The two sides of my mother

[Desert Flower]

It's not easy for me to be saying these words Stillost. Saying them makes it real somehow. And also, after I say them, I cannot go back so to speak.

I'm sure you will find some words you need to say Stillost and that will relieve you. Your being here is such an enormous step already. You are on your way.

[Mathilde]

All of you. Thanks for giving words to this. Or saying it is too hard to give words.

I struggled with this in my journal. Then bumped into this topic. My family had these two sides. My ex had too. It was the hardest thing to deal with. And still. I can see when they fake it. But I think often both parts are real. They broke.

What I hate most, is that I could not break the cycle. I went no contact with my ex nearly immediately after giving birth. Too late. I had to fight the entire system. For years. Him, my family, his family, CPS, the courts. Everyone wanted to force a sociopath into our lives. Until I had barely anything left to give to my kid. And could not protect him from my family's troubles.  I begged for help everywhere. Nobody wanted to believe me. Because they too, did not believe these sweet people hid a dark side.

But I also showed my child two sides. I never hurt him on purpose, like my parents did to me. But he saw my grief and panic and anger at my dad. To whom I am also double myself. To meet his doubleness. I screamed at him to stop abusing us. Only now I learned to stay outwardly calm under everything. I hate that my kid saw this. He too has a mother with two sides. Even if the terrified side came into being over fighting for his safety.

I am most angry at my ex and parents over this. That their refusal to take accountability, shoved their dark parts unto me. So that I too could not be there for my child, as I wanted and he deserved. I also hate myself for this. We have good times too. But sometimes it feels like the only thing I can give him is to say sorry...on my own account and that of all the rest. Tomorrow I - again - tell the whole story of our two sided family to CPS. In the hopes my kid gets the help with this I never had. I hope he heals, as we could not.   

[Desert Flower]

This resonates very strongly with me Mathilde, the stuff you write about having the two sides yourself and your kid. That's really hard and it's not what we want at all. I feel very guilty myself about my kids having to experience the two sides of me. One thats relaxed and being able to love them and another anxious side, closing me up and making me jumpy and angry at everyone sometimes. Really hard. But I do believe we are on our way to doing things differently than what we had to experience ourselves and making things better. It will not be perfect, but it will be better.

[Mathilde]

Thank you. For the recognition. I'm sorry you too struggle with this. I suspect every parent, especially from a highly traumatised family, struggles with this. I hope our kids see that at least we tried to do things better. This is what I missed in my family: a simple "sorry, we weren't perfect".

I had to bear the family trauma of my ex...that was a whole lot worse than mine. I think it is easy to see what cycles we did not break. But my ex would have been extremely abusive to our son. I broke the worst family cycle at least.  

[Desert Flower]

That's a big thing you did for your son Mathilde! Huge in fact.

[Chart]

Acknowledgement and recognition... THAT is what we can do for our kids. And narcissists and abusers CANNOT. I know I did bad things, but I can remember them and admit to them. I've apologized and will continue to acknowledge the things that happened. My kids know that they can talk to me about these things (well two of them do...) Everything is relative and we don't know the future, but staying open to my kids is something that is only going to get stronger and easier as I heal. Honesty means hope, and kids can understand and intuitively know this even when things are confusing and bad.

[Sanctuary]

Thank you to everyone who has posted here, and a particular thank you to Chart for writing on this today, which led me to see and read the thread. I too have been grappling with mixed emotions about my mother. On one hand, she had a tough childhood and then a long and extremely abusive relationship with my father, which damaged her mental health. I understand that he destroyed her to such an extent that she wasn't able to protect either of us from his abuse, and I have huge sympathy for all that she suffered, to the point where she used to try to kill herself when I was little.

I also understand from my T that her narcissism in the decades since then is likely to have been a response to the trauma she experienced.

But on the other hand, I hold enormous anger that she didn't keep me safe, and that if she had been successful in any of her suicide attempts, she would have left me and my brothers and sister in the sole care of a monster.

I also don't like the way that she'll talk at me for hours about how much she cares about all the people around her - her neighbours, her neighbours' relations, strangers in shops, etc, but despite the frequent phone calls, she'll often go for half a year or more without asking me how I am.

As the years go by, I've been finding it increasingly hard to be around her, and hating myself for it because I feel like none of it is her fault. Our relationship became more and more strained as we both felt more and more tense spending time together. After a lot of soul-searching, I decided when I last visited her to try to open up a little bit about my childhood experiences and the ongoing effects of them, in the hope that she might understand why I'm often so stressed when we're together. I expected her to deny my suffering (she had previously told me and my brother that situations we both remember clearly didn't happen) but it still felt important to say something.

She stopped me soon after I started, said "Well at least you weren't married to him for 35 years", and walked away. It felt as if she had suffered so much by being married to a man who was violent, sadistic, a paedophile and matched the characteristics of a psychopath, that there was no space for anyone else to have also gone through *. I believe that for her own mental health she may have to block that out. I imagine otherwise the guilt of acknowledging what she let happen would be overwhelming.

I've reduced contact with her over the last few years but can't bring myself to end it completely, as much as I'd love that. She's coming to visit me and my son tomorrow for a few days, and I think that keeping in mind that others on this forum have similar conflicted feelings about their mothers and look forward in a way to possible relief/release when their mother no longer exists, might help me get through it.

[Chart]

I believe that narcissists suffer and certainly they suffer terribly. But people who ask for forgiveness and see "reality" as it truly is (or as close as we can try to get) are so much easier to forgive and connect with. You can construct your own prison, but please, afterwards, don't complain that I can't get in, or I refuse to come visit, or anything else that is simply not true. There is nothing to be done from determined denial... except walk away. Subsequently, not looking back can become the saddest thing we know for a long long time. It sucks.