I want my mommy

[Justme729]

I am so sad and frustrated.  I have been going through a nightmare of a time personally.  All I want is my mommy.  But where is she?  Nowhere. 

Reality:  she neglected her health. She is in the hospital.  She always does this sort of crap.  Long story short, hospital notes aren't adding up.  It looks like she discharged herself AMA.   gave wrong med list.  Declined treatment.  Family ignore these inconsistencies, but I can't.  The whole thing is attention seeking, but how would one purposefully make them septic.   She knew family wouldn't let her go that family. My father told me she has been going off her mental health medication on and off for years.   She's lied to me.  No surprise.

I just wish I had a mom I could call, to cry to.  You get support from.   But, it doesn't happen that way.  I miss my mom that I'll never have.

[Liketheducks]

I'm so sorry.   I feel you.

[Liketheducks]

Do you have friends that can stand in for your mom?   A few years ago, I went through a terrible time.   I had made my husband into my safe place, and he had an affair.   It was brutal - still is some days.  (We're in a much better place, I like the guy I'm with so much better, but the trauma of it still lingers sometimes).  At that time, one friend leaned in hard for me.   Took me under her wing.   Have you shared this with anyone else who can be supportive?   
During that time, I had no idea how my friends would step up.....but they rallied around me when I was at my lowest.   
It is so hard to grieve the knowledge that you have never had the parent you deserved.....but sometimes the "village" can help.   Hang in there.   

[hhaw]

Lots of mommy spirits on this board, ((Just me.))

You didn't get the mommy you deserved and she'll never heal or change, bc she's broken.

Turn toward people who can, is my suggestion.

[easterncappy]

I really missed my mom the other day. Like a lot. I almost toyed with the idea of contacting her again, but I didn't...

Then she spammed my text messages with all sorts of abuse, and tried to call me once. I remembered how anxious it makes me just to see her phone call on my screen. I got over that ish real quick.

I want a mom. That thing is not a mom.

[Boat Babe]

Yeah, it's so, so primal. Us human mammals are born very prematurely because of our big brains. While other mammals can walk within minutes of birth we take a year or so to do so. As highly social mammals we are wired to bond with our parents and learn huge amounts from them so that our dependancy, or our childhood,  extends into our mid teens. Our brains have evolved to grow and develop in a loving and nurturing environment in order to reach optimum well-being and performance. This is why we struggle if we haven't had good enough parents. We end up a bit wonky, with too much of this or that unfortunate trait and painful unmet needs that inform unskillful behaviours and sometimes disastrous decisions. It fucks us up.

However, coming to a full understanding of that devastating knowledge, coming Out of the FOG, is the first and major step in the healing process. We can, in great part, heal from this. It takes time and effort. It requires commitment to ourselves, daily practice and self care and the support of others. For me, Mindful Self Compassion (see Neff and Germer) has been a wonderful practice and I highly recommend it.

See you around on the boards. Hugs

[olivegirl]

I realized as early as my teens that I was not being properly mothered.

I understood in my 20s that my mother was more of a frenemy and I tried not to provoke her jealousy and deliberately made myself small.

And that is why I have been such a people pleaser, looking for validation and looking for others to mother me.

The result has been that I had communicated a neediness which in turn made me a target for bullies.

So now I just mother myself! 

I do so by engaging in self-care, and giving myself permission to have strong boundaries. 

And I now understand that my mother's hatred of me, her smear campaign against me, her penchant for humiliating me and isolating me from my relatives has nothing to do with me and that it is not my job to parent her or to fix her.

My super power is my ability to separate myself from her and to affirm my safety by physically keeping my distance from her.

And the longer I stay NC, the more I find that I don't need her mothering me or anyone else to mother me because it was she who was undermining me the entire time.

And that's her baggage.  I won't pick it up! 

[Boat Babe]

I realized as early as my teens that I was not being properly mothered.

I understood in my 20s that my mother was more of a frenemy and I tried not to provoke her jealousy and deliberately made myself small.

And that is why I have been such a people pleaser, looking for validation and looking for others to mother me.

The result has been that I had communicated a neediness which in turn made me a target for bullies.

So now I just mother myself! 

I do so by engaging in self-care, and giving myself permission to have strong boundaries. 

And I now understand that my mother's hatred of me, her smear campaign against me, her penchant for humiliating me and isolating me from my relatives has nothing to do with me and that it is not my job to parent her or to fix her.

My super power is my ability to separate myself from her and to affirm my safety by physically keeping my distance from her.

And the longer I stay NC, the more I find that I don't need her mothering me or anyone else to mother me because it was she who was undermining me the entire time.

And that's her baggage.  I won't pick it up!

Absolute badass!

[Justme729]

What's strange is I don't want that PD mom, it's that other mom.  The fictional mom that doesn't exist.   Honestly, most days I am strong.  Sometimes I am just tired of being strong.  That's just kind of where I am right now.  I am triggered by her behavior.   I am dealing with my own big feelings about certain things in life with the kids, work, life.   I love my spouse, he doesn't get it the way a mom does.   My mom isn't there. My dad is to in the fog to express my concerns without sounding crazy. My siblings don't give a crap about her as they're more attached to our dad.   I have my own issues with my dad (abandonment and failure to protect us from her).  He isn't in the fog — but he also is willing to tolerate her behavior for companionship every few months.  It's dysfunctional. They're divorced.  Idk I'm rambling. Trying to process it all.

[feralcat]

It is very hard. Getting to a point where you realise that your only real support is YOU.

I love my H as well, but I got to where I realised he can't really be there for me , in the way I'd really like him to be, because a) he's too neuro divergent to be that empathic ( might start a thread sometime about why I've been attracted to ND people . ' because they seem Stable ?'). And b) because he's also in the FOG re his own parents, and doesn't want to listen. Too threatening ?

My FOO talk of faaamily , but to them that's an enmeshed Borg . So best avoided, information diet, GR/MC etc.

So...I'm afraid it all reverts back to you, and the hard task of learning to radically accept that.
The 'mum' you want isn't there. (And tbh maybe 'great' mothers are probably few and far between. Or so many wouldn't spend their time feeling guilty lol. We can only do the best we can to be 'good enough'. I used to have a quote , as a screensaver, to the premise of us thinking that other people were normal...until we got to knowing them better. Ditto mothers I expect.  )

It is hard. It can be lonely. And depressing.
It's a grieving process. Like so many realisations . You will get there, in time.

[olivegirl]

Just me,

I think I was where you are at now.

I kept pining for her to show me some empathy, some semblance of love, especially when I was fighting cancer. 

What I realized is she can not give me (love and respect) what she does not have for herself.

So I engaged in magical thinking for a very long time and pretended that I had a mother who wished me well.

Additionally, I looked to boundaries: I was now living very far away, I kept her on an info diet and gray rocked her hard. 

I was desperate to keep contact in the hopes that my mother would appear in a loving way or that maybe my love would heal her and teach her how to love me back.

I didn't want to be motherless!  I need a mom.  Where is she?

My generosity and thoughtfulness to her communicated to her that I am easily duped into getting her material needs met.  She saw me as pathetic.

(She just had more contempt for me that I was trying so hard and rewarding her bad behavior by giving her gifts).

My time contacting to her on our regular phone calls communicated to her that I was easy prey to generate chaos that I am bullying her on the phone, thereby creating the illusion that she is the victim. 

(She now had Grade A supply to hand over to my Npd father.  Her orchestrated triangulation and chaos that I was berating her on the phone led my father to rage at me later for torturing my mother.  All lies spun by my mother.)

I finally realized that she sadistically enjoyed my aching for maternal love as a power battle.  And it was set up that she would always "win" because she had all the cards.

And when I went quiet, she'd call me and tell me how much she loved me and asked about my health. 

Other times after being intentionally cruel in her caustic digs, she taunted me: "This is the way that I am!  I like being this way.  This works for me!"

When I finally went No Contact, the push pull tactic no longer was being utilized to intentionally maliciously confuse and hurt me. 

No Contact finally gave me peace and my moods were no longer all over the place. 

I still feel a bit wistful from time to time but the deep longing for a mother to heal me no longer haunts me.

Because No Contact gave me the courage to end a toxic relationship that was sending me into a deep depression and had me question my self-worth.

[moglow]

What's strange is I don't want that PD mom, it's that other mom.  The fictional mom that doesn't exist.   Honestly, most days I am strong.  Sometimes I am just tired of being strong.

I don't see this as strange at all. I don't want her, the mother I was given. I want a mommy, someone who's kind and nurturing and compassionate. Someone who can and will champion me when I can't/won't for myself, someone who can teach me how when I forget. I want that mommy I saw others with, who laughed with not at them. That mommy who dusted them off when things went wrong, hugged them and let them know they'd be okay. Not the mother that danced all over every insecurity and ounce of decency in her path.

While I have no clue what it's like on any real level other than what I've seen at a distance through others, today I want *that* mommy.

[Preamble]

Justme729 I hear you.  It's the worst loss of all in my opinion, really it's too big to process.

[Leonor]

Yeah, me too.

I feel like I "should be" over it by now.

[sandpiper]

I hear you. My mother has been dead for many years now and I'm still dealing with the fallout from her crap. Sometimes I wonder if there's something wrong with me because the fallout from that crap has killed any love I may have had for her. I just don't understand how she could have made the choices that she made which made our lives so damned hard, and all the while doing it with this sense that her abuse and her preventing us from knowing any of Dad's family was doing us some kind of favour. It just boggles me.
It's only natural to grieve for the mother that they couldn't be.
We've sustained a huge loss, and it's one that people with loving mothers can't possibly understand.
My mother wound up in an early grave from refusing to get medical treatment at a point where it would have saved her - instead she used that time - while we were trying to tell her she was sick - to throw scorn on us and she spent 18 months taking me 'doctor shopping', convinced that her 5yro daughter was the problem, because of her inability to see that she herself was ill. It was just so much easier to project that problem onto her child rather than deal with the reality.
She died of a cancer, which, if she'd gone to the freaking doctor instead of schlepping me from door to doctor's door, insisting that I was the problem - they might have caught it in time to stop it from killing her.
They just have no insight, and it's heartbreaking, and impossible to see any logic in anything they do.
Big hugs to you. I know what it is to have a parent who chooses to self-destruct and tries to take you with them. It's horrendous.

[Justme729]

What's strange is I don't want that PD mom, it's that other mom.  The fictional mom that doesn't exist.   Honestly, most days I am strong.  Sometimes I am just tired of being strong.

I don't see this as strange at all. I don't want her, the mother I was given. I want a mommy, someone who's kind and nurturing and compassionate. Someone who can and will champion me when I can't/won't for myself, someone who can teach me how when I forget. I want that mommy I saw others with, who laughed with not at them. That mommy who dusted them off when things went wrong, hugged them and let them know they'd be okay. Not the mother that danced all over every insecurity and ounce of decency in her path.

While I have no clue what it's like on any real level other than what I've seen at a distance through others, today I want *that* mommy.

And I am that mommy to my kids.  I may fail and I am very honest with them.  I am humble enough to admit when I fail or don't know an answer.  I'm glad I can be that mommy to them.  It makes my heart ache even more.  I couldn't imagine hurting my children in the ways she hurt me and my siblings.

[DaisyGirl77]

I am so sad and frustrated.  I have been going through a nightmare of a time personally.  All I want is my mommy.  But where is she?  Nowhere. 

Reality:  she neglected her health. She is in the hospital.  She always does this sort of crap.  Long story short, hospital notes aren't adding up.  It looks like she discharged herself AMA.   gave wrong med list.  Declined treatment.  Family ignore these inconsistencies, but I can't.  The whole thing is attention seeking, but how would one purposefully make them septic.   She knew family wouldn't let her go that family. My father told me she has been going off her mental health medication on and off for years.   She's lied to me.  No surprise.

I just wish I had a mom I could call, to cry to.  You get support from.   But, it doesn't happen that way.  I miss my mom that I'll never have.

I hear and feel you so hard here. I've been NC with my uNM for almost 7 years and I still have moments where my inner Daisy just cries for her mommy. But uNM is not a safe person, and I've recently learned that the person I'd called my Spirit Mom for about 6 years isn't a safe person either. There's nothing wrong with the desire to crawl into a trusted lap to be soothed and hugged while you cry or talk to ease your burden. It just sucks so hard that it won't be fulfilled for us. And we recognize this hole and this fact and it's so very painful—like we've been abandoned.

I wish us all luck as we try to patch this hole as best we can, and we find people who are willing to be our chosen mums for this purpose. Hugs to all.

[Cosmo]

God, this thread really speaks to me. I have been observing and processing an deep feeling of alone-ness in myself. I went NC from my uBPD mother for the first time in 2016, and I have been NC with occasional breaks since then. At first, I felt liberated, and then I had a lot of layers of guilt to sift through. Alternating between those two feelings seemed to take a long stretch of time. Over the last year and a half, I have worked my way down to this intense empty space. Sometimes it looks like loneliness, but if I really pay attention, I see more of an abyss. It's a dark, empty void that I'm floating in, and when I have some time on my hands, especially after I have established a boundary or expressed a need, I'm in it. I appreciate that self-care, self-parenting, and all-around staying friends with myself is the best way to work with this.

It was only recently that I started to connect the emptiness with the absence of a mother, and I'm getting used to that idea. Thank you for expressing it so well, all.

[monamurre]

And I am that mommy to my kids.  I may fail and I am very honest with them.  I am humble enough to admit when I fail or don't know an answer.  I'm glad I can be that mommy to them.  It makes my heart ache even more.  I couldn't imagine hurting my children in the ways she hurt me and my siblings.

God that just breaks my heart (because I can relate)! Having my daughter was the beginning of me realizing my mom's world view and way she treated me wasn't okay. I started seeing her actions and words from the parent side of the equation and kept thinking, "I can't imagine doing that or saying that to my kid!" I mean nobody's perfect, we all do the wrong thing sometimes, but I couldn't get past wondering why she was the way she was. There is a lot of pain there. My husband is a good listener, but I eventually hired a therapist who was partly a stand in for the mother I didn't have. A supportive, listening presence, with dedicated time for me. I hope you can rustle up some good support, whether it is friends, therapists, this forum, a journal, etc. We all need it! Also, I find that when I am all talked out and just need comfort a good hot bath is very effective. Its like a hug

[mary_poppins]

I just wish I had a mom I could call, to cry to.  You get support from.   But, it doesn't happen that way.  I miss my mom that I'll never have.

I am with you on this! These fantasies of calling my mommy and talking about everything under the moon with her or just making jokes together are comforting to me. But they are just fantasies.

I wish you'd find a mother figure in an older woman friend or family member or aquaintance to fill that 'mother' hole in you. John Bradshaw says we can go out there in the world to find a mother/father figure and let ourselves be held by them. There's nothing wrong with that.