There's something about my mother I don't really get

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I've just read For your own good by Alice Miller. While not always agreeing with her, there was something that struck me: When Jürgen Bartsch, a serial killer and rapist, described what he felt when his mother threw a butcher's knife at him... I knew that feeling. I could very easily imagine this "is that real? Yes, she did it! She DID it!" state of mind he describes.
And I could understand him. From early childhood, he was surrounded by denied evil. Lots of it. The pressure of the evil and the denial was so hard that he had to construct something real. And he constructed evil. The worst evil he could invent, to make it real, to act out.

I am not a serial killer. Also, my parents did not lock me in a basement, neither did they abuse me sexually, neither did they send me to an institution notorious for child abuse. I think it's for the best for everyone. Yet - there is something in the story I can relate to. This pressure of not knowing what was real. This weight of lies - but what lies? What are the lies I'm living in? If I knew, I wouldn't live in them.

I remember trying to confront my mother with my perception that she was harming me. I was young, I couldn't explain it and she was quick to defend herself. She always defended herself. She says she detests lies, she did spank me for lying when I was a child but she is actually quite Macchiavelist. I am also good at lying. And acting. And masking. And I hate it, I would like to have everything, even the most scary topics openly discussed... but with her I can't. She denies. Even a stupid, minor thing like my lack of language skills. Every time I mention something may be wrong, the first thing she does is denial.

What is she trying to defend? What is there, beyond that thick layer of denials? I've started to suspect it may be something painfully trivial: that she simply doesn't like me, maybe she even hates the human being I am but she can't stand any spot on her self-image of a loving mother. And she demands me to regularily phone her (she never does) to exchange some careful meaningless expressions with carefully controlled tone of voice.

She had been accusing me of being false until I learned a perfectly naturally-sounding tone of voice. She tried to spank lying off me until I became a perfect liar, impossible to catch. But why? I got literally insane, not knowing what was real and what wasn't, which ended in my misdiagnosis.

My mother has done some pretty awful things to me in the past too and just like your mother she denies it ever happening and insists that I'm crazy and don't know what I'm talking about, and of course nobody believes me or if they do believe me they simply don't care because it's not their problem.

She denies ever spanking me but she used to spank me all the time as a kid. Once she beat me so hard with a belt for sneaking a poptart out the kitchen and lying about it that she left red bleeding marks on my legs and the next day she made me wear pants to school to hide it.

She's always been somewhat verbally and emotionally abusive towards me. She will say very nasty things to me if I dare to disagree with her about anything and sometimes she talks about wanting to kill herself just to make me feel bad. Yeah how f****d up right?

She's always hooking up with these scumbags like her ex husband who's a crackhead and she forces us all to be OK with it or else she basically turns her back on us. And she's always fighting with him in front of us and pulling us into the drama with no regard for how we feel.

Maybe my mom is abusive...

Maybe, but here's another interpretation, coming from a mother. She judges herself harshly for her failures of parenting but she doesn't want others to judge her similarly. See how that differs from "she simply doesn't like me"?

Raising an Aspie kid is a very hard job, and all parents fail in big and small ways. It can be very isolating to have a special-needs child, especially when you don't know what's going on medically/neurologically. It also feels much of the time like a thankless task.

You are within your rights to change your adult relationship with her, including even going No Contact if you need to. But it might be more healing to you as well as her to change your mindset about these things. This is just a suggestion.

What was your mother's childhood like? Mine had controlling parents and she concocted her own world to escape into. She's still doing it.

I've come to pity her. Yes she was nightmare to live with as a child. She was incredibly inconsistent and I never knew where I stood. It was confusing.

I really do think it's her way of gaining control or level ground to stand on. It's a hang over from her own upbringing. Even though her parents are long gone, she still has to find something to control to steady herself in a world where she feels she has no control.

The secret she's trying to hide is that she feels like a lost child with no control pretending to be an adult.

Oh Dorothy, your mother is a mouthy old Sicilian woman who could make you feel guilty about bombing Pearl Harbor if she wanted to.

What?

Um, hello? Golden Girls reference? Your username and avatar?

Yes, it may be this. I think I sense fear and anxiety in her... which she doesn't want to or cannot confront. And as I am the kind of "take the bull by the horns" person, I can't really stand it.


My mother's childhood certainly wasn't easy. She's a post-war baby boomer, the youngest of six and lived in poverty-stricken communist Poland. I didn't have a chance to meet her father because he died before I was born but what I heard about him, he was rarely home, living mostly (both physically and mentally) at work. Funny thing is, my father is just like that and my husband is not far from this. And her mother - now that I think of it, I suspect she was borderline. My mother remembers when she was 4, my grandmother stood at the window crying she would jump out... other days she was the warmest, nicest granny... you never knew what to expect. And they always insisted they were a nice, loving family.

I know my mother saw similarities between me and my granny, I know she had been scared of them. As a baby, I cried violently and nothing could comfort me. It continued far into school age, my uncontrolled explosions of crying. So I got a label of "hysterical, just like her granny" which I hated. It took years but I learned to supress tears, to be hard and self-controlling.
And only recently I learned why I was crying. What was that horrible, pain-like sensation that I never could explain to anybody, that nobody believed in the very existence of it but that tortured me through all my life, since the earliest childhood. It's sensory overload. Now, after 30, I know: my pain has always been real, despite everyone denying it. They were wrong.

As I grew up, my parents became more and more conservatist. They weren't like that when I was a toddler. They created some kind of conservative mental bubble around their house. I didn't respect that bubble... and when, as a teenager, I explored what was outside it and my mother learned it... she came to me with a wall of ice. I was no more of a human being to her. She showed no human feelings towards me. Only this wall of ice. And whenever I tried to discuss it later, I sensed this wall of ice always there. Well, unlike my father. He was offended, too, but he sensed I suffered. He acknowledged it and he told me - what happened, happened, now you need to go on. It was so much for me then... my mother never was able to admit seeing a human being beyond my offence. I think this is the moment corresponding to Jürgen Bartsch's mother throwing a butcher's knife at him.

I couldn't discuss it, I couldn't settle it, I mentally ran form home. I knew running from home physically would put me into a lot of trouble and I didn't want trouble, I just wanted to be myself and not meet this wall of ice... so I did it more subtly. I cried at school, I cried in public transport but coming home I was having a perfectly polite face and never spoke about my feelings. Never showed them to my mother.
I avoided taking money from my parents, took only the food nobody else wanted, sometimes went hungry for days... one of my friends remembers he had a loaf of bread in his bag, remembers feeding me with it. I remember feeling an urge to take some scrap of food a crow was eating on a sidewalk. I guess it was some kind of anorexia, only not centered around weight loss.
My teachers at high school sensed something was wrong, they called my mother to talk about it - and my mother succesfully convinced them it was nothing serious.

I never came back. I found a new home in my boyfriend's apartament. I couldn't oficially live there, my conservatist catholic parents would never agree - but when I disappeared from home for three or four days they never asked where I was. And I never talked to them about it. I just sent them a message that I'm not going home tonight so they knew I was alive and didn't call the police.

Four years later me and my boyfriend married. In a church. So my official home is where my real home is, my parents are bound to respect it. Now, ten years into our marriage, the wounds between me and my mother are still too deep, too painful. I don't really want to go no contact with her, I would like to settle it but I can't. And I can't phone her regularily just to pretend nothing ever happened.

there is too much in this thread that refers to me. too much of my story written by other people. then again, it means i dont have to write it myself xD