part 69. sigh.

So wow. It’s been awhile.

I haven’t written in a while because I have been kind of taking advantage of summertime to rest up and acknowledge and accept some pain. It has been bittersweet to do that – pain hurts, but I feel so much more grounded and confident in my own sanity and judgment.

I recognized a few days ago that when I did a reality check on my memories I could no longer weigh the possibility that all of this has just been the makings of my own insanity. I suppose that has been a big part of my survival of all of this – keeping some hope in the back of my mind that maybe, somehow, all of this shit didn’t really happen.

I’ve come full circle from questioning whether these things could have been real to no longer questioning if they happened at all.

It sucks. It hurts. It is so, so, so, so bad and tremendously fucked up. It feels very, very heavy.

It is so DARK and EVIL and WRONG.

I have recently been able to see my mom much more clearly, as well. I did not ever write much about her in this blog because I wanted to protect her from judgment and criticism. Protecting her is no longer relevant. I mean, it’s not that I don’t want to protect her, it’s that it’s no longer relevant. At all.

I have tried so hard to see how my mom could have seen all of this shit happen to me over the years and yet still love me and want to keep me safe. I have tried to reconcile my experiences and her neglect and manipulation with a caring and loving mom. It just isn’t going to happen.

For the past few years, I felt like I was being up front with myself about my mom because I was willing to acknowledge that I was angry with her for the past, and that I was just waiting until the time would come to address that anger and her role in the abuse.

In the meantime, I just wanted a mom.

I still do – I really, really do.

The bottom line though, is that I cannot handle the duplicitous nature of how she acts and thinks. There is just too much of a disconnect between what she sees as real and what is really actually real. I like to think she is pathological about it, that she is not really aware of doing this, that it is just part of who she is – thinking about her being consciously malicious and conniving makes me nauseous and sad.

At the end of the day, I really don’t know if she is consciously manipulative and cruel or if she is not aware of the damage she does at all. Regardless, I can’t handle it anymore.

I have been working so hard at finding the truth, sticking with the truth, and accepting the truth, painful or not. But that just isn’t who my mom is. Maybe one day I will be able to have a healthy relationship with her, but for right now my relationship with her is simply not healthy, and I am tired of working so hard to make unhealthy relationships work at the expense of my own peace of mind.

Writing this now, I imagine her reading it and deciding that I am being vindictive or somehow intending to use this as a venue to hurt her. It doesn’t really matter how I address her role in the things that happened to me, though – she will find a way to make it about her being a victim. I’m just so tired of this shit.

I feel good about recently really confronting my mom about telling her what was happening to me when I was little and her not doing anything about it. Her response, though, was to say that it was something I needed “to work out in therapy.”

She sounded just like my dad. If I ever displayed any kind of emotional pain around him – or even just confronted him about anything at all – he would tell me I was being irrational, and then turn his back to me. Actually, he would only turn his back to me if he had bothered to face me to begin with.

My mom has been very direct about her views of emotion – emotion is equal to insanity and a lack of control. Expressing emotions is a sign of weakness. Emotions take things that are real and turns them into things that are not real.

I have never really seen her express a lot of emotions. Maybe my dad taught her that the only way to say something legitimate and relevant is if you say it without any emotion at all.

I still have a lot of shame about feeling things – good, bad, happy, sad – I am very guarded about acknowledging and accepting my feelings at any given time. Therapy has really helped a lot with this. I have learned to recognize when I am uncomfortable and ask myself if I am having trouble respecting my own emotions. I really do make an effort to respect how I feel about things and to recognize that emotion does not mean I am crazy.

I looked up Histrionic Personality Disorder today. I’m not a shrink and I am not attempting to diagnose my mom with a personality disorder. However, reading the comments and experiences of other people whose mothers have been diagnosed with HPD, I am finding a lot of validation.

It’s funny - my mom was constantly trying to convince me that I was histrionic when I was growing up. Well, I guess it isn’t funny, maybe just ironic. Regardless, her recurring claims that I was histrionic played a very helpful role in convincing me further that feeling anything means that I am crazy.

I realized about two or three years ago that I simply could not trust my mom or what she says. I still wanted her to love me and want what was best for me – and willingly overlooked a lot of shit to convince myself that I saw that in her - but I can’t deny anymore that is not who she is. I do feel a lot of peace about coming to this particular awareness of my mom, and even more peace about my own perceptions.

Still, though. It just fucking sucks.

I know she sometimes reads this, and that people she knows reads this, and that there is probably no way she will not know that I have written this and posted it on my blog.

Is it a histrionic attempt to make my mom look bad and make me look big? Is it a way to get a dig in at her publically? Is it a chance to try and hurt her the way I have been hurt by her?

I guess it could be any or all of those things, but it could also just be that I am putting it all out there, and it is time to stop pretending that my relationship with her is anything other than what it is.