My mum was never a great mum

There have been a number of threads on Mumsnet recently about toxic parents and how to cope with them. Also a fascinating site analysing the dysfunctional thinking, and behaviour, of some toxic parents whose adult children have gone NC.

Its made me think again about my mum who is no where near as bad as some of the examples but was never great. To illustrate my point a random list of incidents I remember from my childhood.

• When  I was about 5 I had terrible ear ache and ended up having an operation to sort out the problem . I remember taking myself off to bed one afternoon because the pain was so intense. My mum remembers this as me 'making a fuss'...she recalled the time recently when I had an ear infection that resulted in my ear drum perforating.
• My mum told me when I was younger that 'no one would ever call you pretty'. She now insists she didn't mean it 'that way', there is really only one way to mean a comment like that and she was being nasty and unkind, I was there and I remember clearly.
• I had 'flu when I was about 12, maybe 13, and was in bed for 3 days. I don't remember anyone coming up to check me at all or see if I needed anything. I may be editing my memories but I don't think so and it does fit with mums behaviour.
• When I was about 10 a man attempted to seriously molest me. I was lucky enough to escape because some people heard me screaming and came to help which meant the man ran away. I then walked home, with my little brother in his pushchair. When I told my mum about the incident she laughed. The people who'd come to help followed me home, I was way too scared to speak to them even typing this now over 40 years later and I can taste how terrified I was. They told my mum about the incident and instantly mum was very upset and phoned the police, but it had only been me telling her nothing would have been done. I also don't ever remember mum talking about the incident or asking how I was coping.
• Throughout my entire childhood my mum made it abundantly clear that I was horrendously fat, looking at photos  I was a slim child and actually quite pretty, though I really did need a brace for my teeth! When I was 14 I decided to loose weight as  I was obviously so hideously obese I needed to hide away...well I was as far as my mum was concerned. I weighed 10st 7lbs which wasn't massively overweight, even in the '70's! But I did have a curvy figure which my mum can't have liked. I had to deal with a lot of sexist comments that I really didn't like and I struggled to cope with. Anyway I ate a scarily bad diet for a few months and lost 2 st...how I avoided anorexia I will never know. As a parent of a daughter I am staggered that my mum was happy for me to eat the way I did. I don't recall any comments from her about my weight loss, maybe she didn't notice! Anyway I inevitably put all the weight back on again really quickly plus and extra 2st. In many ways I was almost happier to have the extra weight as it made me pretty near invisible, and made my mum unhappy!! Though I did spend the next 30 years dieting on and off.

I am sure there will be have been any number of times my mum was amazing but I can't remember any. My brother was her favourite and my little brother was young enough to need more attention so I was left to my own devises a lot. Which was obviously a good thing in hindsight.

I put up with loads for years...after all she was sad after my brother died, she was poorly and needed support and so on there were always reasons why she had to be the centre of, not attention as such, more 'need' ...her feelings were important and everyone else's not so much.

My dad is a total enabler and still thinks she is amazing and was incredibly happy when the hospital managed to keep her alive last year...I was not so chuffed!

I am now very low contact and tell her nothing of any importance, I have more meaningful conversations at the check outs in Asda's! My DD and DS1 are both NC, not officially but they are neither of them prepared to see her. They still keep up a basic pretence of happy families in that they accept birthday and Christmas presents and write 'thank you' letters. But my DD is just too poorly to cope with the drive over to see them even if she wanted to and the last time they came here and saw her my mum sat in the living room and expected my DD to entertain HER...god she is such an entitled bitch! So anytime they come over DD is in her room. DS1 chooses to stay at home and look after his sister anytime the rest of us go over to my parents house. Mostly its because he is really angry with how rude mum has been over DD's illness but its also because he finds going to see his GPs intensely boring...which it is!

I realise that this account is utterly one sided and the incidents listed are all a bit silly but its hard to find the words to say what is wrong with the relationship when  I've not any other experiences of being mothered to compare it too. All I know is that she is a miserable, whingey bitch who never seems to have a good word for anyone. She will find the worm in every apple, even apples someone else is eating! I am certainly making the right decision to keep her way from DD and to keep contact as low as possible. Its a real shame as I could really do with someone to vent to when DD is really poorly but I don't have that mum, any conversation has to be about her or what she wants to talk about. So be it, she looses out as she doesn't get to know her grandchildren who are all utterly awesome and perfect, and no I'm not biased they are perfect!

Obviously if the relationship was discussed from my mums point of view it would be very different but I'm not interested in her version of my childhood. She certainly isn't interested in mine, or in me come to that.

Another thought I have been reading a lot about narcissistic parents and one theme that really resonated with me was the idea of not wanting to take up too much room. I totally do the trying to retreat into the background and become invisible. I also struggle to accept any praise, or really even thanks, as I find any attention paid to me incredibly difficult to cope with. I am used to my mum sucking up all the attention so I was always ignored. Its weird that I'm only just realising some of this and I'm over 50! In  some ways its because I see her so rarely now I have enough space in my head to let the thoughts slowly seep out. Such a shame that its taken me all these years to recognise how much my mum's toxicity affected me and how it impacted on my choice of partner and why I was so passive in the face of low grade emotional abuse for so long. I was trained to ignore my needs and emotions and only view other peoples emotions as having any validity.

Having said that having a very firm grip on my emotions and being able to switch them off at will is proving immensely useful with coping with the demands DD places on me as her illness continues to deteriorate.