Monday, May 3, 2010

Toxic mother

I hate my mother. Not only was she an enabler of my alcoholic, pedophile father, but also she is one of the meanest, angriest people I know. Her favorite thing to do is gossip. She has been abusive to her parents and she has been abusive to me in order to undo some of the damage my father was doing to her, as part of their highly codependent relationship.
Recently, my boyfriend of 3 years moved in with me. He brought along some of his belongings that I verbally attacked. I surprised myself by sounding exactly like my mother. I didn't like his belongings and bullied him into putting them in storage.
Thinking about how I yelled at him, I realized I was recreating an episode I lived with my mother about twenty years ago.
I was about 12 years old when my mother redecorated the house and promised me she would allow me to decorate my own room. It was a short lived joy. Not only she picked the color blue for the walls and bought exactly the furniture she liked without even asking me about it, but also she rearranged all of my belongings in the most idiotic way, according to colors and shapes, making it very difficult for me to be functional in that room. It was as if she was informing me that the room was part of her house, and I was only a temporary guest. The room was not mine, could no be mine, because she bought it and she bought everything inside it. I was to be grateful to her for the kindness she was showing by letting me live in that room. It didn't matter if I was uncomfortable at all times and in order to do my homework at a small desk, I had to jump over a bed which was really a couch that opened into a bed. It didn't matter that the couch-bed didn't really have a mattress and I would wake up with the couch's pattern stamped on my back. It didn't matter if, in order to reach the books I needed to read, I had to go fetch a ladder, because she wanted her china figurines eye level, on the lower shelves, where people who'd visit the house could see them. These were only a few of the signs of her lack of love towards me. Others were daily beatings with a belt, for nothing other than imagined wrongs I could have done and that mostly depended on her state of mind. Sometimes she would come from work angry and beat me for no reason at all, silently and with hate in her eyes. I asked her many times why didn't she love me. She would cry and call me ungrateful. She would make me feel bad because I asked such a thing and would say things like: "every mother in the world loves her child.", as if I were to accept that slogan as a self evident truth and should never question her again.
Even as an adult she would say to me: "You're arrogant, you're out of my control again. Enjoy while it lasts!" as if she would promise me to soon control me again. It was as if I would have to cancel my personality, myself and everything I knew, in order to succumb to her whims and guilt trips and manipulative words.
Eventually I realized I am smarter than her, younger and a lot braver, simply because I refuse to live the lie she sold to me for a family life.
About my boyfriend moving in: I'm sorry I yelled at him and forced him to put his things in storage. What I was really angry at, was my mother and his move in simply triggered that memory of her. It never ends.