The terror of being ill around a narcissistic parent

My mother has a full-on HATE for anyone who is ill - she claims it's just them needing attention. Obvious illness causes her to express rage and derision. For hours. I don't know what happened to her that she is so violently hateful of vulnerable people – although I know from personal experience, her mother - my grandmother  - was much the same. 

In my adult life, when I've been employed (I have been self-employed for almost 25 years) I had a terrible time calling in sick no matter how sick I was.  I always felt I would be called out as a liar. It was terrifying.  I'm in my late 50s and even now, being ill to the point I can't work really bothers me; I feel a deep sense of guilt, like I'm committing some type of fraud, and fear whatever response I might get. Some of that is my mother’s reaction to sick people generally, and how she handled me being ill specifically.

As a kid, I had terrible colds; I would often be up coughing all night and exhausted for weeks from lack of sleep.  I still went to school - by choice because feeling unwell at school was preferable to being in the house with her, enduring her endless rage.

In the worst years, I maintained my social life, being between 16 and 17 years old when the cruellest of this was going on. My mother railed on that my “never being home,” was why I was sick. That and the night air, which she claimed the doctor had told her was keeping me sick. According to her, I was doing everything I could to stay sick and keep her up at night. She argued my entire goal was to cause her as much distress as I could.

I remember once when I was very little – maybe 8 or nine – I had a bad earache. I remember sleeping in my mother’s bed and her saying she wished she could take the pain away, and I remember that statement didn't ring true. As I grew up, she became more and more hostile towards me and particularly when I was sick. Those many nights I'd be coughing so hard, trying to stifle the sound into my pillow, she would burst into my room in the early hours screaming at me that I was keeping her awake on purpose and was trying to wake the whole house, that I was selfish. She didn't care at all how sick I was, didn't offer help or medicine, never mind I was nearly barfing from coughing so hard... It was horrible. I was sick, exhausted and terrified she'd turn up screaming at me at 3 a.m..

My "favourite" incident of her going ballistic because I was sick was in the week after my boyfriend visited over the winter holidays in my 12^th grade year. This incident set off a chain of events that reverberated for more than 10 years after.

That December, my boyfriend, who lived away, came to stay with us over the winter holiday. Meeting him for the first time, my mother vacillated between being sugar-sweet and trying to make an impression on him, and being a full-fledged bitch. Near the end of his stay, she did a bizarre, really weird thing - the catalyst for events to occur a week later. He and I had come in late-ish from a New Year’s Eve party; She heard us come home, but we didn’t hear her emerge from her bedroom.

My mother’s controlling personality and her “religion” make for her being extremely caustic about intimacy, sex and relationships – insulting, derisive, weird. We weren’t allowed to share a room – and I get it; it was her house – so before parting for the night, we did what in-love 17-year-olds do and had a little make-out session on the couch. Her sudden, “That’s enough of that!” revealed my mother standing in the dark, observing us. She then disclosed she’d been watching us for 10 minutes. It was, among the many, many weird moments of her parenting, a pinnacle of her bizarre behaviour. We were mortified, embarrassed and of course subject to her barrage of insults and abuse. I still feel sick to my stomach remembering it; it was extremely peeping-Tom of her. So gross.

In the days after my boyfriend left to return to his home in another province, I came down with a wicked cold.  All the parties we’d been at and all the shared food we’d consumed were likely the source of whatever bugs I had, and as a 17-year-old, I was doubtless not as careful about hand-washing as I could have been – nor was anyone else. I was sick enough the week after the winter holiday I couldn't go back to school. My friend (a gal my mother absolutely detested for some reason - but she hated all my friends, so true to type) came over to bring homework material. 

My mother hadn't contacted the school to see if there was homework.... my fault that I wasn't there to get it myself, and I was just trying to get attention... endless, but I had called my friend and asked her to bring over whatever I needed to be working on. My mother absolutely freaked out at my friend came to the house. My mother cornered my friend in the front hall of our house, my friend’s back against the front door, unable – or too terrified – to leave, as my mother screamed in her face, called her names, tore into her character, shamed her. It was horrifying.

After four days of being at home, subject to my mother’s endless abuse, despite still being sick, I went back to school and to my job serving tables in a busy restaurant. At the end of my first night back, I left by the staff entrance where my step-dad (who was amazing) and my mother (who bullied him) were waiting. My dad often picked me up, but this time, she was with him and my suitcase was in the car. It was 9:30 at night, I was tired after my shift, still quite sick, and VERY confused about what was happening. I don’t have words for what happened next; they drove me to the hospital and left me there.

I have almost no memory of what had actually happened that night. It was so deeply traumatizing I have only vague and incorrect memories of that night even now.

In my memory, my parents drove to the hospital and we came together into the lobby. I went to the bathroom and came out minutes later to find my parents gone and my suitcase abandoned in the middle of the lobby.

I didn't know I had spent two hours with a psychiatrist – I have still no memory of these two hours or having met with or spoken to anyone. I only remember entering a typical hospital public restroom, doing my thing and leaving in the usual time it takes.  I only discovered what had happened after yet another terrifying incident of my mother’s irrational rage, occurring almost 10 years later.

The incident that led me to discover almost four months of mostly-lost memory was spurred by my mother’s behaviour one particular day about two months after I got married, when she was visiting my house. I was juggling new spouse, new home, young child, new marriage, and on this day, caring for my two-year-old daughter and my friend’s child – a one-year-old.

My mother has a bizarre propensity for getting herself into rages. The usual trajectory is she says something caustic or critical about another person. Whoever she has said the thing to might respond with a counter of some type, at which point she blasts off into some explosive tirade.

As per her usual, this is exactly what happened. She launched into a rage within 30 minutes of arriving and began seething about my new spouse (who wasn't there) and my dad (definitely not there). After an hour of it, I finally couldn't take it anymore and asked her to stop slagging them off, that it wasn't fair or right and that she was not welcome to come to my house and tear into people, particularly when they weren't there, or to subject me to her shit in my own house. 

This made things worse by orders of magnitude.  She wasn't having it and doubled down on her attacks on my spouse and my dad, and screamed she could come to my house whenever she wanted, and I couldn't stop her... So bizarre.

As my mother slid into her rage, I put the kids in my bedroom in the crib, so they'd be out of danger, if not out of earshot. My mother - enraged, and irrational - and now resorting to striking me - refused to leave; she said she couldn't go because she needed her purse. I opened the front door and threw her purse onto the front lawn hoping she'd follow it. Nope. She still wouldn't leave and was in a massive, irrational frenzy. This is when I called the police.

By this point, we were both screaming.  I was pleading with her to leave, which became "you have to leave," which became "GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!" 

Suddenly, she went from full-on rage to dead calm; she spat out that she was leaving, adding her usual barrage of what a terrible person, mother, wife, daughter I was and how “everyone” knew how “sick” I was. But rather than heading out the front door, she went down the hallway, opened my bedroom door and scooped up my child. She tried to leave the house with my baby in her arms. This did not go well for her... 

I admit I threw a few hard punches to dislodge my child. This was the first time I had retaliated with purposeful violence. My mother had struck me many, many times in the past with fists and with objects. Sidebar: once she chased me upstairs with a carving knife – one she still has. I locked myself in the second-floor bathroom, but she kicked the door in and stood there with the knife in my face, screaming at me. Terrifying.

I had often defended myself, or had run off, sometimes down the street in the dark - once in bare feet in winter - but I had never reacted this way - consciously, purposefully resorting to violence with the goal of hurting her.  That she would attempt to take my child made me blind with anger.

It. Was. Horrifying. 

When the police finally arrived, she saw their vehicle pull up, threw herself into the couch beside the door, and as the officers came through the open front door, she bleated "Help me, she's trying to kill me."

I had already told dispatch what was going on - and they'd heard her screaming her head off in the background, so the police were aware of what was going on, that she was attempting to take my child, that she was in my house and refusing to leave. The officers managed to coax her out the door and into her car, to a cacophony of her pleading and desperately trying to convince them she should take my child. 

As much as my mother attempting to abduct my child was horrific, as were the hours leading to that moment, and the years before, and her regular, horrifying, middle-of-the-night attacks on a sick teenager, I'm glad - strange word to use - it happened. Her rage and her having tried to take my daughter that day compelled me to find out what had transpired 10 years earlier. 

That incident was a turning point. I knew then I needed to comprehend what was going on and what had been going on my entire life. I knew I had to understand as much as I could about her – and, by extension, about me. The gaslighting my mother is so expert at had led me to question my fitness as a parent and my sanity from as far back as when I was in fifth grade, when she would tell me, on an almost-daily basis, she had people watching me.

I started calling around. I remembered a couple counselling sessions we’d attended as a “family,” and I knew which hospital they'd taken me to and knew that there must be a record. When I called the hospital, I was transferred to the psych unit. Reception confirmed there were records of that family counselling and gave me the names of the people who'd seen us. My call was then transferred to a doctor - a psychiatrist - who said he remembered me, and that he'd met with me for two hours on that night many years earlier. 

I was STUNNED to understand I'd spent two hours at the hospital with a psychiatrist. I remember walking into the hospital's main reception area, my step-dad putting my suitcase down, me walking forward into a small white bathroom and walking out soon after to find my suitcase sitting in the middle of the floor, and my parents gone. I remember calling our then-pastor, who came to pick me up, and spending two or three nights with him and his family, sleeping in their den on their pull-out.

I had no memory of anything else (even now), and asked the doctor if he was sure he had met with me. He was, and said he had a file with names, dates, and record of that meeting. Writing this now, 40 years later, I'm still amazed I remember nothing of this night beyond these incorrect details.

I requested access to the file and said I wanted to come in and read it. When I arrived to the doctor’s offices in the basement of the hospital annexe a few days later, he was at first very reluctant to let me read the file - because, he said, my mother was not there, so something about consent. I said that file was also about ME and I WAS there. He relented but said I could not copy anything, or take the file out of the small room he put me in. Fine. I had notepaper with me and I did copy. Furiously.

This file was a compilation of notes from the initial intake – that two hours I remember nothing of – and several family sessions. I was utterly stunned - again - to understand we had attended EIGHT family sessions. Even now, I have no memory of these sessions beyond two.

We – my mother and I – had attended family counselling sessions in the past, usually with a minister at our church or a school counsellor. My mother had tried many times to find a counsellor who would say I was crazy, and threw around “schizophrenic” like she was some expert on mental health.

As a sidebar to her behaviour in counselling, this anecdote:
When I was 15, at her insistence, we'd met with our then-pastor. He had heard her out on a couple prior occasions, and I think she thought he was an ally. However, within 15 minutes of the start of the session, she exposed herself, her anger, her behaviour, and the abuse she was heaping on me. He identified several issues and suggested she shouldn't treat me the way she did and that things would be easier if she weren't so harsh. 

This, predictably, resulted in furious, loud outrage on her part, and her stalking out, as was her usual response to anyone pointing out she might have contributed to the situation. She accused our pastor of attacking her, and of conspiring to ruin her reputation in the church. Bizarrely, but not unpredictably, she turned on that man with a vengeance. Although she had led the charge to see him hired as our pastor, she launched a vicious campaign to discredit him, and have him fired.

Her personality and tendency to extreme outbursts were well-known in our church of barely 150 people (on a good day when dessert was served), so her campaign was unsupported and unsuccessful. Her efforts resulted in him remaining with the support of the greater congregation, and her leaving our church and to begin attending the very large church up the road from us - a church she had spent many years maligning for its demographic of "all those wealthy people who look down on me." It was bizarre. 

In my memory of the counselling sessions following the hospital incident, I was there with my mother, my step-dad, and a female counsellor. I didn't remember her name, nor do I remember how I got to these sessions or where they were held. I was living with my dad at that point, so likely he drove me, but I don't have any memory of getting there or leaving or being dropped off or picked up. 

In the two sessions I have in my memory, my mother was OUTRAGED. I remember her being utterly furious at the psychologist for having identified my mother’s negative, angry behaviours and their effect on me and on my siblings and step-dad; and I remember her furiously lashing out, calling the counsellor names, accusing her of making stuff up, of being unfair, of colluding with other people who were out to get her. She stalked out of both sessions claiming everyone was against her (she said this regularly, along with "You can hardly wait until I'm dead.... ").

As I sat in that small, windowless cubicle reading the notes written by the psychologist who did the sessions, I remember being relieved that she had identified my mother’s extensive personal issues. This was the first time I’d had anyone – particularly an adult – identify my mother’s serious mental issues. The counsellor observed my mother took no responsibility for her actions or behaviours, or anything she said; that she perceived herself as constantly set upon and persecuted by other people; that people were out to “make her look bad;” and that she was still furious at my father for leaving her. The counsellor wrote my mother was dealing with her mental distress by making me her target. In her notes, the counsellor identified my mother as intensely angry and having deep-seated feelings of maltreatment. She wrote, "The mother is scapegoating her child." Yes. Yes she was. From the time I was about two years old.

Discovering the truth about the night my parents left me at the hospital, and knowing the extent of counselling, how many sessions there were, identification of my mother's serious personality issues, and understanding - finally - those were not my fault, and knowing the extent of them was horrifying but a relief.

That counsellor wrote my "behaviour" issues, which she identified as my acting out as a means of self-preservation, were a direct result of my mother's scapegoating.

I began to heal after that. Very slowly. I was completely out of contact with my mother for almost two years after that, but there were many relapses, many times I tried to have a relationship with her; many, many more of her outrages, her abuses, her irrational anger, her tearing me to bits, and the time she lashed out at my parenting with “You’re a terrible mother; you don’t feed your children potatoes.” Yes, she actually said that. That comment caused a huge crack in the “matrix.” That comment, and my mother’s apparent narcissism, irrational, unpredictable, abusive behaviour are the foundation for the vast raft of reasons for our present reality.

When my children were in their early teens, she began directing her anger and treachery towards them in person, and in emails. She told them they were “heathens” and that she was sorry they would never go to heaven. In emails, she wrote things like, "I don't know why you hang around those people who hate me and want me dead." Six years ago, she finally, terminally, crossed the line. (Chapter six million... to follow).

Am I still amazed that I have no memories of that hospital visit and six of the eight counselling sessions? YES. Do I still struggle with taking time out when I’m ill? Yes. Do I feel guilt about being out of contact with my mother? Yes.

But I understand that guilt and why it is misdirected. The guilt I feel is attached to a mythical "good, loving mother" who doesn't exist, but who I have abandoned. Six years ago, when I finally hit that terminal wall and suspended contact with my mother, that guilt was suffocating. My extrication left my sibling with care and feeding of this abusive woman, who has since turned her abuse on this sibling – the was-golden-child (chapter six-million-two-hundred to follow). For the record, there are three of us siblings. The other one literally fled the country, where they have a “relationship” with our mother from a safe distance (chapter six-million-three-hundred to follow).

In the last three or four years, I've come to understand this guilt and its context; every child’s enduring wish for a good mother who cares about them, is kind and loving, and engaged in a caring, unobtrusive way. However, in my case, this mother does not exist and never has. I finally understand there is nothing at all I can do to elicit the good mother. I can let go of feeling guilty for abandoning what is a fantasy mother who doesn’t, and never did exist. The real thing has serious personality challenges that no amount of me "being good" will fix. It took me 50 years to get to this point, many bouts of deep, terrifying depression, much self-flagellation and self-hate, but I am finally out. 

I feel all the time but I don't know what I'm feeling...

One of the most difficult things about being the child of a narcissist (or someone with borderline personality disorder - BPD) is untangling emotions, understanding what one is feeling, why, if the emotion is attached to something, someone, some event, or if one is generalizing.

As I sit here this morning, I have an intense feeling of upset, slight anger, foreboding, fear, frustration. About what? I haven't untied all that yet.

In the list:

I've had a client contact me about a project I've tried three times to complete for them. They must contact their client to make sure the site is prepared, and they haven't. Frustrating but I can't fix it for them - they drop the ball but I take the hit.

I have a friend needing help moving stuff, which I'm happy to do, but I'm a third party to the machinations, so sitting about waiting on that stuff to be coordinated.

I'm travelling with a group next month, but not positive of accommodations, and unhappy about a potential addition of $500 US to my costs resulting from my having done a good deed...


I'm pissed off we've had dead air from an organization we've been trying to contact since May this year. This angers me so much because their behaviour is ridiculously unprofessional and we're left wondering what we've done.

I'm bored; work is too quiet thanks to a continuing sluggish economy.

I'm annoyed with myself for procrastinating over several need-to-be-completed items that will take only a few hours to finish.

I'm so very angry at my sibling over their handling of a change to our parent's living situation and that sibling's demands for money but a refusal to say WHY.

I'm also furious at this sibling's deep unwillingness to be clear about what is going on, particularly, as I understand it, they were on the verge of losing their home, and the home our parent was living in. This sibling chose to be angry and confrontational despite our many offers of help.

And I'm furious at another sibling for having taken nearly half a million from our parent and lost it all. Every damned penny of it, and $45K from an investor, and $80K from another person's parent too... this is a whole other story, none of which I was part of, except where I suggested, strongly, to my narcissitic parent they should make sure their investment is secured - which they didn't, so yeah, near poverty. 

I'm struggling to figure out which feelings go where and if they're even worth entertaining. And I'm sick to my stomach and I don't know why, and I know I'm pretty close to burying my head in the sand that is Reddit, or in my addictive craft habit. I have lately come to understand how I use these as "treatment" of a sort.

Growing up as the child of a narcissist is a distinctly unbalancing experience. There's no variance in how the narcissist approaches whatever it is they're angry about - and they're always angry about something.

It is never their fault and they always react on maximum volume, no matter how infinitesimal whatever the issue might be. There is no emotion one can feel and/or express the narcissist won't somehow attack, minimize, misrepresent.

They can spend hours or days haranguing, but when the harangued person finally crumbles into tears, or resorts to rage, the narcissist doubles down. There's no emotion one can feel or express that the narcissist will accept as valid; emotion is always an attack on the narcissist no matter what has precipitated that emotion.

When one is subjected to this from an early age, to be blunt, it fucks you up.

The net effect, particularly when all this starts when one is a tiny kid (2 years old in my case) is, as an adult, the victim often - almost always - misinterprets what people are saying, or what they mean by what they're saying. I am, as a rule, confused and uncomfortable about where my emotions are coming from and I have a difficult time understanding other people's emotions. I am aware I read in other people's feelings, but am terrified to ask if they're actually feeling the way I think.

I usually default to believing they're angry, or they detest me - this being a result of my parent's regular assertion when I was young that they had "people" watching me all day, every day, whether I was at school or with friends (I had so few friends; my trust was shattered at such a young age, and I never knew who these "people" were).

I always feel as if I've done something terrible - a persistent, ungrounded foreboding. Someone saying, "Hey can I talk to you for a second," releases and INTENSE fear response in me. Always. You will understand in employment situations, where people must collaborate many times a day, the "Can I talk to you?" thing made my work environments unbearable and terrifying. For the record, I work for myself now and have mostly done so for about 25 years.

I struggle to let things roll off me and to understand when something needs a response, or when there is no point in even thinking about it, let alone responding to it. I am never confident in whether I have appropriately dealt with a problem, or responded correctly to a question, or an issue. I feel most of the time I've made things far worse, by addressing them at all.

This weirdness has not been helped by the couple occasions when I've been blamed for something completely out of my control; once a pipe burst in a room I was in, and the woman of the house - my former spouse's mother - came steaming down the stairs yelling "what did you do?" at me. I was sitting there, stunned that water was suddenly pouring out of a wall behind all the shit she had stacked up there, having had no clue there were pipes there.

I have three adult children and I am fascinated (and envious in a sense) by how expertly they deal with the day-to-day issues they have, and how well they solve work-related stuff, and by their excellent friendships - with each other and with actual friends.  I'm also amazed I managed to raise three kids who can do that. I'm very glad my distinct issues seem not to have transferred to them. They're great collaborators and skilled at conflict management and resolution.

I feel unbalanced most of the time where it concerns my emotions: I'm either flat, meaning I feel nothing, or experience far less emotion than someone else might in the same situation, or I'm often full-on torn apart by a comment or event someone else might barely register.

I feel I am always letting people down, never doing the best I can do, cutting corners, being shitty. This is my narcissistic parent speaking, and I know it, but this horror began when I was very young.
Although I know it isn't logical, it is deeply internalized. I've heard it said children raised in such environments are permanently-affected, as the trauma causes changes to their DNA. I haven't read too much on the subject, but colloquially, I'd claim it true.

Where it concerns my siblings, my emotions are particularly hard to manage; I shift between concern for them - they were victimized as much as I was, in different ways - and anger towards them for not taking off the blinders they find so comfortable.

I am very concerned for my one sibling, as they are enmeshed in a not-at-all-positive way with our joint torturer/parent. I have deep concerns as to how this sib will react to this parent's death (this parent being 90 years old presently), and how they will adjust to the absence of this still-narcissistic, parent who has, I understand, added stalking-type behaviours to their contact with this sibling.

At the same time, I am beyond furious at this sibling - for how they have scapegoated me, in concert with our parent, for more than 45 years, how they fail utterly to see how, more and more, they are exhibiting the same characteristics of this parent (and of this parent's own also-narcissistic/BPD parent), for how they protect our abusive parent, how they prey on me for help, but reject any help offered - except when they are in dire straights - and ignore me entirely when whatever crisis they may be having has been solved. Since early this year, my overriding emotion is a desire to literally tie this sibling to a chair and punch them until they feel the deep pain I've felt my entire life.

The other sibling ... I also feel so much fury and anger towards them. I cannot comprehend how they can sleep at all, let alone live day-to-day knowing they are the one-and-only reason none of us will have an inheritance, and why the other sibling has been footing the bills - all of them - for this horrifying parent we share. This sibling has exhibited a bizarre vacillation between having near-murderous feelings toward this parent and attempting to have a relationship with them. For the record, their joint relationship has been spectacularly and catastrophically unstable for most of this sibling's 47 years.

Well-meaning people will often say, "Just let it go," but they truly do not comprehend how children of narcissists experience emotion, and how confused and often fearful those children (who may be adults in their late 50s) are. If we're struggling to wade through a lifetime of it, imagine how little a probably-caring but uneducated person might understand.

The net effect of my inability to appropriately parse and navigate my emotions has been the development - among several issues - of profound body dysmorphia to the point of obsession as a stand-in for dealing with the moving parts.

This dysmorphia coalesced on a specific day when I was 13 years old thanks to an off-hand comment made by a good friend, who I know meant absolutely nothing by it. I was going down the stairs in our school, heading to class - she being on the stair directly behind me - when she made a comment about the structure of my hips and butt. I can remember that moment and I were I in that school, I could walk to the exact place - the exact stair I was on - when she made the comment.

Literally from that moment on, this dysmorphia has been a daily, draining, torturous fixture in my waking life. It is the first thing on my mind when I wake - and I wake three or four times a night - and the last thing on my mind before I fall asleep. It doesn't help my sibling is a fitness professional (driven to some extent as a means for them to cope with their own demons I suppose), who has no shame about shaming me and how I look, whether that be the body scan or an insulting comment.

This dysmorphia is coupled with an ever-growing fear of being in public looking like I do. This is compounded by my having competed in a fitness competition four years ago, and then returning to a normal weight and average strength for a person of my age. Hating how I look also keeps me out of the gym: I'm embarrassed to be "normal" after having become so fit and strong.

In my case, that bucket-list item, the competition, was approached as a means of, "SEE! I'm not gross!" rather than something I pursued purely on my own terms, for my own reasons. I'm now fighting with entrenched dysmorphia made worse by having become very fit and quite thin for that competition, but not having the tools to deal with being a normally-sized person of my age. On the rare occasion I see my sibling, their habit of body-scanning me, and their unshielded look of disgust after that ... it doesn't help, and it makes me want to injure them all the more. Vicious circle for sure.

If you're reading this and wondering why I don't get help, I assure you I have tried. I have used - with some success - one of the on-line counselling services when the issues with my sibling were such I was feeling suicidal. It was very helpful to have a faceless, but experienced psychologist willing to read my long accounts, and make observations and suggestions. To not have to be face-to-face where he could see me, how I look, and to have counselling sessions not diluted by my terror over how I look - it was a good solution.

I have recently sought out mental healthcare services; however, despite physical health care being easy to access and covered under the country's health care plan, mental health services are not covered and are very costly, or if provided on a sliding scale, not dependable.

I need care several times a week for at least a year, but at a cost of about $2000/month, it's impossible to afford. It is not for a lack of desire and willingness to get help; it's a literal inability to afford the care I need. The doctor I saw recently diagnosed me with severe anxiety - filed under "No shit, Sherlock," - and prescribed a specific medication to help. The drug she prescribed has a significant side effect - predictable weight gain. Definitely no bueno. Like 1000 percent no bueno.

I am not in contact with my siblings or my parent - and yes, this is extreme, highly guilt-inducing, and difficult to swallow. I know, however, contact with this parent is poisonous, and contact - currently anyway - with the siblings is likely going to affect me negatively.

I know what it's like to have to talk myself out of walking into traffic or driving into a semi - it is utterly, utterly terrifying to be at that point and to know what might trigger that again, and how bloody close - twice in the last eight years - I came to saying "aw, fuck it," and driving across the line on purpose, despite knowing doing so would end my intense pain but would ruin my own children's and partner's lives.

I cannot stress this enough; when someone is in THAT much despair and so desperate to end their own pain, and they know doing so will have a massive, permanent effect on their loved ones, you MUST understand how unbearable it has become for them.

Neither of these siblings is willing to acknowledge their parts in any of it. They are, at times, like starving dogs with respect to goading me. One of them - maybe both - seems to enjoy pushing me to the point of pure, blinding despair. I don't know what they get out of it but it seems to satisfy something for them. Then again, they learned at the feet of the master, given our parent was ravenous for the high of torturing (in an emotional way) me, teaching them how to scapegoat, and expert at alienating us siblings one from the other. The effects of this parent's efforts are cell-deep and permanent.

A bit of advice for people who like to give advice, particularly to people like me: Just don't.

I guarantee you, if you had a happy or reasonably stable childhood, you cannot possibly understand the chamber of horrors that is a childhood overseen by an angry, unfulfilled narcissistic parent whose sole purpose in life is to create as much pain, despair, fear, sadness as possible as some means of obtaining power, and edifying themselves.

Nobody was paying attention....

 Last week, my mother moved from her two-story home into a supported living facility - much smaller digs - and the excavation was initiated. Somehow, she has managed to acquire enough stuff for four families, despite being very elderly and a widow....

Among all this stuff, surprisingly, is a small archive of my report cards from a couple grades of elementary school, two from junior high school and one year of high school.

It was riveting and heart-wrenching to read the comments on those reports - all hand-written, dating back as far as 1966.

Our home life was, shall we say, disturbed. My parents fought - not regularly, but spectacularly - and finally separated when I was maybe five, which is the year I started kindergarten. Their relationship was acrimonious. Actually, not "their;" her relationship with him. Brutal. As it was the 60s, we, my younger sister and I, stayed with our mother. My mother has the most spectacular case of narcissism I've ever met, although I didn't know that until maybe 10 years ago. Such affected people do not great parents make....

I read those hand-written comments with a shifting mix of chagrin, anger, embarrassment, and wonder. In all those years, did not one single person - teacher, librarian, principal - ever wonder what was going on? It was the 60s/70s and people didn't meddle back then - certainly not teachers; they had enough on their plates between planning lessons, working five days a week and doing everything by hand, so probably paying attention to the more personal aspects of their students' lives was too far outside their area of attention. I understand that. But.

See, I grew up in total, daily chaos. My mother was always angry about something, angry at me, angry at what I was wearing, how my hair was, who my friends were, how I spoke and acted... you name it, she found something in it to be angry about. I was, until 2013, her scapegoat. I think I still am, but I am out of contact now, so whatever she might say about me, I don't hear, exept for the occasional vitriolic, hateful email she writes that someone forwards to me....

When I was in second grade, the bulk of the comments on my report cards were that I was distracted, occasionally confrontational, not doing well, rushed, missing fundamentals. At home? M mother would pick a fight with me every morning. For a period of a month (I was little; could have been a week, could have been three months; it was fucking terrifying, however long) and then threaten to send me to boarding school. She would pick up the phone in the kitchen and pretend to make calls to some school. The second she started for the phone, I would run upstairs to her bedroom and pick up the handset of the bright orange phone sitting on the table beside her bed to prevent her from making the call. It was terrifying. 

So yeah, I was distracted, because I was terrified of what might be happening - what my mother might be doing or calling or planning during the day, or what might happen when I came home after school. It wasn't a maybe; it was a for-sure. If the what-might-happen was relative peace, it was a rarity that was proof of the rule, and the calm before a certain storm later, or the next day, or....

By the time I was in fifth grade, her terror campaign was well established and deeply rooted. My mother reminded me on a regular basis she had people watching me and reporting back to her about what I was up to during the day. Can you imagine what it's like to be an eleven-year-old child who is convinced she's being watched all day, every day??? Like, who do you trust?!

During all this chaos my mother remarried. He was excellent. Really. We'd known him since we were born so he wasn't a stranger at all. He married my mother (the sunday school teacher) because, despite her outwardly puritanical, judgemental views on sex and relationships, they were screwing around and she became pregnant. If you're the puritanical, once-divorced sunday school teacher in a baptist church, in the 70s, you must, at all costs, keep up the appearances....

The upside was he was a great dad and we got a little sister out of it. The downside is we got a little sister out of it and I went from being my mother's constant target to being that, and the scapegoat for ANYTHING she didn't like - my younger sister's teenage behaviour, and anything that our new baby sister did that my mother didn't like. Apparently, I was going around behind her back "teaching them to misbehave." That accusation continued up to about 10 years ago... the 'baby' was 45 years old by then....

When I was in junior high, I was bullied. Endlessly. One guy put his foot in my back and pushed me down a flight of stairs. Later, he took to following me home. In eighth grade, my so-called best friend decided she was furious at me because I'd made one other friend, so she chased me home... with a stick. Then she never spoke to me again.  One day couple of girls, twins, waited for me outside the school, the back side, in a corner not visible to the street or windows, threatened me, pushed me off my moving bike, attempted to steal my bike. In home Ec. class, someone stole my bra while I was trying on a dress I'd made in that class. An hour later, I was horrified to see the boys kicking my bra down the hallway.  A boy in several of my classes took any opportunity he could to harass me. One day he decided he hated me and, right outside our science class, he pulled a huge clump of hair out of my head - hurt so much. I wacked him with my binder - and was hauled into the office and chastised for the "friends" I kept. A few months later, he slapped me across the face in full view of an auditorium of kids.... I was ridiculed for my hair, my size, my build. You name it, it was up for target practice. At any point did any teacher or parent step in? Nope.

My mother, of course, was carrying on as "normal" which meant I was never sure what would be on the other side of the front door when I came home after school, but it was never good. Once, when I was 13, it was really, really bad: she was in a fury over how I was doing the dishes - criticizing absolutely everything to the point I began screaming at her to leave alone (this kind of harassment was the usual - almost any time she screamed us into cleaning up, she'd also spend the entire time screaming it wasn't good enough).

This time, she picked up a knife - a 12-inch long, bone-handled, serrated knife she had beside the stove (which, by the way, she was still using 40 years later). She was terrifying anyway, but armed? Holy shit ... so I raced out of the kitchen, up the stairs into the bathroom and locked the door. She kicked the door in and held that knife to my face - in our second-floor bathroom with one of those 60s-style wide side to side, narrow top to bottom windows high up in the wall. You don't know terror until you're pinned against a wall with your crazy-ass mother shaking a knife to your face and threatening you, and there's no escape.

So yeah, my schooling suffered. I was angry. I was scared. I daydreamed. I escaped into a book or up into my head. I looked for any possible means of escape - which, for the record, did not include drugs or alcohol.

Not a single teacher ever asked if I was ok. Not one. In twelve years of school, how many teachers does one have? 60? I know some of this had to do with the era - people didn't meddle and given divorce was such a horrifying event still - common enough but still considered a morally-contentious choice.

Hilariously/sadly/confusingly, my mother used to write comments back to the teachers on those report cards - it was always their fault I wasn't doing well, and true to her character, she was an exemplary parent, and had expectations for everyone's behaviour. As she'd been a teacher herself, she was bizarrely judgmental, and her imperviousness was more pronounced.

In fifth and sixth grades, I volunteered as a library page in my school. I LOVED that job. The school was always quiet - mornings, 7:30 to 8:30 or so and sometimes after school. It was safe, and provided a legit means of being out of the house. And I really liked the librarian, Mrs. Woods. Like, a LOT. She always had a smile on. She was nice.

Even that bubble was burst, though. When I was 28 years old, I was out for groceries with my two babies - I think I was probably pregnant with my third at the time - and ran into Mrs. Woods. I was really happy to see her. During the conversation, I made the fatal mistake (being a stay-at-home mom at the time and it being the late 80s and being that mothering wasn't necessarily considered a job), of replying "not much" to her question of "What are you doing these days." Her reply was, "Well, you always were a bit lazy."  I was DEVASTATED. I wasn't, and I'm not now, lazy; I was an eleven-year-old child with a chaotic, scary home life turning up almost every morning for two school years to shelve books, to get some peace and stability.

I still struggle day-to-day with feeling like I belong, like I have the right to belong, with feeling like I'm not contributing to anything, like I'm failing, like random shit that happens is my fault; like with "bad things wouldn't happen if I weren't around;" with living.

With LIVING. 

There was an "into traffic" incident a few years ago - the second, the first being the result of agreeing to go to counselling with my sister, who spent an hour of a two-hour session with her finger in my face, screaming at me. The first "into traffic" incident scared me a LOT and took two weeks to come down from. The second was even worse. I was driving alone on the highway and I struggled for the entire 90 minutes to not drive across the centre line. Semi-trucks are big. The driver is up high. It would be a bump for them. That's where I was in my head for and hour and a half....

My family members don't think I hear their whispers of "well, you know how she is." They don't know how devastating their petty little comments are. They don't acknowledge their actions and they don't understand they scapegoat me, or, if they do, they're somehow justifying such lifelong abuse.

My sister continues to scapegoat me - this month of moving my mother gave her the opportunity to unload her resentment on me - and to be fair, this time she copped to it; she called me to tell me how resentful she is (except she ignores she chose the situation she's in, and that I had zero input into it), so at least there's that - but yet again, after her having unleashed on me, demanding money from me, but refusing to let me understand what she, or my mother actually need, we're back to radio silence and, "Well, you know how she is."

No, they don't know how "she" is, because they don't give a real fuck.

It took me years and years and years, not a little therapy, and total non-contact to get to a place of reasonably good functioning, but there are still moments or interactions that throw me into chaos.

But at least now I have all these report cards spelling out all my faults and failings - why would I be surprised my mother kept them -  that will reinforce just how separate I am from the family and how invisible I was at school, and how important it is for my family members to maintain me as the scapegoat.

Update, November 2020:
Since I wrote this, my spouse has gone to bat for me with both my siblings. He has always been firmly in my court, right at my side. The shit he's seen and put up with... a lesser man would have been out. His having met with them/spoken to them and speaking for me - bluntly - took a huge weight off me and, I think, may have given them a level of insight they were surprised by and needed to hear. 

Also since then, I engaged a pretty great counsellor, and finally got a diagnosis - CPTSD: complex PTSD. And also since then, I have acquired a copy of our parents' divorce records (these are public and accessible to anyone who wants them, as it turns out), which was unbelievably enlightening, and brought my mother's - and indeed the family's - scapegoating into clear focus. More about this here:
https://stupid-files.blogspot.com/2020/07/raiding-archives.html