Things have been whirling through my head lately. Memories that I thought were long forgotten or at least safely put away under lock and key. Things that I’d rather not consider how they affected me and continue to affect me.

I found a book a couple of months ago when Rowan, S.O. and I were at Borders bookstore meeting with her teacher to review her progress, grades, etc. The book is Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the daughters of narcissistic mothers. by Karyl McBride, PH.D

A week before I turned 14 my mother got angry with me and returned all of my birthday presents with the exception of one outfit. The outfit was what she had picked out for me to wear for my birthday party. It looked expensive and was pretty trendy. She told me she would have canceled the party except it was a joint birthday party for myself and a friend who had the same birthday. My mom didn’t want to look bad.

A few months later we were at the mall shopping. She got angry with me and left me to walk home. Fortunately, it was only maybe a 5 or 10 minute walk from the mall to our house, but I certainly can’t imagine ever doing that to one of my kids.

Toward the end of summer just before I started my freshman year of high school my mom took me shopping. At a local dress shop that I had waited for years to shop at, I picked out a cute dress, very early 90′s, a deep blue almost purple jumper with matching belt and print shirt to go under, it had big buttons that went down the front and I was beyond thrilled.

Just after school started my mother was supposed to marry the man who would later father my brother (the guy she still lives with) the day before the wedding her ex-live-in boyfriend (S.O’s current boss and my mother’s other boyfriend) showed up and convinced her to marry him instead. We ended up in a car headed to Vegas with my mother frantically going through her address book and stopping at payphones to cancel caterers, chair rentals, the officiant, etc. I ended up in a hotel room just off the Vegas strip somehow fielding calls from the guy she basically left at the alter. He was pissed, screaming at me on the phone while my mother hid out in another hotel room with the other boyfriend.

They didn’t get married… we came home and a few days later my mother snapped and kicked me out of the house. I went to live with my dad. A week or so later my soon-to-be-ex best friend (we had been best friends since kindergarten) showed up at school wearing the dress I had picked out from the dress shop. The kicker there was that my mother had to have taken it back to the shop and exchanged it for a few sizes larger… so it wasn’t a spur of the moment yank it out of the closet and hand it to her type of thing.

That would have been September of 1990… the following April I found out I was pregnant with Julien. In June 1991 my brother was born. That ex best friend tracked me down at the drive-in movies to tell me that my mother had given birth. I had only found out maybe a week or so before that she was pregnant. The next thing I knew I was at the birthing center watching my ex best friend flitting around my mother like she was her mother (we were only 15 at the time) and holding my brother as if he were hers. I didn’t stay long.

The following October I was 7 months along with Julien. My mother found out I was pregnant and forced me into a car as I was coming out of school. She drove me around for at least a couple of hours screaming at me. I was trash, everyone would know I was trash, my grandparents would hate me, I was lucky my grandmother was dead because she would disown me. She pointed at my stomach and screamed something about my child being a bastard… I screamed, cried and begged her to take me home. When she finally did I had to be taken into the doctor because I was having contractions. I was diagnosed with high blood pressure and put on bed rest for the remainder of my pregnancy. Around all of this my parents were still fighting for custody of my sister and my doctor wrote a letter to the court detailing the physical affects of my mother’s emotional abuse… she (the doctor) insisted on doing it, I recall my doctor being visibly angry and how surreal it all felt.

I later heard how my mother, my ex-best friend, and another friend gathered together for an evening of going through the rest of my things still at her house and, as she told me later they “mourned” me. As if I had died or something. My ex-best friend and her mother would drive by my house, follow me places, and harass me in stores. My mother would defend them or simply say that she wasn’t there when it happened and had no way of knowing what was really going on.

When Julien was 2 his father left us. I worked at a local pharmacy. My mother was at home with my brother at the time so it made sense to have her watch Julien. I later found out that she was taking Julien out to see his father all the while hiding it from me.

Nearly 3 years later S.O. and I got together. My mother used it as an excuse to contact my father, crying, upset and angry over her 20 year old daughter dating a man who was 32… two years later S.O. and I got married. My father recently told me that from time to time my mother would call him with crazy stories about S.O. and I. My father would drop by my house unexpectedly the kids were always thrilled to see him and I loved that he “dropped” by. Of course, later I found out that he did it to see if there was any truth to my mother’s stories. There never was.

What I have found over the last year is that my mother was telling people all sorts of stories about me that weren’t true. Deirdre and Julien spent a great deal of time with her and as they got older S.O. and I started to notice that they came home from my mother’s with attitudes that weren’t normal for them. When Julien was in junior high she would call me telling me stories about my own son. That he acted up at school, that he was getting a bad grade in this or that class. Julien would get in trouble on my mother’s word, I’ve since apologized profusely. It just didn’t occur to me that she would lie about her own grandson. His report card would come in with awesome results and always had compliments on his conduct and behavior.

After Rowan was born for whatever reason, my mother was never all that interested in her. It was more the idea of having a baby around and all the clothes and things that she was excited about. A month after Rowan was born my mother’s house caught fire and I spent the next six months with Rowan in a carrier going from tile store to paint store to meetings with contractors and architects to rebuild her house.

When Rowan was two we moved into a new house. Four months later we started our own business, my mother was angry because I was no longer available to shop for things with her for her house. She started telling people that S.O. abused me, kept me “chained” to a desk, and that Deirdre and Julien were raising Rowan.

Our tenth anniversary was the following year. I asked my mother to watch the kids for the night so S.O. and I could do something for our anniversary. Ten years, I know it’s not much but it felt like a big deal to me. She told me that she wasn’t going to and I needed to learn that when you have kids you don’t get to have as much fun that was just life.

Two and half years later, roughly, Julien was diagnosed with cancer and the rest is well documented through dozens of posts here.

All that for what?

To remind myself that this isn’t the first time she has done something shitty. And, more likely than not it won’t be the last. Now she makes nasty comments about my marriage and implies I’m horrible person because “mothers and daughters” don’t act this way.

I have trust issues. I admit it. If my own mother is capable of these things… then anyone is capable of that and probably worse. Which means I probably really need that book, it’s time for some sort of healing to begin. Right or wrong at least it’s a move in some direction.