Closing the door

[moglow]

Right?! I mean the audacity and disrespect of it all! It honestly never occurred to me to say anything, any more than with any other trips I've taken over the years. If you're not interested in my life, that's okay, I can still carry on. I'd tried sharing others with her, telling her where I'd been, what I'd done. No interest whatsoever.

It's like she was somehow embarrassed that I'd not told her, like I had something to hide and literally hid it from her. Um no - I had an invitation and accepted it, made my plans, packed my happy ass up and drove 10+ hours to get there. And I LOVED it! She implied later that I'd "told them things" about her, somehow influencing them against her. No concept that it had nothing to do with her whatsoever.

The HP discussion came up with md too - it's one of the bonds with me and my nieces, who's in what house and random HP references sprinkled in conversation. Not that she's seen any of them in years, but md brought it up repeatedly like she still gets to pick and choose my reading material, saying I shouldn't encourage the kids. Seeing her as Voldemort in my mind would be lost on her but that's okay! [A friend nearby has a similar mother and her husb's mother, so we've talked about the correlations between Harry's story and ours. I admitted to her not long ago that on bad days I've been known to have the movies on rotation as a comfort kind of thing. The friendships, triumph of good over evil, the muggleborns feeling cast aside and adrift until they get their hogwarts letter then finding their true families and community, looking out for each other come what may - it fills that emptiness inside for me. Turns out my friend does that too!]

[Andeza]

Slightly off-topic, but I found growing up that the fantasy and sci-fi genres were infinitely more interesting to me than real world fiction. As I aged I began to understand it was because I could escape in those stories to those far different places and experience life in a way I could not do in reality. I didn't get to do the things I expressed interest in, they were all shot down for various pd-type reasons. Then to be followed by a suggestion to do other activity like "Why don't you try basketball? You could be a member of the team, play, have fun!" ...  I was an extremely short introvert with depth perception related fears (possibly autistic as a bonus). It was literally the worst possible idea. So my books were my refuge. My happy world of retreat.

As far as mom knew, it kept me quiet and out of her hair and that was all that mattered.

I'm glad you go places and find ways to enjoy life, moglow!

[sandpiper]

I take a lot of comfort from the Harry Potter stories too xxx

[moglow]

I'm seeing more of that, Sandpiper. Even as dark as they get towards the end, there's a lot of goodness to be found. [I'm actually thinking md is more of a dementor, sucking all the joy and happiness out of everything and everyone...]

[moglow]

... So my books were my refuge. My happy world of retreat.

As far as mom knew, it kept me quiet and out of her hair and that was all that mattered.

Andeza, here too - I escaped [still do] every chance I get. Problem was, mine seemed to see it as some sort of threat. She didn't want anything to do with me but disliked when I was content elsewhere. I remember an insistence that I not "hide away" in my room and her critiquing whatever I chose to read. Even when I was older and she'd visit, evenings the television would be on to her preferred programs with her non-stop nonsensical ramble until I gave up and went to bed. Reading? Forget it. I was being rude by not participating in the "conversation," and she'd snark about my chosen reading material when my books were laying around.

[Andeza]

Yep! "I'm lonely! Is that book more interesting than me?"  Well.... YES! Not that I could say that.

[bee well]

I'm so sorry to read this Moglow. That is too much for anyone to handle. Survivors go in and out of no contact for good reason, and I don't think there's one of us who did it because it was easy. Keep standing tall as you are...

[Boat Babe]

My mother hated me reading. "Always reading." She'd moan.  Reading and public libraries made a lot of my childhood bearable.  I read to my son from when he was tiny. He just completed a Masters degree in Creative Writing so you can imagine how proud I am. Because he's a nice boy he has invited his grandmother to his graduation ceremony. I am so going to have to hold my tongue!

Big hugs Moglow, and all us adult children of bloody awful parents. ❤️

[sandpiper]

Yep the dementors were a wonderful creation by JKR.
I don't know how I would have gotten through my childhood without books.
My stepmother used to do periodic clean-outs of my favourites and would give them away to mothers at the school saying I'd outgrown them and then she took satisfaction when I would say 'But that is one of my favourite books and I didn't agree to parting with that,' by telling her targets that I was a capricious little liar.
I figured out the best way to deal with that was to stop asking family to buy me books for BDs & Xmas and I became a heavy user of the school and public library system. Those things she didn't dare to 'disappear' and by then I think the primary school was onto her game, anyway.
These personalities are just so damaged and so damaging, Mo.
My advice to you would be to try to let go of the idea that you have anything to apologise for.
The only reason you may be disappointed in your own behaviour is because she's wilfully provoked you with hers.

I went through a similar angst with my sister, after I lost my temper with her and yelled at her. But when I examined it afterwards, I realised that she'd been following a consistent pattern of learned behaviour that she'd picked up from our mother, which is the game of 'Poke The Bear'.
I came to the realisation that by yelling at her, and having finally cracked, after 20 years of bearing with some really foul behaviour from her, I'd given her exactly what she wanted because it means that EnSis can sit back forever after and point at me and say to anyone who is interested and many who are not 'See, I have been telling you for years that Piper is the problem.'

If I try to snatch that hard-won prize from her by apologising, she won't be pleased, and it will just reset the game of 'Poke the Bear' back to a point where she needs to set up another situation where the passive aggression will push me to overheat and we'll be back at square one.

So I'm going to let EnSis have that one.
I've distanced myself from the flying monkeys who will push those buttons in her absence, but my fall-back response for anyone that wants to guilt me for that is ''No arguments from me, everything they say about me is absolutely correct.'
That response has confused and embarrassed a number of people who have learned from that to shut the hell up & butt out.

It's tough.
Of course we want to apologise when we've lost our temper, been abrupt, or we feel like we've let our own standards down. The thing is - apologising to the PD is just throwing petrol on the fire because an apology isn't going to help. They aren't going to reflect on their own behaviour or the reasons why you'd protest theirs. They'll never be motivated to gain insight into their role in accelerating the conflict and sometimes, I think, the only thing you can do is to step back and learn that there's no putting those fires out because whatever you do, it's just going to fan or fuel the flames.

[moglow]

Therein lies the rub,  Sandpiper - I did it because of who I am and to reinforce who I want most to be. I'm not her, will never allow myself to become her. Somehow in spite of her efforts, she really didnt grind me all the way down! I know right from wrong, and practice it regularly.


She did provoke me and I allowed it. Looking at it later I realized she had some goal, can only imagine that was it, to push until she got an emotional response from me. Maybe after all, I'd perfected gray rock and medium chill and that she couldnt abide. She demanded a fight and ugliness. I require the opposite.

Today's a better day. Every day without her is a better day really. Telling, isn't it.

[sandpiper]

Yep.
Truly, I think they just create drama because it distracts from the pain of their own internal climate. They aren't able to sit with their feelings and process them & deal with them without generating drama.
I keep reminding myself of a question that our group T asked us to consider, many years ago, 'What would you be doing with your life if this person was magically, overnight, suddenly all better and there was no need for you to fix/help/resolve any of this?' And then her advice 'Change your behaviour to focus on that, this way it puts all the responsibility back on the disordered person to fix/help/resolve whatever problem they've created.'
As we know too well, our disordered FOO are fire-starters and if we put one fire out, they'll just light up another.
My decision to go NC was to just let them burn down the house, the bridges and the forests and to go far, far away, in terms of creating emotional distance.
I really don't think they're capable of doing any of it differently, but we are. And I don't want my FOO to take that away from me.
I'm grateful for the peace that I've got with NC.
I wish that an alternative was possible, but there's no peace to be had with people who are intent on starting fires & pushing buttons.

[justducky]

I keep reminding myself of a question that our group T asked us to consider, many years ago, 'What would you be doing with your life if this person was magically, overnight, suddenly all better and there was no need for you to fix/help/resolve any of this?' And then her advice 'Change your behaviour to focus on that, this way it puts all the responsibility back on the disordered person to fix/help/resolve whatever problem they've created.'

What fantastic advice! Thank you for sharing. I'm glad you've found peace with NC.

[moglow]

My decision to go NC was to just let them burn down the house, the bridges and the forests and to go far, far away, in terms of creating emotional distance.
I really don't think they're capable of doing any of it differently, but we are. And I don't want my FOO to take that away from me.
I'm grateful for the peace that I've got with NC.

It's a hard-won peace, isnt it? Putting all the decades of drama back where they belong is a process, one I'm glad to step away from. It seems unimaginable that she's okay with this, the silence. The distance she created. 

I think of the wasted time, all the times I asked her to talk about it, get it out, only to be blasted with more poison and her snarling that I should somehow know what's going on with her and fix it all. No accountability whatsoever. I honestly thought there was a bottom to it but she showed that's not the case either.

Her only attempts at contact for years now were to blast me for things she either invented or that simply aren't mine to address on any level. Phone call after call where she went off on angry tangents instead of refocusing on any attempt at actual conversation with me. It honestly didn't occur to her that we build relationships through shared experiences and conversation. She talked AT people and dug deep into any drama she could create. And Lord have mercy, the rages. The repeated attacks on any and everything I said - or didn't say.

If she were suddenly magically all better, given where we've been? I'd still be gone. I don't trust or like her, don't care to pretend any longer for her or anyone else. I could maintain polite behavior to be around her on a limited basis when necessary, but only that.

[Leonor]

Hi Moglow,

I'm so sorry you're going through this. It's agonizing.

You know, there's all this talk about mirroring in child development. That kids look to their moms as their mirror: Am I ok? Is this safe? What am I feeling?And then the mother, drawing upon her inner stability, reflects back: You are ok. It are safe. You are feeling ... And so on.

But if there is no inner stability, mom has nothing to draw from. Nothing to reflect back to her child. She doesn't know if she's ok. She doesn't know if she's safe. She doesn't know what she's feeling. So she starts reflecting everyone else: this is how people act at a party. This is how people define success. This is how everyone should treat their mother, and so on.

Of course it's toxically self absorbed, but it's only because there is this void where her self should be. I think that's why narcissists can be so charming: "charming" is about attunement: What does this person like? What makes him or her tick? What can I say or do that would make him or her say or do ... ?

But they're not perfect at it, and you can tell when they slip up. They misread someone, or they're not sure what the other person wants, or there are two people to charm and they aren't sure which one is the most powerful. Then the opinion changes in a flash, or the faux pas gets brushed off as a joke (or a quote from someone else!), or the person who was the center of their attention gets elided from the conversation in order to focus on the new arrival.

To a child, the charm can look like empathy, even love. After all, you are the center of her world. You are the focus of her attention. Plus she's telling you all the time what a wonderful mother she is! You don't know that the center should hold for more than 20 minutes at a time. You don't know that you're not actually supposed to be in competition with your siblings or her new date or the family pet. You're 18 months old. What else are you going to believe, but what she tells you?

So mom seems attuned to us, and we keep expecting the warmth, the self, the bond of empathy. But you need a self to be empathetic, you need a self to put yourself in someone else's shoes. Our moms can't do that. They don't have a self. Their self was hollowed out or smashed to bits or raided and held hostage decades before we were even born.

The unholy unfair tragedy of it all is that it's not about us, it was never about us. It's not about doing what mom wants us to do or saying what she wants to hear or planning a trip she'll enjoy. She doesn't know what she wants. It doesn't make a difference what we do. Everything in her existence is about being in a state of panic and void that is either intolerable or excruciating.

And because you are a loving, empathetic person in spite of it all, you want to connect with her. You want to figure it out with her, for her. You want her to be, if not the mom you've always dreamed of, at least the mom you can call once a month or send a card to on mother's day. That's like folding a card into a paper airplane and tossing it into a tornado. It might land where you hoped, but it's an off chance that it's anything but a coincidence.

You know what that is? It's sad. So, so sad for you. So sad for little Moglow, who adores her mommy and loves her mommy and doesn't feel like anything in the world is real or right or safe without her mommy, and mommy is not there. It's good and fine for adult Moglow to be angry and frustrated and intellectualize about all of this. That is healing. That is considering the situation from an adult point of view, with big words like "personality disordered." But little Moglow is in such sadness, such heartache. She doesn't care that someone has a fersonalidyorbered. She just wants her Mommy.

So  to little Moglow, today and every day.