The Last Letter

My mother died in July this year (2025, for future readers). I know I don't have many followers here despite writing this blog for more than 20 years, but if you search the posts, you'll find a lot of background. Some of it is repeated here.

She was ill and declining for six or so months. We never reconnected. Not since October 2013. 

Before:
I’m sorry you’re unwell and in hospital, but I am so much sorrier for you, for the life you’ve squandered. I’m so sorry for you that you know nothing about me, nothing of my partner, and nothing about my amazing, successful, wonderful, compassionate, loving daughters, or your incredible niece.

I’m sorry – and this is the hardest part – that in 12 years, you never reached out beyond notes talking about yourself, or asking for things you wanted; never, “I would like to reconcile; can we talk?” I’m sorry your refrain was always “I don’t know what I’ve done.” I’m sorry you never saw your eldest child was desperate for a real, kind, compassionate relationship with you, and I’m sorry every time there was the possibility of having a relationship, you found some way to kill it.

I’m sorry that, because you have never shown much interest in them, your grandchildren wanted little to do with you; anything you might ask them about was only a springboard for you to talk about yourself. You made no effort to know them or be interested in them, their schooling, their friends, their partners, their work.  They are my greatest joy. I’m sorry for you that your self-obsession prevented you from being interested in and engaged with these brilliant women.

After
I’m so sorry you never understood the immense love you could have enjoyed – from your children, your grandchildren, and your husbands – George particularly. I’m sorry that my children could never know you, know about your life, your family, your experiences – the true story of what it was like to grow up when and where you did, the true story of who your mother was, who your father was – good or bad. I’m sorry my children knew how bright you were, but that what could have been a bright beacon for them was only an enticement into your self-obsession, and your constant belittling of other people, your anxiety, depression, your closed world.

I’m sorry that your anger and your lies caused a permanent rupture between you and your Nova Scotia family. I’m sorry for you that the damage you did to your relationships there means you will be buried far away from your parents, your brother, and your family members. 

I know you spoke against me to your brother and sister-in-law, intending they hate me too. I believe you poisoned my grandfather’s understanding of me.  You didn’t succeed. The last words out of Bill’s mouth to me before he died were “I love you.” The last words Alice spoke to me before she died were “I love you.”  Jeanette and her girls and I are very close. As weird as he is, even Brad and I can get on the phone and talk for ages.

 I’m sorry that you don’t understand how criminal it is you caused such deep divisions between your own children, and I’m sorry for you that you spent your life abusing, maligning your firstborn. I’m sorry that you never understood what all of this cost you and that you never understood the life you could have enjoyed, and the love you could have surrounded yourself with. I see all those condolences people have posted, and those make me sad and frustrated, frankly, because most of these people never knew you beyond a few hours at church or at some event. They never knew the you behind the door. They never saw or knew the chaos, and they never understood how deeply wounded you were. Hundreds of people in your life would have corralled around you, supported and championed you – the real, damaged, human you. But your narcissism was profound and so stifling.

I was saddened and frustrated to receive your note in May via G. I am without words to understand why, after nearly 12 years, your request was that you were probably dying and that I should come make you happy. I have never been successful making you happy at any point in my life. I don’t believe it was ever possible. Nothing I did ever caused you to feel pride, interest, or curiosity. You responded to me as a nuisance, an invasion, as someone who, as you said so often, was trying to ruin your life and doing a good job of it. How could I have ever made you happy when I was a liability you seemed to have to deal with? How would my presence have suddenly made you happy when it hasn’t in my entire life? It felt more like you wanted a win. It did not read that you wanted a reconciliation.

I think you have been anxious and depressed most of your life, and that your coping mechanism was anger, blame and chaos. That too makes me so deeply sad for you. You had an amazing second husband. Amazing. You had three great daughters -different yes, but all bright, compassionate, funny. You were surrounded by so much potential for love, support, understanding, help, but you let your anger colour everything. The cost is immense – for all of us.

I have had the experience of anxiety and chaos ruining my life and relationships several times myself; I have had several periods of debilitating depression. I was very, very ill between 2020 and 2022. I was critically depressed and anxious, leading me to seek out crisis care when I became obsessively suicidal. During this time, I was prone to hours-long rants, and to feeling persecuted and marginalised. I was sure my children and spouse were conspiring against me, and positive I was universally hated and hence should not exist. As I look back over my life and the hundreds of times you engaged in similar rants, anger, inconsolability, I recognize these similarities: depression, anxiety, insecurity. I will always, always regret the distress I caused in my family and to Jason, when I was so ill. I don’t believe you ever considered the damage you have caused, and certainly not that you ever had a moment’s regret.

For most of my life, I wanted a relationship with you. How many times did I try, did I hope “maybe this time,” dare to believe you would somehow have some clarity about how you’ve lived and behaved, and that maybe you would engage with those realities and finally be honest and humble, and willing to accept your failings and deal with whatever mental health issues you surely had.

But the mother I wanted a relationship with didn’t exist. The mother you were was brutal, false, violent, untrustworthy. It took two years for me to mourn the end of our relationship and nearly 10 years more for me to finally accept you were not that mother, and were incapable of being that mother. I had to abandon hope you would ever have any clarity, honesty, or humbleness, and that your inability to do so prevented you from having close, loving, respectful relationships with me, RA and G.

 Your relationships with us have been unpredictable, anger-based, and incendiary, predatory where it concerns RA, controlling with G. I do not have any impression or memory of you being genuinely proud of us. My feeling is we were accoutrements to your life. You said so often I was selfish and that any time we did or said anything you didn’t like or agree with, or if/when we were just being kids of whatever ages, we were out to make you look bad. You said so very often, we couldn’t wait until you were dead. I remember you saying such things from when I was very young. You never understood, or never cared to know, how utterly destabilising it is for children to know themselves as liabilities to their parent. It has taken me most of my adult life to finally put the responsibility for your behaviour where it belongs; with you.

If I were to lose contact with any of my daughters, it would be my sole pursuit to know why and put it to rights. You made absolutely no effort at all. Not once did you ever indicate you were aware your actions and your abuse were, at very least, what caused me to sever contact.

I have no means of understanding why a mother would not make it her obsession to rectify such a catastrophic event. I don’t know if you were unwilling to acknowledge your part in it, if you were utterly unaware, or if doing so would have wrenched open the portal to something impossible for you to take on.  I deeply resent it when people say “she’s your mother,” but never stop for a second to contemplate what might make a person sever their relationship with their mother. I am not infallible, and knowing that helps me be a better, more honest person. You always believed, or at least presented to anyone who passed through your life, that you were infallible, and that somehow, I was just an unkind, punishing person. “I don’t know why she won’t come see me,” puts the blame outside yourself. For people who don’t know you (very few people knew you well), and who don’t know me, or who never met me, you managed to place all the blame on me with that one deeply dishonest statement. 

From my earliest memories, I have known it was impossible to make you happy. I have always known it was impossible to trust you. I have always known that I have been your scapegoat.

The week G was here in 2013, when A was a newborn, was the terminus. It was the last weight I could bear. To watch you be so unkind and abusive to a near stranger you had invited to stay was bizarre. To watch you sulk, be petulant, to lock yourself in your room for two days, and be so abusive to G, who was a new mother trying to get her bearings, and who had brought you your youngest, newest grandchild to meet you, was intolerable. Then, after you had spent that week being vicious and intractable, the morning they were to return home, you suddenly refused to drive them to the airport, leaving G in a panic. You were petty, angry, and narcissistic. That October, I finally accepted a relationship with you was not only impossible, but to continue to try would be dangerous - potentially lethal - for my mental health. The cycle of abuse was present then, and looking back, I could see it having repeated over and over, hundreds of times.

After 53 years of your abuse, I knew in my bones you could not be any different, and that a relationship with you was impossible. I tried so many times to establish a workable relationship, or re-establish after a period of no contact, but you never seemed to understand you had a significant part in that loss of contact, that you had to participate honestly, and that you were culpable. You were impervious to the swaths of damage you caused me, and to RA and G, and to so many people around you. Nothing ever penetrated to cause you to acknowledge this reality, not even losing one of your children. That is astounding. In twelve years, not once did you reach out with anything approaching “what happened?” or “I want to reconcile.” I know, second hand only, you consistently stated “I don’t know what I did.” I believe you did know but I think acknowledging any of it was impossible for you. This is the core of narcissism; it’s always everyone else’s fault. Whatever goes wrong, when you felt bad, or angry, it was never due to anything you did or said; it was always other people treating you badly, being mean to you.

The things you have said and done to me, your dishonesty, your anger, your propensity to belittle, insult, rage against, terrify, has left me with permanent scars. Until I chose to end contact with you, I was unable to know myself. I still struggle every single day with deep self-doubt. Every. Single. Day.

I have lifelong depression and have struggled my entire life to trust people because you, my mother, were immensely untrustworthy and consciously vicious towards me at every possible moment. There was never a time between you and I when things stabilised for more than a month or two, and I could trust you; there was only holding my breath waiting for the next explosion.  From my earliest memories, it was always when, not if, it would all burst into unquenchable flames.

My lifelong depression is grounded in that trauma. I am deeply resentful of your abuse of me, and so much more so of RA and G. More than that, I am so resentful of the deep ruptures between me and my sisters, and particularly RA your abuse caused. You sewed the seeds of this rupture years ago, when we were small, and you never stopped. The divisions between us sisters, our inability to trust each other, or to lean on each other, and in my opinion, RA’s propensity to do as you have done, and shift her anger, her disappointments, her resentments onto me – to continue making me the scapegoat for whatever is wrong in her life – this is the greatest wound and the deepest cut.

It is an unforgivable theft, and an unforgivable shift in RA’s ability to recognize problems and deal with them, rather than shifting blame onto me, or targeting me when she’s angry, frustrated or disillusioned. You disabled her by instilling this process with her; you predisposed her to engaging in bad, sometimes scary relationships, and when those were going badly, to acting out and making me the scapegoat, or the recipient of her anger or frustration. G too is so deeply affected by your abuse. She is brilliant and talented, but deeply insecure – so much so she seems unable to make her immense abilities and her excellent mind the cornerstone. She is angry to the point of scary unpredictability. She simmers only degrees from catastrophic, angry, unpredictable explosions.

It is impossible to describe losing a sister, but much more so seeing that sister fall into the same behaviours, suffer that same anxiety, anger, depression. Of everything you took from us, our relationship and her confidence, assurance, ability to trust – this is my deepest resentment. As for G, I say the same; all the success she most surely would have had were stolen from her along with her self-confidence by you, who never saw her as a person, your child, but as a cog in your desperation to be someone, your desperation to create some fantastical, important, wealthy maquette. I believe your inability to accept and honour yourself also comes from substantial abuse in your childhood. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t have recognized the traumas of your own past, and why you never rejected continuing that abuse and inflicting it on your children. From the time my girls were tiny, I have encouraged them to cherish and nurture their relationships with each other, to champion each other, to love and understand each other, and to acknowledge they are individuals with their own thoughts and perspectives, but to never let their individuality stand in the way of their relationships with each other.

I hope we sisters can heal. I hope RA can begin to understand how your abuse, particularly in these last 12 years, when she has been your sole caregiver, your ride, your confidante, your coordinator, your support, has impacted her. Regardless that she was with you, or helping you, almost daily for the last 12 years, bought you a house when you were homeless, found you safe care when you needed it, dealt with your possessions, liaised with your friends, you continued to harass her, to diminish the immensity of her contribution to your life and your day-to-day and accuse her of avoiding you or “being too busy to help her old mother.”

I hope she will come to understand and deal with how it has affected her, how she lives her life, and to understand how damaging it has been to us as sisters. She literally had neither of us, G being distant physically and me being distant otherwise, and still, you never stopped. Those “you don’t have time for me,” comments, when she gave you so much of her time - more than she had - were cutting and malicious. I know she slagged you off behind your back at times, because she was powerless to speak directly to you – it would have done nothing beyond giving you more opportunity to criticize her, be angry, be despicable to her. She was essentially enslaved by you – an old woman who had made stupid choices, and who took and took and took from her. She was powerless to change any of it and absolutely unwilling to do what many would have done and leave you to deal with your situation alone, regardless of what it cost her.  

At least I was honest: I couldn’t be around you, and I couldn’t fake it; RA felt she had no choice, but I think she reviled you in private. I saw this in a video of your birthday one year, I can hear her being sarcastic and diminishing of you under her voice and off camera. You forced her into dishonesty with herself and with you. I asked her once why she didn’t speak back to you, and she said she didn’t want to make you cry. You, however, never spent a second thinking about the years and years and years you caused such pain to your children, and how many oceans of tears we cried. 

You treated me like an intruder, a problem, I think as soon as RA was born. You used me, and you reminded my sisters from when they were little until I left the province, that everything that was wrong, and anything they did that displeased you, was my fault. If they misbehaved, you told them – and me - it was because I had taught them how as a means of getting back at you. None of us trusts the other and neither of them is concerned about wounding me. It’s normal. You taught them this. I’m the family garbage dump. I am terrified we sisters, and Ruth Ann and I particularly, will never have a good relationship, or any relationship, as it is so critically damaged at present.

When I had escaped and was living in Montreal, you sent me letters and a cookbook professing your love and saying you missed me, but when I did come home for a week, within hours, you were at my throat about my relationship. I hadn’t been in the door three hours, and I was tired – because two hours time change, but you were at me about living with someone who was then and still is an exceptionally decent man. Then, the first morning I was home, as I was coming down the stairs from the bedrooms in your house, you said, “Don’t touch anything, don’t break anything, don’t steal anything.” Why? Because I had slept in, and you were pissed off about it. I was home for a week, but I changed my flights so I could leave early and spent the remaining days out of the house with friends. Maybe you did miss me, but your actions, your derision, your anger, your belittling me, and you suggesting I would steal from you put lie to everything you’d written in the two years I’d been gone.

I am deeply, profoundly resentful that you poisoned my relationship with my dad. Thanks to you, I didn’t trust him, and he didn’t trust me. I spent my life thinking he despised me, and I didn’t know any differently until two weeks before he died. I didn’t get to know my dad, thanks to you. You painted him in such a false and maligning way that, at his funeral, I was blindsided by the things people said about him. I didn’t know my dad the way people knew him. I didn’t know how much he loved me, but how incredibly difficult it was to do that, because I was so deeply distrustful of him. I’m resentful you stole our relationships with my dad’s family. I never knew my grandmother. I was terrified of her, and of Carol and John, thanks to you. I had the same experience at her funeral – of hearing people talk about a woman – my grandmother – who was a complete stranger to me, but who was absolutely not, in any way possible, the woman you led us to believe she was. Maybe she was horrible, but we never had the opportunity to discover that because we’d been poisoned so young. 

In 2020, I obtained your divorce records – 123 pages of documents, including your 10-page, handwritten letter. At 60 years old, I finally understood not only were you abusing me and scapegoating me at home, you had used me as a pawn in court. You put words in my seven-year-old mouth – things I never said and would not have known how to say – to deprive my dad of his children. These documents confirmed the extent to which you are untrustworthy and mendacious, and willing to hurt and use your children to achieve whatever your goals were. Those years are etched on my skin like deep burns. Had I known any of it before my dad died, I would have been able to connect with him, to talk about what had happened, and to explain my understanding was false and manipulated by you, and that you never stopped speaking against him.

You brought that divorce action, not him. You lied about still being married for almost two years after you were divorced, and by doing so, you fostered the falsehood my dad was a philanderer. If I have my timelines right – and I have these documents by which I can verify this – you only stopped claiming he was your husband because you were pregnant and had to remarry.

You sacrificed EVERYTHING that could have made you happy. Yes, you and my dad were mismatched, but you chose that union, probably for the admiration you expected to obtain from your family. I think you always felt less than for being from the farm, and maybe, by marrying my dad, you thought to elevate yourself – and you could have, except you let your anger, your anxiety, your inability to be happy, ruin that marriage, and then you lied about what happened.

Then, you married GG, who was one of the most stellar men, who took on a pregnant wife in the context of the Baptist church, who committed to RA and me, and then G, who stabilised all our lives, and yet you still would not be happy. I miss him, but not because I was unsure he loved us. I miss him because he was a wonderful dad, granddad, friend. I wish so much the people in my life now could have known him. He was everything a man, a dad, a granddad, anyone could wish for. In this entire morass, he was the best thing, and I was not able to appreciate him because you caused unending trauma around him, between he and I.

Occasionally, and far less often now because so many people have died, people say I look so much like you. I can’t describe this in any other way than that observation makes my skin crawl. I don’t want to be like you, look like you, think like you. I want to be a trusting, confident person who can accept the love and care of my family and my friends, and to trust the people around me; I want to care for my appearance but not be obsessed with it: this has been incredibly, debilitatingly difficult throughout my life.

From when I was little, your obsession with how I looked, how my hair looked, what clothing I liked or wanted to wear was the basis for constant little wars. You wanted me to be a compliant little dolly with no voice, and when I wasn’t, you used that as a weapon. How many times did you erupt in anger, sometimes to the point of hitting me with your hands or some implement, because you didn’t like how my bangs looked, or that I wanted to do my own hair at all, or the colour of my shirt? How many months did you threaten to send me away – every morning pretending you were on the phone with a boarding school -because who knows what had set you off before it was even 7:30 a.m.. Occasionally, an old yellow wall phone, or an orange desk phone, will turn up in some thrift shop somewhere, and I am instantly back in that trauma – it’s as real now as it was when I was seven.

How many months did you belittle me by saying the then-fashionable colour was “prostitute pink,” yet years later that became a colour you wore often; how often did you disparage my hair, even dragging me off to the hairdresser to have 18 inches of my hair cut off because you didn’t like the style? How often did you disparage my body by pulling open the front of my shirt and saying “Oh, you poor thing,” or when you would suggest I was somehow improper, or bluntly suggesting I was sleeping with some random person, most often people I barely knew? How could you have been so vicious over things – clothing, hair - that didn’t matter? Not once did you ever understand the immense damage you did, or the hypocrisy of your actions. You tried this with my children too – even once calling C a “heathen” because she happened to be wearing a black dress one day. Horrifying. So, when you said to my kids and to G and RA you didn’t know what you’d done and why I wouldn’t come see you, you made it ever more impossible to reconnect with you.

When my girls told me you were in hospital and going to respite, I STRUGGLED to know what to do. I knew you were very ill and that I had very, very little time, should I want to see you. The trauma and the indecision that caused was brutal. But here’s the rub: my lovely girls – C, particularly – and G (after the fact) told me you would not have a moment of clarity; you would not accept any responsibility, and that there would not be any kind of reconciliation. They said if I chose to go see you, I should expect you to chastise me for not having come sooner and perhaps even chastise me for having abandoned you or some similar accusation. I am sure this is true, given your note that I come make you happy. Even when you knew your life was coming to a close, you didn’t write a single word I could have interpreted as you having any awareness. The mother I wanted to know and love never appeared. 

When G messaged me to say you were gone, my first thought was regret for YOU, that you could have, but didn’t in twelve years, and not in the last six months when you KNEW you had little time, you would not overcome whatever drive you had to never acknowledge your actions or behaviour. 

My mother died without doing anything to reach her eldest child. My mother died, welded to never being culpable, to never acknowledging she had any part in my – our – life-long trauma. How could this be possible? When I was very sick in 2021, particularly, I was estranged from my children, because I had caused an immense disruption; I had caused an impassable catastrophe. I didn’t know how sick I was until A wrote me a message in which she called me her abuser. She was correct, and I had been incredibly abusive for six months.

That message felt as brutal as being kicked in the head with a jackboot. That message sent me immediately into crisis care. That message caused me to accept everything I’d said and done, and to get help – medication and six months of intense therapy – rather than lose my children or continue traumatizing them. I will regret my actions for the rest of my life, but I am so very grateful my girls are as confident as they are, and that A was willing to risk terminating her relationship with me so that I would hit the wall of reality and facts, and be propelled into seeking help. Had you done this – ever, at any point in our lives, even last year – it would have changed everything. It would have given you your family back; it would have given me a mother I was so desperate for; it would have changed all our lives. But because you refused to acknowledge the things you said and did, you died without contact with your eldest, and with your grandchildren saying “good,” regarding your death.

I can forgive you for being a victimized child – I’m assuming you were – granny was unkind to us as children, and inexplicably derisive of you when we were to Nova Scotia for that reunion; I have to let that be my reality; I can forgive your anger and depression resulting from the effects of being an abused child, but I don’t know how to forgive you for the things you stole from me – my sisters, my self-esteem, my feeling worthy to exist, my father, my aunts and uncles and cousins, and my paternal grandmother, and for leaving me - us - motherless in every way but biology. 

I can forgive you for your own deep and debilitating insecurity that made your life performative, rather than authentic, leading to acquisition of a revolving door of friends, catastrophic disagreements with your family, and termination of your relationship with your Nova Scotia niece and nephew, but I don’t know how to forgive you for doing everything you could to isolate me – belittling my friends, leaving me questioning everything and everyone, leaving me unable to trust anyone, and to my being paranoid – because you told me so often you had people watching me. Although you did hit me, in the context of being scared all the time, having nobody to talk to, and having my sisters disliking me, being distant from me, and the three of us unable to overcome your abuse and the fracture of our relationships, being hit is the thing I remember the least.

Recently, I watched an episode of a popular series, The Bear. The mother character is, in many ways, you. Abused as a child, deeply insecure, anxious, depressed, angry, and vicious to her children to the point one has taken his life, another having left the country for years, and her daughter left walking over the broken, sharp bones of a destroyed family. Following a catastrophic, violent family altercation at a Christmas dinner (quite like what happened to us in 2007), her living children will not see her. Unlike you, she has her “come to jesus” moment, when her living son comes to her house. She is overcome. The soliloquy is riveting. She bares it all, acknowledges the damage she’s done to each of her children, her part in her son’s suicide, the distance she caused between her children, and she begs her son for forgiveness. The night I watched that episode, I made that speech mine. I made that the apology I had always hoped to hear. I know it’s a TV show, and I don’t believe TV characters are speaking to me, but I have been desperate for such an apology for most of my life, and there it was. I know you didn’t say, or ever think any of those words, but the fantasy mother gave the fantasy apology. It is what it is.

In another life, I would be mourning my mother’s death as so many people do. So many are blessed to have had good, loving relationships with their mothers, blessed with the opportunity to mourn and to miss their mothers, and then to fill that space left by loss with good memories. I mourned for perhaps three years, but now, at the moment of your actual death, I don’t feel loss; I feel a combination of nothing, freedom, release, sadness that I have very few good memories to fill whatever small void, and guilt that I am not mourning. I wish we could have reconciled, but I also wish I had known so many years earlier it was impossible. I mourn the life you could have had. 

I want you to know that despite a lifetime of abuse, I have survived, and I am happy. Jason and I have been together 29 years this year. My girls and I are unbreakable.  I have graduated five times from university. I own three businesses; my clients appreciate me, and the members of my studio have a safe, warm, welcoming space because we make it that way. I have real, long-term friends who actually know me – my successes, my failings, my insecurities. I deeply hope my sisters and I can reconnect, and I hope with all my heart, body, and soul RA and I can finally, finally find each other, learn to know and trust each other, and that we can be supports and champions for each other. 

 

Raiding the Archives

I decided to do a bit of digging into my parents' past. Upon checking with the provincial archives, I discovered two things; divorce records are public domain, and secondly, anyone can order a copy. So I did. I received 123 pages of legal documents (some duplicates, so about 115 unique pages), including a hand-written letter my mother (the narc) wrote, which was entered into the record as an affidavit, and which became the basis of questions in a later deposition.

Nothing in that letter surprised me necessarily; she has harped on about her divorce for more than 50 years.... However, what DID come as completely new information was that it was SHE who brought the divorce action. She has always claimed my father "abandoned" us. Completely false. I also didn't know she had threatened several times both in the letter and the deposition to leave the city with us to prevent our dad from seeing us. This was at odds with the fact she wouldn't acknowledge she was divorced and continued for years to call my dad her husband, even after he had remarried. It was so, so weird. It wasn't "I am divorced, and my former spouse is remarried," it was "My husband is living with another woman, and they don't have a real marriage."

It should be noted here while she was carrying on about my dad and "his women," (the only woman being someone who became my stepmother and was for 33 years), my mother was herself dating someone - she the Sunday school teacher and he the deacon - and this resulted in her falling pregnant and them having to marry very quickly. She will have become pregnant slightly before she got her decree absolute, I believe. I have to revisit the dates in those documents. She's a very skilled hypocrite....

The other revelation, which makes sense of her relationship with me and with my two sibs, is the clarification of our roles to her, and the clarification - like crystal clear - she at no point saw us as humans separate from her, but as the means of expression and means to whatever ends. We were pawns.

She has always scapegoated me, but these documents confirmed she has done so at least since I was seven (when all the custody proceedings were in full swing), and likely before that. I don't have any particular memories but a younger-than-seven-year-old child wouldn't recognize scapegoating or gaslighting.

The hand-written letter and the later deposition are fascinating with respect to scapegoating, though; my mother put words in my mouth: she made claims - numerous times - about what I was saying to her or telling her. For instance, she claimed I told her, and I quote, "Daddy says you're sick, sick, sick in the head and we don't have to listen to you." This. Never. Happened. She makes this statement three times in the deposition as something I allegedly told her, and curiously, it is always in exactly the same format: three "sicks" followed by "in the head, and "we don't have to listen to you." It's weird. She claimed I told her my dad said this to us. I know this is a full lie. Anytime - up to and including when we were married adults with children of our own - we'd ask our dad what went on, his reply was always "It's a long story." He never said anything more than that.

My mother makes several statements about things I supposedly said to her, including that I (specifically me) wish to see less of my dad - absolutely false - and that I (again, specifically me, not my sibling and I) am disturbed by my father's "lovemaking in the front seat of the car and in the pool." This specificity is so, so weird. My dad was a preacher's kid who struggled very much to find a path to remarriage, as he'd been told since birth he'd burn in hell if he committed adultery - and in Baptist world, a marriage after divorce is adultery. The idea he'd engage in "lovemaking" in front of his children is ridiculous. None of what she claims happened, and she contradicts herself several times between the letter and the deposition.

The short form is she has always used me to voice what she will not say herself. Where it concerned my dad and my stepmother, my mother would claim I said terrible things about them, when it was she doing it. She put words in my mouth to my teachers, to a couple pastors, to people we knew. I spent most of my pre-teen and teen years being utterly confused about what was going on, because people would confront me about what I'd "said," when I hadn't said. It took me ages to understand she was lying to everyone. For the record, I haven't seen her in years, but until at least 7 years ago, she still claims I'm somehow wrecking her computer... or her life. It varies.

My next-youngest sibling is mentioned but once by name in the entirety of those documents, and not at all in the hand-written letter. I'm not sure whether this was due to her being invisible to my mother, or because she was the "golden child" so my mother protected her. Predictably, though, as I have anything to do with our mother, the golden child is now the unfortunate recipient of our mother's wrath and abuse.

I'm after my mother's counselling records now. I'm almost certain I won't be able to find any records of her therapy sessions with my dad prior to their divorce, but I know I will find family counselling records and can access them because I was there. I've read some of them. I'm going to get copies so I can re-read.

Fascinating shit.

UPDATE, November 2025
I have discovered our province requires psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors, therapists keep documents for 10 years, after which they can be destroyed. As such, although I have read the records of our family "counselling," those documents no longer exist. I think I took notes at the time, but it was before cell phones (1986), so no photos of the pages. Obviously, any counselling records that might have existed in the late 60s are long gone. 

I went looking for other documents which would date from 1945 - 46, but the facility, the Ideal Maternity Home in Chester NS, where they would have been housed, or where they could have been acquired from, burned down. Nothing remained; no furniture, photos, or documents. 

Wait! You're Taking THAT out on ME??

I get into loops in not-rare occasions; loops of thinking about events and what I could have, should have said at the time... had I understood what was actually happening.

There are so many events I remember as being confusing and weird and incomprehensible; so many times shit would go sideways and I would have no clue why and would be standing there like I'd been hit by lightning of a sort. In retrospect, knowing what I know now...

The first I remember was when my sister was 20. She was dating a guy who was quite a lad - slick, self-absorbed, and someone I suspect was treating her more like an accessory than a person, and who I think was likely cheating (I don't know this, but I knew that guy on and off for about 20 years). I was at her house one night and she began insulting me and calling me down. It still hurts thinking about it. Shortly after that, this guy was gone.

Another of these instances occurred at her house after she was married and a mother of two. She and I had had some disagreement about something - I don't remember what, but these incidences were common and had been since we were little kids. I detest arguments and I detest more feeling like I've done something for which I should apologise, so that's what I set out to do. I went to her house, sat at her kitchen table, and told her I was feeling badly about our argument and that I was sorry we'd argued.

One always hopes the response to an apology will be something like, "Thanks, I appreciate that." But no... her response was to fly totally off the handle stand bent towards me, pointing her finger in my face and screaming at me for 15 minutes... I left in tears, devastated.

Another time, I was at her house for our parent's 70th birthday. She was agitated and annoyed, and a day after this shindig emailed me some caustic edict about how I had disrespected her daughter, and terminating with "Manners. Get some."

At yet another point, she was dating some guy from the US. She was angry and agitated for several months - her anger and agitation was directed at me, of course... After an alarming visit to his home, which was "off grid," down a long driveway, hidden by a huge berm and with "private property" signs lining the way - she said it was weird - she broke up with him not so much because THAT was weird but because she discovered he had broken into her on line accounts and had been deleting her male clients and male friends. Although she had been very abusive towards me during this relationship - which I knew very little about - after she dumped him, she called us - my spouse and I - to help her protect her information and block that guy... Note pattern beginning to emerge. 

Then there was the French guy who she was dating when she hosted our parent's 70th. He also lived away and obviously wasn't going to be able to commit easily given the distance. Also included in her email about her daughter was some rant about how it was rude to speak French in a room full of non-French speakers... I dunno... is a sideline conversation unrelated to and unheard by anyone else in the room rude?

And then there was a cocaine addict... She called me up and asked to go for walk... she wanted my blessing, I think, to date this guy, who she acknowledged has a huge problem but who she thought she could "support." I did NOT give "permission." I told her she was crazy, that cocaine addiction is the WORST, that those people often spend all their own money and that of anyone they're with... I don't know what happened, but given this was one of the few times I didn't end up being the brunt of her wrath, she might have taken my advice.

Then there was the six-year-long relationship characterised by pathological jealousy, stalking, anger, verbal abuse... As a note, she is extremely private - fine - but secretive - not fine, so nobody knew what was going on in that relationship. Throughout this relationship, she was secretive, intense, often angry, closed off.

About four years into the six years she dated that guy, I agreed to attend counseling with her. Prior to the day of our counselling session, it seems they had been arguing for days. I found out that day they'd been in counselling for a while. When I arrived to the appointment, I found her sobbing outside the counsellor's office. She was on the phone with him. She was so agitated that day and the counselling session became an opportunity for her to express her anger. Within 30 minutes of us beginning the "counselling" session, she was already accusing me of all sorts. This escalated into her yet again yelling at me with her finger pointed at my face. The counsellor said nothing, which I still find bizarre. My sister left shortly before the end of this session. I left in a suicidal fog and walked the 45 minutes from the office to my home.

Also during that relationship, another time she lit into me: she had invited my spouse and I for dinner, but called literally as we were walking out the door with food in our hands to tell us to delay our arrival for two hours. I found out later she and this stalker had been arguing for hours and she hadn't been able to prepare food... but who did she tear into? Me. Why? because I was inflexible not being able to wait around for two hours for dinner with zero notice.

Then there was a guy who I had dated about 25 years ago. Lovely guy; kind, diligent, funny, but dumb and slightly dishonest. She knew him of course, but imagine my surprise one year when upon arriving at my step-mother's home for christmas dinner, and he opened the door.... They dated for maybe six months, but then she dumped him for the abusive stalker. In 2016, they decided to give it another go. She is intense, a personal trainer, long-distance runner, ironman competitor... he is NOT; definitely comfort, not speed. They date for a year, but without warning - literally - she turned up at his house, dumped him again. He was devastated and called me - something he hadn't done for many years - trying to understand what had happened. Two weeks after that, SHE is calling me, after been entirely out of contact for several years, asking me to call him and go pick up her running shirt, which she says he has. He is not amused .... 

Speed forward to yet another incident in February 2018. She was angry about issues I was not party to and couldn't do anything about. I understand things had become dire for her, financially, as she had taken on my mother's financial affairs in addition to her own. I don't know this for certain, but the details add up to her having got to a point of possibly losing both her home and the one she had purchased for my mother. When she was finally able to sell her house and rent out my mothers, and get our mother settled into new lodgings, she called me up and spent 45 minutes telling me how resentful she is (I would be too were I in her shoes - but she bought those "shoes" all by herself...) and chastising me for all the stuff I should have been doing over the last seven years - ignoring the fact the past is unchangeable and the issues were of her own making.

Looking back over these known incidents, I think I have identified what was going on; she has been in many unpleasant, sometimes abusive, and twice, dangerous relationships. In every instance, she has been absolutely silent about what is going on in these relationships but has taken her anger and frustration out on me.  It strikes me now, from the distance of non-contact, she has used me as her target throughout her life. To be fair, she learned this from our parent, who has scapegoated me since I was a tiny child (read the previous and next posts for background).

She has lately contacted me suggesting she owes me some apology, but she has no clue how deep is the pain I live with on the daily. No clue. She doesn't comprehend how much she's contributed to it by siding with our abusive parent, and by engaging in it herself.

I don't doubt there will be another few times where she'll get herself in to a bind and call me to sort her shit out - except now the answer is NO (unless she is in physical danger, which I can't rule out because she is unfortunately stupid about men).

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 6 – 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 annex 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 the incident in my house, and discovering these counselling notes. 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.