Free at last ! Free at last !!

[alphaomega]

Hi all 

I wanted to begin a new thread where we can share the incredible freedoms that we begin to feel once our PD parent has passed on.

I have realized in interacting with people in the real world regarding my mothers death, that almost no one understands how very OK I AM

My poor FIL (who abhored her with a fervent passion - although he would never speak of that feeling to me personally) is very concerned about me.
He expressed to me several times over the years that the worst day of his life was when his mother died.
He felt orphaned and totally lost.

He is so sweet and keeps checking in with my DH asking him"(are you sure she is OK ? "
Is she going to have a breakdown ?

Poor guy, he just cant wrap his head around it.

Nor can most people.

Here is our safe space where we can share the total and complete liberation we feel when they are finally GONE.

I hope to use this thread as n inspiration to those of us who are still having the pain of dealing with these highly disordered souls...

In the beautiful "tell it like it is" spirit of our beloved Woman Interrupted, feel free to TELL IT LIKE IT IS right here.

So I'll go first...

I HAVE NEVER IN MY 51 years on this little blue dot floating in space, felt sooooo free, so unencumbered, where I am beginning to see things through my OWN eyes, and not through the lens of horror that everything in my life had to get filtered through.

I AM FREE, AT LAST.

I AM FREE !!!!!

[SunnyMeadow]

I'm happy to read this alphaomega!! I wish WI was here to post some of her thoughts on the matter! 

Mine hasn't passed yet so I'll just read about everyone's freedom and give you all a big toast    and some cake! 

[Call Me Cordelia]

 

I'm so glad for you! My parents are still living. But I have had similar feelings of relief after NC that I simply didn't have to consider them anymore in my holiday planning, children's events, making those seemingly obligatory gestures all the time. I no longer had to have the co start negativity and judgment in my life. So many things I was suddenly free from. I felt freer than ever to do what was right for my FOC without giving a moment's thought to their opinions. It's such a life-altering thing!

I've also had people who are dimly aware of my situation offer "thinking of you alone at the holidays," or whatever and I'm like no, you have no idea, this is GREAT.

And other times I feel genuine grief that I feel that way. I think both are to be expected. As I've read on here before we have natural responses to unnatural situations. Hugs, thanks for sharing.

[Hepatica]

alphaomega,

Thank you so much for sharing that with us. I do stress about it sometimes, as both my elderly uNPD parents are alive, yet old and it could happen any day. I worry I'll have regrets. I worry about how to survive the funeral. I worry about things still. Ugh.

But one thing I am certain is that when they pass, they will get a release from their painful situations. My parents are just so dysfunctional and unhappy. I hated seeing it when I still visited them, not only for myself, but for their sakes. I wish they would be free of that unhappiness, even if that means passing on to the next realm - where I just trust they will receive freedom and love they never had. Ok. I'm getting a little hokey I think. But I really believe they will be free and it's not that I wish their deaths, but I want them to be free of pain, because that will release me from pain as well.

I hope that makes sense.

I'm just so happy for you and it gives me hope as well.

[Amadahy]

I've often thought my Nmom's healing will be via her passing. She is a tortured soul, so I will find some comfort when her time here ends. Practically speaking, I have felt such a burden from her that I believe I will feel lighter, freer, finally at peace myself. The sad truth is that I associate her with pain, sadness and all kinds of trouble. I am a quiet, calm person and I look forward to the absence of hypervigiliance and worry. I believe my higher power understands this -- I hold no malice, but will enjoy relief.

[Psuedonym]

Oh alphaomega,

It's so strange that today of all days I checked in, because I haven't checked in a lot recently. Also I just realized today that we are the exact same age.

When I read your post I felt joy, joy for you and your new freedom. Because that's really what it is,  that weight, that anchor, that venom that seeps into your life and poisons the wonderful, magical, unpredictable experience that should be your life, is gone. And you are free. I get it, When my mother (aka Negatron) died, after the initial shock wore off, I felt euphoric. I really did. As if this dark cloud of needy, clingy, parasitic, depressing awfulness was finally gone. And it was.

I'm so glad you have your freedom. Enjoy it and your life to the fullest.

[alphaomega]

Heartfelt thank yous to all of you who are transforming along with me !

I'm in a very anger filled headspace today.

I chose not to do an obit because well she had zero friends or zero family who had anything to do with her.

But I also chose not to because of the "promises" she made to everyone - my company, money, my condo...she was forever promising people the things I worked my ass off for.

This morning some who is connected to her old caretaker asked me how she was doing.

I had to lie.

I had to lie about my mother being dead to PROTECT MYSELF from what she is expecting to receive !!!

I'm mad all over again now, because I literally can not believe that she still controls me from the crypt.

I'm just beside myself with fury that I gave her this much power over me.

[JustKat]

I HAVE NEVER IN MY 51 years on this little blue dot floating in space, felt sooooo free, so unencumbered, where I am beginning to see things through my OWN eyes, and not through the lens of horror that everything in my life had to get filtered through.

Yesssssssss, alphaomega, yessssssss.....

I was 55 when my NPDmother died, and I was SO happy and relieved when I got the email saying she was gone. Like you, I felt like I had finally been set free. My mother died on my birthday and my first thought was, "Hey, my mother finally gave me a decent birthday present." I'd be torn to shreds if I ever said that to someone outside of this group, but I can say it here. I always feared that she'd live to be very elderly and might even outlive me, but she left at a young enough age that I have many years left to live without her in it. I celebrated!

My mother was terminally ill for several years before passing so had plenty of time to make sure she could haunt me from the grave, but she failed. She had me disinherited, which was brutal at the time because my enFather went along with it and even taunted me over it, but that was also for the best since I finally saw him for what he was and went NC with him as well. My enFather is still living, now very elderly. I know I'll never see him again and I'm okay with that. I'm okay with my GCsis inheriting their house since she's going to spend her senior years living there alone with no friends or family. She sold her soul and sacrificed her own happiness to inherit a tract house in the suburbs. I don't need that! I don't want that! I'm okay with it all!

I have no f*cks left to give. I don't care. I AM FREE.

[JustKat]

I chose not to do an obit because well she had zero friends or zero family who had anything to do with her.

That turned out to be the case with my mother too. She had always envisioned some kind of death bed scene out of a movie, the dying queen, with servants standing at her bedside fanning her with palm fronds. It didn't happen that way. As far as I know, only my enDad and GC sis were there at the end. No other family members cared or bothered to show up to say their goodbyes.
My father had her cremated and dumped her ashes into the ocean. No funeral, no memorial service, no obituary. For all her delusions of being worshipped and admired, in the end, no one cared. Oh well, boo hoo. 

[Call Me Cordelia]

She sold her soul and sacrificed her own happiness to inherit a tract house in the suburbs.

Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for a tract house? 

(If you don't recognize the reference, it's from A Man for All Seasons. One of my favorite plays. I think it's a good one for OOTFers. Thomas More is a hero for all those who would be true, and resist rewriting history and reality to suit their narrative of themselves and us!)

[JustKat]

Wow, Cordelia, I had never heard that quote before but it sure is relevant. Thank you for sharing that!

[Call Me Cordelia]

The original is, "...but for Wales?" But a tract house is even sadder.

[alphaomega]

The Emancipation of Alpha Omega

My mother just died and I have never felt better. 

I am going to stop using the substances, that I used to have to use, to escape the life, that I somehow could not manage to do without them.

I have been drinking hard for the better part of 30 years.  I drank to cope.  I drank to feel free.  I drank to escape.

I drank to try to bond with her.

My drinking began when I was very little (4 or 5 years old). 

We had a "cocktail hour" (more like 5 hours) every evening as was rather typical in the 70's.
Mommy would pour herself a large sherry, daddys was a tumbler of gin on the rocks, sissys was box wine, and I would always get one of those shrimp cocktail glasses filled with red vermouth.

It was sweet and made me feel funny.  Silly,  Part of the "gang". 

And I drank it while I was watching Electric Company waiting for mommy (who had to lament over making dinner, while lamenting over having to iron all day) to put dinner on the table.

Many many evenings, their drinking would continue far into the night and always end up similarily.

Daddy would pass out on the kitchen table, head down in his crossword puzzle, mommy and sissy would do their drunk bonding thing,  And I'd go off to play in my tiny 9 X 9 bedroom.

We were NEVER allowed to close the doors.  It infuriated mommy.  So I'd have to sit there, and play alone, and hear all the nonsense until usually they all stumbled off to bed.

I'd lie in bed terrified, absolutely terrified of the fact (and I knew it even then) that NO ONE was capable of functioning and that I was technically in charge of the house if something was to happen.

Of course, there was chain smoking going on.  And ashes would fall and sometimes burn holes into the chair, or the polyester pajamas that mommy was wearing.

Now, that was the actually GOOD nights.

On the bad nights ?  it got exponentially scarier...

Once my sister left for college (she was 8 years my senior) things got downright demonic.

The evening would start out mostly the same, but since the golden child was no longer there to buffer the constant tension that was ever present, well now that was my job.

My mother hated being a housewife.  Hated it so much she would force herself to stand over an ironing board 6 hours a day to have something to hold over my father when he would get home from work.  How she hated it so much and she had no one to talk to, and OMG she HAD to go to a school assembly of mine and all the teachers were assholes and the parents were worse, and blah blah blah.

MY father, being the good catholic martyr that he was, would placate her with diamonds, and promises of better days, all while drinking close to a half of handle of Beefeaters Gin a night.
Highly Functioning Alcoholic was a term created for my incredibly hardworking, enabling father.

But when mommy was going to have one of her turns ?  Ohhhhh man, you could literally feel the darkness and evil begin to ooze up through the floor.

On those nights, my father might go to bed early, drunk and exhausted, and it would be off to the races with NPDM's ushering in of the demons.

She would sit in her recliner, and talk to the air.  One might have thought it was just drunk mumbling, but it was so much more than that.  There was an incessant and pervasive feeling of pure evil as she would converse with these things.  And because I was terrified she'd fall and kill herself, on burn the house down, I would sit there and listen to this.

When I literally couldnt take it anymore, and I had began to understand that the liquid in mommy's drink made her crazy, I'd wait for her to get up to crawl to the bathroom, and I'd go to her large sherry...
... and chug it.

I was eight years old.

When she would return from the bathroom and notice her drink was gone, she'd stumble her way to back to the liquor cabinet for a refill...
And this pattern would repeat until either I was too drunk to continue to try to keep us all alive,
or I would wake up my father and he'd release the kracken

He'd stumble awake and go to the liquor cabinet and take all the bottles and lock them in the garage.  Put the key in his pajama pocket and stumble back to bed.

There would be screaming and fighting and just a whole host of scary things, but eventually it would all die down and we'd all fall into our beds, drunk and cloaked in evil.

I can not even fathom how many times I must have gone to school "hungover".  I didnt know what a hangover was, but I was sick.  ALOT. 

No wonder I was, at the time, considered an 'average at best' student...    
Who could learn multiplication and division when their heads were pounding and they constantly felt they were going to throw up ?

Alcohol and evil killed my sister.  And my father.  And I one thousand percent blame my mother for this.

it's nothing short of an absolute miracle that it didnt kill me.

I am ready now to get sober.  Truly sober. 
I cant change the fact that I will have these memories for the rest of my life.
But it is absolutely 100 percent my responsibility to reorient my life, now that I'm free of all of it.

And, honestly, after what I have witnessed in my life, I cant imagine it's even going to be that difficult...

XO AO

[Hepatica]

My God, AO,

I have to put my hand on my heart. I have a lump in my throat and this feeling that I want to time travel and whoosh little you out of that place.

I have no doubt though that you are going to be okay. None. Something inside of you is a super hero survivor. I know it won't be easy, but you'll find what you need to manage, to get alcohol-free and get the support to lead you to other side of this.

As I always tell myself, put any shame where the shame belongs, on the abuser, and in this case, straight with your mother, wherever she is. Let it all go and now it's time for you to heal.

Reading your words reminded me of the times in my family home where I too felt true evil. How that has haunted me over the years, how I still carry it as this spooky, scared feeling. My mother lost it regularly in my childhood years. She attacked my sister violently. She screamed so loud it shook my soul. I felt like a bag of shaky bones at times and had to go to school having witnessed absolutely horrible things. I felt so alone. I had no one to tell.

Now we do. I am grateful that you shared your story. It gives us all a chance to let ours out as well. Because I've seen dark things, your story makes me sad for you, but I understand like a sister survivor of some kind of domestic war.

You are not alone. Good luck on your steps to a better life. It's not always easy, but it is always worth it. Always.

[SunnyMeadow]

AO,

No wonder you feel so free now. That was hard to read. Your poor little inner child need some serious nurturing and shame on your parents.

I experienced some of that too, a parent smoking while being completely sloshed and eventually passed out drunk...every single night. Not fun for a little kid to live through, not to mention all the other toxic stuff that goes along with it. I understand like a sister survivor too.

Now you have Sweet Freedom!!

[alphaomega]

Thanks for the love you guys. Its palpable. 

Growing up with a malignant narcissist/sociopath as ones primary nurturer, you learn, or perhaps are "groomed" at a very tender age, that aint nobody happy unless The Beast has been fed. Both literally and figuratively.

The undercurrent primary energy in every interaction, is her needs come first. Above all else.
And that is a terrifying way to have to try to survive when "mother" is sustenance, nurturer, protector, and the center of the universe for a helpless baby.

Soon, it becomes just understood, that walking on eggshells isnt even enough. You have to suffer, profoundly, to prove your loyalty.
You must walk on broken glass, hot coals, because anything less than that, means you don't love, worship and adore her.

And, then, that is when there is REAL hell to pay.

My past attempts at getting sober, were always sidelined by her need to have a drinking buddy. Then, when she could not longer drink because she became too sick, I had to continue to self harm in because thats just what I was programmed to do.

If shes not happy, I cant be happy. Period.

That was the entire toxic families modus operandi.

And when I went secretly to ACOA in my early 20's, I was made to believe I had sold out the family. It didnt matter if she knew or not. The programming was already in place.

Then multiple attempts at AA, where as soon as she found out I was trying to get sober (no longer her drinking buddy) resulted in me eventually just throwing in the towel, because she was ALWAYS sick. Always miserable. Always needing more of me.

And even though I didnt have any more to give, it was demanded, expected and the programming kicked in.

My harming myself, was a convoluted way I could prove to her that I was still worthy of her love and attention.

This thread is most likely gonna get a whole lot scarier before it gets better. I'm going to verbally vomit all the toxins that reside deep in my psyche as I process the gravity of what my life has been thus far.

But, then, hope is gonna spring eternal, and I *AM* gonna come out of this sober, better and more alive than I have ever allowed myself to be...

Mark these words...

XO AO

[Amadahy]

Mad respect, warrior. May you soar. xoxo

[Boat Babe]

Hey alphaomega, we hear you. You're going to feel a lot of mixed emotions over the coming weeks and possibly months now she's gone. Know that this too shall pass and that you are going to be feeling so much better once the storm has passed. I hope you can be supported during this time. You certainly are here. Sending love and hugs.

[alphaomega]

Now the morning after she would open a portal to hell, was more unnervingly terrifying then the actual events of the night before. It was if she had one foot in that realm and was reluctantly having to continue to reside in this one.

If my "normal" was walking on shards of glass, the hangover was like walking through hellfire.

Mornings after were absolutely horrific. My father would be seething with her for the antics she would pull the night before.
But he was also quietly ashamed for what he allowed her to get away with.
The man had a conscience, and he knew he'd made his bed, but again, catholic guilt/hard work dominated his character and because he had taken the "for better or for worse" vows, she would literally be able to get away with murder.

Spiritual murder that resulted in physical murder of atleast 5 people that I can think off hand.
More on that later.

Mommy and her ice blue red rimmed vacant and hollow eye sockets, would usually be either sleeping it off or up in our only bathroom throwing up.
He'd either feel so guilty for what we I had to witness that he'd make me a couple waffles with ice cream, or if it was too awful, he'd make my lunch and sneak off to work.

She NEVER made me breakfast in all the years I was growing up. Nor would she pack my lunches.
Those were his responsibilities, as he was the one who wanted me.
She never let him live down that fact that she never wanted children, especially not a second one, and dog gone it, he would be doing the parental heavy lifting,
so help her GOD !

Dad would overcompensate by writing a note on my lunch napkin. They were sweet, but in retrospect I would have rather preferred he'd of gotten sober and gotten me the hell out of there. But he was indebted to her for her nursing him back to health from a nearly fatal car crash before I was born.
As so long as she knew that was the case, she would make damned sure he never forgot it.

Now I have had some hangovers in my decades of drunking, (one that is chronicled somewhere here, where I actually left my body, hovered above it, while I was vomiting and urinating and defecating simultaneously) but the hangovers SHE had, those were just a different type of fresh hell.

There was a pure evil that spewed out of her that was far worse than whatever had occurred the night before.
The in-between worlds she was obviously experiencing, was a final shove back into earths reality, and neither IT nor SHE was having it.

To this day, I cant stand the smell of beef boullion cubes. Those were her go to methods of rehydration.

As the day would go on, and I came home from school, what I imagine they call the "honeymoon period" after domestic violence would be waiting for me at the door.

She was back to being semi-human rather than mostly-demonic, and there would be over compensating bullcrap because she'd known she'd stepped over the line with my dad.

Like any good co-dependent, it was all passive aggressive, them not speaking, her I imagine still suffering from the night before, him shocked at the **** storm his life had become, and little old me trying to figure out WTF was going on and how I could fix it.

A few days would pass, they'd kiss (and whatever) makeup, and the whole cycle would begin again.

One especially terrifying night, my father was in our basement (((shudder))) equally divvying up possessions from my grandfathers estate to his 4 siblings. She arrived at he middle of the stairs, in those godforsaken pink polyester pajamas, and tore into him regarding his being too generous with the items he was giving sway.

He had 5 paper bags set up, with each of his siblings names on it, and as the executor of his dads will, was trying in earnest to give everyone of them a fair amount of their fathers things.

I distinctly recall him even putting a single pen that belonged to him, in each bag. And even at my tender age of 10, I found that endearing and beautiful. I saw the pain in his eyes. His fathers death had broken him. So I kept him company and tried to keep him pieced together.

Well, old drunk demonic blue eyes wasnt about to tolerate THAT, because "he was doing all the work so he should be getting ALL THE THINGS !" so she physically went after him and punched him in the face and knocked his glasses off.

In order to get her to stop beating him, he pinned her to the floor, until she finally exhausted herself.

Meanwhile, I'm screaming, crying, hyperventilating and trying to get between them because someone was gonna die that night...

I called sissy at school and begged her to come home. But she was 6 hours away and that wasnt possible.

As for what happened after that, I blocked it out.

Most of my childhood, I honestly can not recall. I believe its some sort of survivalist, hard wired into our brain, coping mechanism that keeps us from going totally crazy.

I would call it merciful.

__________________
~ The soul would rather fail at its own life, than succeed at someone else's. ~ David Whyte

[Sneezy]

alphaomega - Your story is heart-breaking and I will read every word and cry for you.  Keep telling us - we are all here for you.  Much love