My mom loves me unconditionally. Yet ignored me to a point of severe neglect.
I have trouble remembering her before the age of 16.
Mom got cancer when I was very young, it’s hard to remember if it was in kindergarten or the first grade. I have large gaps in my memories surrounding the time she was sick. She survived, but had trouble healing, and was suicidal for a time around the cancer. I certainly can’t blame her. I don’t imagine cancer to be easy on anyone.
She hid her illnesses from me. Though we have most health issues in common. Mom is the source of my fibromyalgia and chronic migraines. She has struggled with her functionality a good portion of her life. However she didn’t get fibro until her late 20s. I was 5 years old. I resent this. It’s a feeling I haven’t figured out how to fight. I resent many things about my DNA, most stem from her sequences.
Hoarding
My Mother, the hoarder, has always struggled. There were times the house was more presentable than others, but they seem very short lived in my memory. She had a nasty temper around cleaning, and for years insisted that the state of the house was our, the children’s, fault. We failed her over and over. This is also how she was treated as a child.
Mom still struggles, the house is awful, but she’s acknowledged that there is an issue, she’s messy, that it’s a pattern from her childhood, and that she doesn’t know how to fix it. For years she never acknowledged that there was an issue.
The hoarding kept me alienated. It reinforced the grip Bitch had over me, I had very little interaction with Wanderer, and less with Mom and Dad until I was a teenage and lived alone with them. Mom always scared us with threats of Social Services, we must keep quiet or we would be taken away. I’ve lately found myself wondering if that would have been the worst thing that could happen. Maybe it would have been a wake up call. Maybe our lives would have been better.
Then I recall the statistics, that at 18 years old, 75% of the children that have been in foster care have been sexually assaulted. So I doubt I would have been better off. I know at my core that my parents love me, I wish they could be stronger than me though.
Mom is not stronger than me though, after moving home just before I met Vance, she told me she was proud of me for continuing to put myself out there. The way she said it made it clear she would not. She is not strong enough to handle the emotional vulnerabilities that come with dating. She is set with my father, and I don’t know if she would ever bother to date if he passed away.
I’m sad that I’m stronger than her, while also being proud. I don’t enjoy her weakness, I pity it a bit. I always saw her as strong, even if not strong of health, however now I see a scared woman in an overwhelming world.
I resent this. She should be stronger, she should have seen what I went through, what I dealt with, that I had to be someone I wasn’t to get by, but she never noticed. She wraps herself in her inner turmoil and misses the pain of others. Her weakness makes me mad, I couldn’t afford to be weak. I didn’t have that luxury. Even when I can’t work, I am constantly struggling internally, something I know she does as well, but in the end I’m fighting. She’s resigned. She gave up, and she could have saved me. Instead, I must save me. No one to my rescue, she’s not the helicopter mom she wanted to be.
I grew up shredding my personality to get by, and she just lets the world overwhelm her. I’ve been struggling for 28 years, but she gave up her struggle many years ago.