'Mother Taboo'

[clarity]

Hope the tone of this wont offend...

Just here for a rant... found an old thread on the subject of 'not all mother's love their children but most people think you are crazy if you suggest otherwise'.  It resonated with me so much I wanted to start a similar conversation just for the SHEER RELIEF of being somewhere that people know that some mothers are the polar opposite of the fairy tale stereotype.  I guess maybe stepmothers and mothers in law take the rap, and are the accepted 'shadow mothers' in society.   But woe betide you should dare to besmirch the hallowed one who bore you...!!!!!!

I wonder if it is because the pain of maternal rejection is so profound, that society cannot handle it... tooo unpleasant.  Let's brush it under the carpet and do this  and rejoice in false celebration of the Teflon mama's.  Covert's being triple coated with Teflon that they apply themselves whilst howling at the moon. 

Yes, I can feel for her troubled childhood, but cannot feel sympathy for someone who stubbornly refuses to address things despite having conversations with me about how crappy it all was for her.... she is a martyr who cannot bear to give up her cross.

A little anecdote about my supposedly 'loving' mother....

She agreed to drop me into town for a rare night out with a friend.  I had gone to a lot of effort to get ready and felt quite nice.  No comment on entering the car.  After a while she said ' oh I went to a party last night.  There was a young woman there, a friend of my friend.  She was soo beautiful! She looked really stunning you know, she was dressed so well, so elegant she was...'  This went on a while....

'Oh'.  said I

Silence.

'Mum, don't I look ok?'... ( I fell into the trap of letting her know it had bothered me.  Years before I knew about Narcs)

' Oh goodness!' said NM.' Of course you do!! How awful of me not to say... I should have said, yes, you look lovely dear. '

I left the car, not so sure I looked ok any more.  I will never forget this calculating ( and very often repeated tactic) example of a mother clinically rejecting her daughter, whilst ensuring that she could slither out of it, excusing it as a moment of absent mindedness.

Loving mother?
Hah.
Don't make me laugh.

[Three Roses]

 

[clarity]

Thankyou threeroses... I really hope so.  Get so tired these days... it is exhausting. Even when I don't think about it which I try not to, the stress is in my body. 

[sanmagic7]

i hear ya, clarity, about the stress being in your body.  i've gotten some of it out, but there's plenty more.  could that be part of all this rumination crapola i work so hard at avoiding, but it keeps coming back?  hmmm . . . i think you hit on something for me.  thanks.  big hug!

[woodsgnome]

So true...how the 'mother's taboo' is yet another setback many here experience. I learned long ago to avoid trying to explain why the very mention of the m upsets me so much. It creates more pain I don't need; thoughts about it usually roil within to where my heart feels engulfed in the sadness, anger, and hopelessness.

Still, here there are people who do understand, so for Clarity and everyone else affected by this, here's a collective sign of mutual support:

                                               

[Candid]

I call this the Motherhood Myth, clarity. It's quite simple: All mothers love their children. That's it.

I know, it doesn't make sense for a woman to be pregnant, carry the foetus for 36 weeks of watching her nutrition, limiting alcohol, preparing a layette and a cot etc etc... then offering cruel contempt when the babe arrives. It doesn't make sense, of course it doesn't. But a whole lot of us on this forum know it happens.

I managed to deny it myself until I was all of 35 and there was a devastating Final Straw. My first therapist some years earlier had made it explicit to me, but I was still trying to work the unworkable. Denial on a monstrous scale, matching societal sacred cows.

I hope in years to come there will be Mother's Day cards and Mother birthday cards that tell it like it was, for all the unloved children who still feel the obligation to acknowledge the day, are still afraid of repercussions if they don't. I remember those years of looking through the wishing wells and dicky birds, the sickly sentiments, how damned long it took to find anything I could bear to send.

We probably need ambiguous wording. I loved one response (I think it was Kizzie's) on a thread where one member was struggling with what to write on the card to accompany funeral flowers. It was along the lines of "We will never forget you". Very mild, considering the 'recipient' was dead.

Yep, the truth needs to come out. Not all mothers love their children. Many are competitive and hateful, especially with daughters.

Clarity, more than once I've thought you and I must be twins. In her one fauxpology, my mother said: "I don't know why I treated you the way I did. Perhaps I was jealous, you were so beautiful."

A good mother might delight in that, right? But oh no... ours had to attack it at every opportunity.

[clarity]

Oh Candid, the card thing.... those parental celebration days make me heave.  And yet.... for the past many months ( oh, actually that would be 5 years?!!) have been sending mum those exact schmaltzy cards with loving messages ( excuse me while I throw up) as I fawned and fawned without realising, congratulating myself for being able to transform the relationship ( excuse me while I have a coughing fit)... and on my 50th a few weeks ago, NM gives me one of those 'born in 19--' cards, as impersonal and mass produced and generic as possible; she didn't write my name anywhere on the card or envelope, and the contrast was just deliciously ;slap me in the face with a wet haddock' enough to wake me up from my fawning slumbers ( along with a whole loads of other details that added together made me STOP denying things AT LAST...)

Would quite happily go back in time and rip every one of those schmaltzy monstrosities into confetti. 

Had visions recently of her funeral and all sorts of satisfying moments when I reveal to all and sundry ( there will likely be masses of people there, as she has an obsession with this, always tells me when there were 'sooooo many people at the funeral!'when she has been to a 'good' one - it is her measure of a person ) that she was the mother from *.  Of course, that is not likely, but I may find subtler ways to drop the hint.
If I go before her, she will be mortified at the lack of people at mine ( self isolation not being very conducive to amassing weeping  mourners  )  and I will have a snigger watching her from my cloud, as she cringes about my 'unpopularity' and the terrible burden of having such a misfit as a child.   

Grrrrrrrrrr.

[Candid]

And yet.... for the past many months ( oh, actually that would be 5 years?!!) have been sending mum those exact schmaltzy cards with loving messages...

Are you planning to give that up, hmm?

she didn't write my name anywhere on the card or envelope, and the contrast was just deliciously ;slap me in the face with a wet haddock' enough to wake me up from my fawning slumbers ...

[clarity]

Well, am going to have a really long think about it...





Err, YES!!!

[songbirdrosa]

Yes, I can feel for her troubled childhood, but cannot feel sympathy for someone who stubbornly refuses to address things despite having conversations with me about how crappy it all was for her.... she is a martyr who cannot bear to give up her cross.

Sing it, clarity!

Having only just realised in the past few weeks how damaging my own mother was, that right there describes her to a t. HER life has been so horrible. SHE has endured so much. EVERYTHING is someone else's fault. She always has to be in the most pain, with the most problems, the hardest life. Puh-lease! It's like suffering is a competition and she has to be the winner!

Yesterday, at the mere suggestion that she had done things to hurt me, she became angry, defensive, and rude. I know now, she's not going to change. And beyond all the anger, that just makes me sad.

[radical]

This is such a common theme here.  It seems to be such a big factor for so many of us in developing this horrible condition, and there does also, often seem to be a link with sexual abuse via extreme isolation, inability to develop boundaries, lack of protection, and neediness for affection.

I spent years having to read dozens of cards to find one that didn't have a whole lot of extreme schmaltz about about a mother's love, dedication, selfless devotion etc. for mother's day.  I always knew she didn't love me at all.  Sometimes I couldn't find one and had to buy a blank card.  Yet I loved her, and always chose one I thought she'd like and wrote in it lovingly, always spent a long time finding a gift I thought she would especially like.  A post above reminded me that when it was my birthday I always got a card that looked like the cheapest she could find, and one I would be guaranteed to not like, and there was no message, although my name was in there.

Last year she gave me a raincoat.  I know it was one she'd bought for herself but decided she didn't like because the pockets were full of hankies and sweet wrappers.

[clarity]

Oh big and loving hugs to all we poor motherless children....  ... to some that would sound so over the top but this is a devastating reality that takes us years to realise and be able to face. 

Tomorrow is big day for me post denial breakthrough first meet. Have told little me she can hide behind me the whole time and I will protect her which went down v well and has helped me feel stronger.... but still got the collywobbles. So good to know I can report back to base camp after I go over the top!! 

[sanmagic7]

along with the overt abuse, may i put in a word for mothers who simply kept quiet, out of the way, did their jobs as wife and mother by having an impeccably clean house, doing laundry by hand, hanging it outside, (we didn't have automatic washer and dryer back then - just a wringer washer and a washboard) and not teaching us anything about it?  'you'll have all your married life to do these things', but no domestic goddess was i. 

our family was devoid of hugs, gentle touch, gathering in when distressed.  also devoid of adult disagreement - in 21 yrs. living with them, i saw them have a fight one time.  i didn't even learn how to disagree/fight in a relationship.  my dad told me once 'you're mother would die for you'.  i almost died for my narc daughter.

trauma and abuse come in so many different forms.  friends and cousins wished they lived with my family cuz it looked so wonderful compared to what they were enduring.  unfortunately, it stunted me in so many ways.   when i've talked to my best friend about my c-ptsd and my parents a few years back (she spent a lot of time at our house) she pooh-poohed everything i said. 

the mother taboo is alive and well, even with those we believe will believe us.  they usually don't.  my parents are both dead a long time, but i really feel for you who have to continue to struggle to 'honor' yours.   i have no idea what my relationship with them might have been like over the years.  hugs to you all.

[Candid]

I've got a new moniker for Mother Superior. Sacred Cow.

San, my own Sacred Cow also prided herself on a house in which not a mote of dust could be allowed to settle.

[radical]

I've always  said and believed that open heart surgery could have been safely carried out on our kitchen floor, when I was a kid.