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I can't put into words how much I miss my mother. She had great difficulty when I was a child being a mother because she was orphaned so young at 11. At that time she had to take on the role of mother to four younger brothers and sisters. She had 7 older brothers and sisters but all were out on their own, except that several took turns being the sibling over 18 to live in the home to be guardian, while working outside for income. So the over 18 year old sibling became the wage earner and as I remember my mom's stories from when I was young, she became the mother figure. My aunts and uncles confirm this.
My mother married my dad when she was close to 30 years old; he was two years older. Dad's father was a heavy drinker but my dad wouldn't dream of calling his father an alcoholic. Dad got a good job around the time I was 7, but it was very stressful and required him to drink as part of the job and to be around alcohol and bars all the time. My father would be out late for work and then when he wanted to be out late to drink more, he would say he was at work. Nothing my mother said to him made a difference. Screaming fights etc. The one rule she had was my dad could not drink at home. I am so grateful to her for that. I came to the conclusion that my dad was an alcoholic quite early in my teens I think. My mother would do imitations of my father being drunk, she would imitate the staggering and slurring and sing drinking songs the morning after. It very much upset me but the unspoken message I got was that Dad was an alcoholic and I knew it was true. Years later my dad and mom were outraged when as a preface to something else I wanted to say, I said well, given that dad's an alcoholic...
Mom and dad were floored. I was 21 and had read Claudia Black's "it will never happen to me," which just filled in my understanding about what I already knew to be true: Dad was an alcoholic. They silenced me immediately-later my mom said my dad could not be an alcoholic because he didn't need to drink everyday and he had a job. My mom had already had her psychotic break at this point but once in a while, she made sense, although Dad not being an alcoholic was not one of those rational moments. Two brothers and my younger sister have since told me they were not aware that my dad was an alcoholic at that time. They have since become enlightened. My other siblings have their own addiction/alcoholism issues now.
Anyway, my mom started disappearing as a person when I was sixteen; as a mom she had begun disappearing into depression when I was 8 and could only cook dinner everyday. My mom was tough to take, she was always upset, screaming and irritable until her psychotic break but I valued that she did not lie to me. My dad was the more fun parent, and his irresponsibility kept us in rags and a shabby home all my childhood. Not to mention fearful and depressed.
When I finally went to therapy, my therapist told me although my mother was still physically alive, I needed to grieve the loss of my mother in the emotional sense because she had died that way a long time ago, probably around the time I was 8.
By the time I was in high school I would eat a high fat snack everyday so I could wait until my mom could put dinner on the table. Sometimes it was ready when we came home from school, sometimes we ate at 10 pm. My father and I were the only ones to eat usually, because my siblings ate out and at other people's homes whenever possible, also avoiding dinnertime fights between my parents. I ate extra so my mom would not be upset that there were leftovers.
I had to take my mom for inpatient treatment twice. My father was all in favor of her being fixed. Of course, he saw nothing wrong with himself. My mother became the designated problem. My dad died of cancer two years ago; he never had to confront his alcoholism. But I do know none of his children could be there at the end for him when he needed care. I guess you would say none of us were recovered enough to go to the dirty broken down home he insisted on staying in until nearly the end. He kept having to go to the hospital for short stays and I visited him there. At these times, the doctors said there was nothing more to be done. They suggested hospice. The hospice people said he was in no way ready for hospice. They said we would have to pay $100/day for everyday he was in hospice beyond 2 weeks. We readily agreed. My dad did not make it one week in hospice before he died. The whole thing still confuses me.
Now it is difficult to take care of my mom. She is living in her home where she wants to be but only because right now my younger sister has shut herself in and is caring for my mom. My sister does not think she has anywhere to go. My sister had worst relationship with my mom of all kids. I hope it is true that everything happens for a reason.
I am grateful for this forum. I was crying when I started this post, but I slipped easily back into my head. That's where my nickname comes from. Athena was the Greek goddess who stayed in her head too much.
Athena: My mother also had many many psychotic breaks. She had one when i was a child and was institutionalized for a while but no one talks about it. She lived in her home until she died but with great pressure on her children. She leaned on her eldest daughter a lot. My elder sister while of course she had a burden of taking care of my mother did a real public relations exercise on it. She made sure everyone knew what a great sacrifice she made.She made sure that all the authorities, everyone was aware of what a doting daughter she was. Well she wasn't all that doting. I went to see my mother 6 years ago. Her house was a tremendous mess (nothing to eat in there) my elder sister said she wanted to keep my mother as independent as possible. My mother had had a hip replacement a few months earlier. She had not had a bath since and I doubt she had had clean clothes since either. All she ate every day was like 4 slices of toast and some tea. At that time my mother was estranged from my younger sister who had two children. My mother had never seen her grandchildren. So while I was there I arranged for a reunification with my younger sister. Then my younger sister started taking care of my mother. The house was cleaned, the garden was cleared, the meals on wheels was organized. Then two years later my mother died. My elder sister first of all said there was no will and then produced a will that said that my younger sister and I were not part of the family anymore. My younger sister had spend hours and hours and days and months cleaning the house, preparing meals, helping her, and suddenly my elder sister came up with this story that none of that ever happened and that her "mother's wishes" were important to her.
What a great public relations exercise she had created in her master plan to get everything and take all the credit for everything which of course she did from childhood. As a child she had to have everything, be the best, know all be seen as the only child I can grieve that now. She took credit for everything my younger sister did. She would tell other relatives she was the only one taking care of my mother and that it was an incredible burden meantime she would have my younger sister do everything. The thing that confuses me is that my younger sister refused to confront my elder sister. She said that would mean losing a sister too and she speaks to her today. She talks about some of the things my elder sister is interested in like homeopathics and she has never confronted her about her betrayal. I did. I think my younger sister still feels she has something to give her although I'm not sure what it is beyond more betrayal and trivialization of what she does.
Athena that was a very touching, honest post. i am so glad you let it out and shared it.
Sounds like you may feel very lost and orphaned. It is so hard to lose our parents no matter what they were like. From my experience we never get over it either.
We do learn to be able to live and laugh again.
I lost my mom in 2000 to breast cancer. I was fortunate to have her as a wonderful mom and my best friend when I became an adult. I grieve with you hon. It is so hard to lose mom.
I found anti stressors are a big answer. Go feed ducks, go to the library, raise a puppy or two or three, get a glue gun and make stuff.(be careful not to get it in your hair, I won't explain.....) find laughter where ever you can. I have movies I watch over and over that make me laugh, I go to Walmart just to watch the kids.
I love to groom my dogs and see them be so happy and funny. It helps, it heals. Most important is watching "All my Children." lol I think of it as therapy, nonsense, means nothing, teaches nothing is just a Calgon take me awaaaaaaay!
Most important really is talk to hp, ask for guidance to the truth, ask for help to be the person he wants you to become. And LOVE you.
Thank you, Athena, for your share. You have really had the courage to face things as they are. My heart goes out to you and also to your mother, who just like all of us, was doing her best, too. My mother was rigid and controlling when I was a child, but after my father died she softened. I still have some forgiveness work to do for when I was a child, but for the most part I accept that she really did a good job, given the childhood she had had. As an adult, my mother and I had a very loving and even fun relationship. I am so grateful for that now, and I still miss her so much although she has been gone 5 years now. Thank you for your honesty and your trust in us. I'm so glad you are here! And I love your nickname, also. Athena was in her head, but she was powerful, as well. Blessings, mebjk
Thank you all so much for your responses. I started to cry again when I read them yesterday and for me crying is a good thing. I think I remember that a few years before my mom became psychotic she stopped crying. I don't know if like me she was trying to shut down all feeling, but I do know that she stopped crying and soon went over an edge she has never returned from. You are all too important to me. Don't leave like my mom had to.
my mother would sometimes take to her bed in depression and stay there for a few days. She'd say she had a bad back. The rest of the time I think she was tremendously depressed like dragging through molasses and she managed that with food (she was always morbidly obese) and gambling (she did the horses and the pools which is a kinda lottery in the UK), she did chaos pretty well too. Every now and then she would pull herself out of those depressions to project onto others. She'd have some relative over and she'd cook and clean for days and weeks. No wonder she wanted them over they were a way for her to manage her depression.
As she aged she became even more isolated and more paranoid. Her paranoia would come at times like she would be convinced everyone was out to get her. Some of that may have been her ptsd since she grew up in Northern Ireland and of course one would naturally be paranoid growing up in that setting. I think her rigid irish catholicism played a part too. It was all hell and damnation and fear and trepidation. Then she slipped into dementia stuff and would get lost all the time she could not find her way home from the store. She would wander at night. I think her sleep terror over took her in her dementia but she always had it. Both my father and mother had it from being molested i would imagine (I think thats why they re-enacted it on me) they would bolt up our house, nail the windows shut and act like the devil was outside. Unfortunately it was inside and appeared day and night like clock work only I could not allow myself to know that till I was an adult and was able to have the courage to know. I could not go into the kitchen at night in our house because it was bolted up. At one time the bedroom which we all slept in till I was 5 or so and beyond was locked. Everything was locked, secret, fear based. Every inch of our house was infused with their fear. No wonder I have difificulty at home. Home is the horror house for me. Home is where I've been raped, mauled, beaten and terrorised. I don't need to watch any horror movies I already had them day in day out in that house. My mother died very suddenly three years ago running down the street in a panic attack she had many many of them but I did not know what they were as a child of course. She also had many psychotic breaks and I did not know what they were either. I could not of course allow myself to know that both my mother and father were psychotic until I was in therapy and even then I instantly pushed the idea away. I wanted to be like other people still I wanted a real mother and father and for someone to hear me say its not fair and serve me up one.
I think sometimes that is why I get so angry at my boyfriends mother. Here I am desperate for this fantasy mother and what do I get another narcissistic in denial bitch and I want to make her the source of all my problems. If only she were. I have no doubt my boyfriend's mother made his life a living hell and still does with her narcissism and her intriguing and her promsies she breaks all the time and her hot and cold motherhood stuff. At the same time he can take people home to meet her and he can say this is my mother when he works in the same place as her. She does look like a human being and act like one most of the time which is more than my parents did. At the same time I do not know what she did to him to cause him to be in so much pain and anger and rage and grief and maybe I would not want to know because I have a hard enough time stomaching her as it is and maybe if I knew I would say something inappropriate as I do so often.
I could not do that with my mother. She always looked decades older than she was and she always looked terrible, bloated with eating, unkept, smelling, clothes covered in food debris, layers and layers of clothes in the winter time, sweating profusely in the summer time. I am sure she never felt her body in her lifetime. Her body was such a curse to her to feel it was probably impossible and I hated her so much because she was not the catalogue mummy and I wanted one so desperately. And I could not own that of course but lived suffused in guilt and shame about them all my life internalizing it all and hating myself.
So I do miss my mother but I don't miss how she made me feel helpless and alone and frightened and abandoned and crazy with rage and shame and guilt. I do not miss that at all.
I do so much relate to all you have written. My mother was able to maintain some semblance of decent dressing and public appearances until I was 16. At that point she started to fall over the cliff of psychosis. All of us children struggled to keep ourselves going as we pretty much had while she was depressed. My youngest brother was 8 at this time and he has no memory of the mother I had who could sometimes be there for me. Somehow today he is the one who is able to have the most compassion for her and every one else in our family. While I was away at college my mother became more and more psychotic, and became a bag lady in our neighborhood. I didn't know how to help and came home after college and after one year tricked my mom gently into the hospital for treatment and medication. She had lost about 1oo lbs. and was subsisting on potato chips and tea. The medication sedated her and kept her off the streets though I can't be sure she has ever stopped hearing voices. She does not admit to hearing the voices, but she answers them all the time. Mom had been isolated and distrustful of everyone a long time before she slipped into psychosis and developed full blown paranoia. Before tricking her into hospital I tried to get her to take medication for depression and psychosis that our family doctor gave to us. She would not take it and then even caught me trying to slip it into her tea. I had no choice but to bring her to the hospital.
I worked for many years in a domestic violence and sexual assault program because I initially thought these issues had no relation to me and would fulfill my need to do social work. Of course I learned quickly how emotionally abused my mother and us children were with my alcoholic dad. In the end I also began to think from things my mother said but would never spell out that she had been molested as a young girl. As far as I could see my mom's catholicism brought no peace to her but was a burden she carried and felt compelled to burden her children with. There was no bright side to her christianity. My older sister has inherited this along with my dad's alcoholism.
I knew before I was 20 from my psychology studies that my mom was a product of her orphaned childhood and genes. Most of her brothers and sisters appear(ed) to be alcoholic. My father's other 3 brothers were also alcoholics.
I understand what you are saying about home not being a safe place. I still struggle today to feel like I am allowed in my own home. It wasn't until after several therapists said to my one brother, my one sister and I that it was a miracle that not one of us children was dead or in jail that I started to get the whole picture. It is easier sometimes to just try and forget.
Thanks maresie. I need your help and appreciate your support.
