little did he know that I almost didn't have kids...because I was afraid I'd be an abuser. People, words have power.

My brother has always played the middle ground. My strongest witness, and the most he can do is claim that he tells mom about herself. It's not doing any good, mom still feels that I've made my entire childhood up. No, she insists. I think she knows the truth. When you try to bring it up, she'll attempt to self-destruct.

But right now I'm thinking about my relationship with my brother. Was it abusive as well?

Sure he meant well. He protected me from bullies, and he at least admits mom treated me unfairly. But I also got tied up, put in the trunk of the car, once he hit me so hard it left a knot for days. I've had dirty socks stuffed in my mouth. But the worst of all has been the ridicule. Every time my brother did something to me, he told me, "you know you want to laugh", and being a child, the power of suggestion did me over. So for years, I have been laughing as he has laughed at me. He often refers to me as his "psycho sister", and is very condescending about my "book learning". I don't understand why.

One of the most enduring pieces of his ridicule has been him teasing me when I danced. He always told me I had no rhythm. But I have loved dance and longed to dance all my life. Shirley Temple was my idol, because she could sing and dance, and so could I. My childhood was filled with dreams of being the first black girl to play Annie on Broadway. My brother laughed it away, my mom beat it away.

I hope that one day I can regain all that I have lost at the hands of my family, both those overt in their abuse and those who were covert, in that they let it happen. I really do not like that I have to deal with this stuff all over again. I thought I was free. I guess I was wrong.

One thing about having a borderline parent is that you do not know how to have healthy relationships. I will not even presume to say that my relationship with Steve has always been healthy. But he's stifled me far less than my family has. And our love for our son has changed a lot. That little boy does not deserve to suffer like we have. Steve had his own hard road to travel as a kid. I'm still cracking open that Pandora's Box.

Every day that I'm blessed to get up, I'm going to mark off the previous day on the calendar...if I didn't do that before going to bed. And then I'm going to do whatever it is I have to do that day, until I find myself ready for bed. Before I know it, summer will be here and we will be leaving this place forever.

Immaculate

There's a chess app on my nook, I wonder if I should learn how to play. It'd be a good way to pass the time. Besides, I feel like the strategy would be helpful to me.

Apparently the best way to survive this war is to make myself as invisible as possible, to give my mother nothing to complain about. Which strangely enough upsets her.

At this point in time, I exchange few words, make no eye contact, and I have erased evidence of my presence from every room in the house except the bedroom that I sleep in. My son's high chair is still in the dining room, but apparently Mom likes to pretend she has a grandchild and not a daughter. So long as she doesn't try to hurt him to get to me, that's fine.

My room is immaculate. Occasionally she sees me picking up lint balls off the floor (they have wood floors...dust magnets), or washing something, and I see her tense. It'd be so much easier for her to complain if I was as sloppy as she says. But now there's nothing to complain about. And I plan to keep it that way.

I managed to set up a little workspace in the bedroom; I'm looking for jobs when Steven is at school. Hopefully soon I'll find something. Preferably before the holiday season. I could use a routine right about now. Anything to keep me out of the house when my son is not here to take up my time and attention.

Onto Steven...something good to think about:

Steven is really doing well in school. He likes to color now, so I went out and got him a whole bunch of crayola twistables crayons. I have to keep him from eating the wax, though. But he loves to scribble. He loves the colors. They read every day in school, so I think that he'll finally be ready for me to read to him from books other than the ones on my nook (he was attracted to the glowing screen). I plan to read to him nightly, he has a pretty good book collection.

Big Steve and I talk when we can, and we see each other when we can. The distance is hard, realizing the circumstances behind it is even harder. But I feel like the situation is going to cement our family bond. It was our child that caused us to reconsider, and discussing him and his future is always a favorite thing for us to do. The pastor at my church said to read your children, not script them. I think that both Steve and I were scripted. Me, especially. At least Steve's mom loves him and will allow him to make his own decisions. She even accepted our marriage. I was shocked at that.

One day at a time. I just keep telling myself, one day at a time. I'm reading a book on dealing with a borderline parent, I really feel like my mom has BPD. I guess I'm back to just coping. But it'll all get better. I'm determined to morph into who I'm truly meant to be, to break this cycle of just coping with pain from day to day. It doesn't have to be that way.

I think the reason why it's so hard right now, is because I've had a tentative taste of freedom, even though things were not easy in that situation either. Anything other than Mom has always been the lesser evil. But Mom knows that too, and deep inside she's fighting to keep me imprisoned, while I'm fighting like hell to escape. She knows this goodbye will be the final one. But it needn't be that way if she could only admit to what she's done. Just tell me I'm not crazy. Still, she'd literally rather die than do that. She'd rather keep up the oppression. So I must needs go.

Monday, October 10, 2011

Paranoia

I wonder if the people involved in the family drama with me and my mom understand just how mentally ill she is. She is a Borderline Mother.

I fully admit that I struggle with depression, anxiety, and now paranoia. I don't believe in hiding my anger. I don't always express it loudly, but I express it.

Apparently now that I just don't speak to my mother, and I shuffle through my day, not asking for anything and not hoping for anything, my mother feels unsafe in her own house.

Of course this is but another of her carefully orchestrated lies. Since she's not getting the normal reaction out of me, she's recruiting new troops in her war against me (people I thought I could trust), and laying the foundation that I'm plotting to do her harm.

I just want to escape. I never wanted to come back here.

It's hard, not knowing if tomorrow my son and I will be put out because I refuse to play in the farce. I just hope I can find work soon. Meanwhile I'm doing my best to give her nothing to complain about...which only angers her. Is that not sick? I'm trying to do what she wants...leave no trace of my existence in this house. I clean more than she does, ask for no rides, cook when they're not around, and stay in the room I sleep in. I come out to run errands, take Steven to the park, go to the doctor...things like that. Then I retreat.

But it's not good enough. I'm alive and determined to have a happy ending to my life, and my mother will stop at nothing to destroy that.


Yet she is afraid.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Minesweeper

I suck at this game, though it's apparently very simple, just a bit of logic.

Perhaps that's why the game of Minesweeper that is my life, I keep failing at utterly. I don't have any more limbs left.

Seriously, I do not want to be a drama magnet...I don't. I don't!

But the roller coaster crests yet another hill, and my stomach flies up into my throat.

It turns out that someone I thought I could trust I cannot, someone I thought I'd never trust again I'm clinging to for life, and some folks just haven't changed in that one is just as evil as ever, and the other will always use denial as a shield.

Since coming back to my mother's house, it seems like I've ended up back where I started. Suddenly that rundown apartment doesn't seem as bad after all. I'll take a cardboard box to the emotional pain I deal with constantly here. Being told essentially that I'm psycho, that I've invented a false reality. The sad thing is, that even though I felt every beating, I felt the razor on my wrist, I felt the tubes down my throat when they pumped my stomach, I felt the taunts and teasing, I felt the loneliness and depression....

I still wonder if they're right, that I'm really THAT crazy, and none of it ever happened. They are so insistent, that I question myself sometimes.

But then my mother pulls more of her shit, and I bounce back to the present.

I've never really put in one place everything that this woman has done to me to make me hate her so. Perhaps I should now, in case someone wonders, then they can refer back to this.

SO WTF IS GOING ON?

My mother had me only for the purpose of keeping my dad around. She got pregnant to snag him, she got pregnant again hoping to keep him. Mom resented her life at home, and sought a man and the chance to play house as an escape. She and my dad divorced when I was 7. I'd been watching them fight for years before that, Daddy was sleeping in the basement years before that, if he was even home.

When Daddy left, Mom turned on me.

I got beaten for missing him. I got beaten when she had a bad day at work. I got beaten for mixing her cold cream with her blush to see what color it made (I was like, 8). I got beaten for putting my bread crusts under the carpet in the living room (I thought they'd disappear) once, when my brother wouldn't cut them off my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Beatings comprised of stripping me naked and hitting me as hard as she could with a belt or switch until SHE was tired. I was expected not to cry...not that I ever succeeded with that. She would draw out the agony of waiting, I'd know before she got home what was coming, and I'd be forced to wait for her while she "got comfortable". She'd tell me her father didn't beat clothes, so neither would she. She taught me to be ashamed of my body, I have never felt comfortable being naked in front of my mother. When she was done, she'd leave the instrument of abuse on the radiator downstairs and tell me that she wasn't finished with me.

Hell, I even got beaten for throwing up at dinner. I had a sensitive stomach, and if I didn't finish it all, I got beaten. If I gagged, I got threatened. Once she made me eat something out of the trash can that I'd thrown in there.

My mother was the ultimate imposing figure in my life. She was God and the Devil. I feared her, hated her, and longed for her to just be nice to me and love me.

She beat me until I became her size. Then the abuse just continued on psychologically. Still, she called me names and berated me from childhood. I was "stupid", "lazy", "worthless", "good-for-nothing", and the biggest insult of all "just like your father". This was the biggest dart she had, because I knew she hated him as much as I loved him.

My dad was gentle, yet ineffective. He never beat me, but he never saved me either.

I grew up hearing aunts laugh about how upset my mom was when she found out she was having me. Stupid women, they didn't realize I was smart enough to put things together. I started wondering at an early age why a mother would NOT want to have a child. And when I learned about abortion and adoption? Then I wondered why my mom hadn't done that, and what life might have been like, living with God or another family. Hell, when I was five I demanded to see my birth certificate. I thought I'd feel better if I knew I was adopted.

I had immense vocal talent as a child. My mom made a point never to encourage it. She said it was because she was made to sing. I tried to reason that I wanted to sing...that didn't do any good. I had musical outlets through chorus until I graduated high school...and then my talent died along with the dream of college. Mom said that she didn't want the Department of Education to steal her identity, hence she would not sign my financial aid forms.

I was suicidal by the age of 12, and that continued until I was in my early 20s. I cut, overdosed on all the meds I was prescribed (14 at one point). The answer to my ailments was so simple, I was depressed. CT scans, X-rays...I've been irradiated so much...and all because the doc was too cowardly to tell my mom she was an abusive bitch.

I got dragged into a dream when I was 13...mom married for opportunity, and off we went to Europe. For the first time I had a name; I wasn't just someone's child or sister. I began to blossom...and Mom killed that, too. She sent me home with the lie that I was on drugs and trying to seduce her alcoholic husband (happy 17th anniversary, you fools...). I didn't find this out for 15 years, and for 15 years her sisters have treated me like trash. When I had my stroke, they were still so scandalized by why my mom would send me 3,000 miles away from her to my father who couldn't afford to take care of me (she had to send me maxi pads and underwear...and that was my birthday present one year), that they believed her when she said I faked my stroke.
How the hell do you fake yourself into intensive care? I almost died, and my family wasn't there.

While in Germany, Mom got upset that I learned German in six months and made friends. She hated my closest friend, often yelling at her to the point where the girl would break down in tears (mom told me she was crazy). On my 15th birthday, my mother came home from being out with my stepdad, storms into my room where I'm eating cake with friends, and starts screaming at me for no reason. I look up, and all my friends are gone. They were forbidden from coming to my house after that. But not from being my friend. Their parents understood that my mom wasn't a good person.

Mom hated every friend I made as a child. And when she learned that Jessi, my German friend was especially close to me, she sent me back to the States just to get me away from her. Just to be spiteful. No matter that all the things she claimed Jessi was lying to me about could be proven, no matter that I had the chance to go to college for free, and the chance to have a wonderful life abroad. She hated me that much, that she'd ruin all that. Then to top it off, she gave the empty promise that I could come back (I lived off that dream, school at my dad's was so horrible, the kids threw trash at me), and then faked being hurt that I was upset for the wrong reasons and not concerned with being with her. She said she honestly thought I wanted to come back to Germany to be with her. I had agreed to get a job, not see my friends, come straight home...just to last until age 18 there, so I could tell her to suck it and run.

I attempted suicide for the first time when she dropped that bomb on me. And her reaction? She drank a whole bottle of wine. Wow.

Mom had to keep painting stories to get my family to look away from my mental breakdown.

Her lies were so convincing, even my dad believed her for a while. When I was a teen, my depression was seen as dangerous. No one tried to help me, they just judged me. Those years were so lonely, I spent 17 hours a day in my room on school days, and the full 24 on weekends. I came out to eat and pee. When my dad died, somehow I got the blame. You see, I was that bad of a child.

And the ironic thing is, I was accused of trying to seduce a man who was grooming me for molestation. When I finally told my mom...she called me a whore behind my back. Funny thing is, she asked me (only because my brother was there) why I didn't tell her before. I told her I figured she wouldn't believe me. And it was convenient for her not to. This man used to stand NAKED at the foot of the steps leading to the lower level each day when I left for work. It scared me so badly. He would find ways to touch my butt, or catch me alone in a room. I used to pray for protection from the evil of that place. And my mom didn't even believe me. But when Woman Thou Art Loosed the movie came out, all of a sudden (in front of her friends) she was my advocate.

When I graduated high school, since I couldn't get financial aid, I started work, hoping I could pay my way through school. Well, I had never been taught to save (hell, I was never taught most things a female should know), so I spent what I wasn't paying mom in rent. I racked up debt. By the time I had paid it off and was able to sign my own FAFSA forms, I had had my stroke.

25 years old, thinking that I just can't win.

I paid this woman tens of thousands in rent, and she was telling her family that I wasn't paying a dime. I used to wonder why she got so upset at me laying the rent money on her bed...it was because she was telling my stepdad that I wasn't paying rent.

I finally escaped when I was 27. I pretty much pulled a move like her, being pregnant and moving in with the father...but we weren't married, and I actually wanted my child. Mom convinced me to move nearby "so she could help". At that time I still held out the hope that she'd care one day. I ended up moving out of that house with no help (Steve was coming from 60 miles in the opposite direction). My mom and stepdad sat and watched me carry every heavy thing alone.

I told myself I'd go to a shelter before I'd live with my mother again.

Mom has done her best to break me and Steve up. She thinks it's okay to spend his money, but I should not let him be a dad. Steve and I have had our own troubles, as laid out earlier in this blog, and they ultimately led me to leaving him twice, the second time landing me back here. My mother told the cops to go away, that she'd take care of me. But she hasn't.

The last time I had a seizure, she was downstairs playing frecell. The baby was running wild. Steve came from work and called 911 himself. But he's a deadbeat according to mom.

Mom told the whole world she was helping me....while doing nothing. I can't even go to the bathroom without having my son in there with me.

She's accused me of infesting her home with ants because I'm so filthy (um, I have to clean every day because my son eats things off the floor if given a chance). She said I gave her MRSA (we'd have had to have skin-to-skin contact for that, and she won't let me touch her...never has). She's now saying she's afraid for her life...because I have just stopped talking to and fighting her. For a minute, she was trying to get me to pay her rent out of my social security. The goal is to leave here! I have to save to do so.

I found out this week that for the past three months she's been talking with Lisa, a person I thought was my friend. Lisa had been pressuring me to go to therapy with my mom, her reasoning being that her adoptive mom was so much worse, and if she could forgive so could I.

Um, I'm not really mad about my past. I'm just tired of being asked to act like it didn't happen. It's really messing with me.

Well, Lisa and my mom have their bitterness towards men in common, and apparently last thanksgiving Lisa was listening to my mom a lot more closely than I was aware, as Mom sat at the dinner table over Thanksgiving and went on and on about how angry and disturbed I was.

So now they talk via cell phone behind my back. They'd made plans to bumrush me on Thanksgiving, but I found out about that. I won't be here. The reason for their ire? I'm back with Steve! I should be struggling on my own like them....to hell with how doing it on my own would affect my kid. I "coped"...so have other kids...so would my autistic son. But there not there as Little Man stares at Daddy out the window and freaks out when the bus takes him away.

But I'm supposed to make that a regular part of his life.

One day, when I was 14, I looked up a book on child abuse in my school library. I knew I was being abused. What I didn't know was that I was depressed and suicidal. Sure, I knew that I was sad and wanted to die, but I didn't know that these things had actual clinical terms. After reading this book, I went to the school guidance counselor, who recommended me to the school psychologist.

I've been in therapy for 16 years. It's the only place where I can talk about my reality.

That's all I really want, to say that it happened. I don't want to punish my mom (I want to move far away from her and not let her know where I'm going), I don't want to flay anyone.

I just want to be free to cry sometimes. That's all. I've held it in for 30 years. Do I have to wait until Mom's dead too to be able to speak freely?

I feel like every step I take is unsure. I never know when Mom is going to go whispering to her sisters, apparently my brother has chosen the side of abuse, he refuses to fully acknowledge what is going on. He wants me to "keep quiet". I'm sorry, but I must cry out.

Every day is like walking through a minefield in the world that includes my mom.

I want to be free. And I don't want the day of freedom to come when they bury her. That's too long to wait.