I'm going to do this in installments. I've got lots hand written in my journal, but my typing is a bit slow.
I am 49 years old. Married for 24 years to a man I met when I was 18. We have one daughter who is 19 and at university.
About 5 years ago I started reading and posting on a website called Aging Parents and Elder Care after my mum had been particularly abusive. I did a lot of investigating and also read Nina Brown's book 'Children of the Self Absorbed'. This helped me enormously. I realised that my mum had NPD and that she would never change. I still phoned her every day and saw her every week.
I have tried very hard to set some boundaries with my mother but she always found a way of hurting me. I was almost coping with her lifetime of abuse after a fashion, partly because my mother-in-law was such a wonderful person. I knew her for 30 years. (I called her my nice mum) She passed away last November and I was devastated.
My mum was always jealous of my mother-in-law and within 3 months of her passing my mum wrote nasty letters to me, my husband and my father-in-law. This has eventually led to me having no contact with her, as I can no longer cope with her abuse at me and those I love.
The first time I remember getting the silent treatment I was 8 years old. Don’t remember what I did wrong, how bad could it have been? She didn’t talk to me for rest of the day, all of the next day and well into the third day. I pleaded and begged to no avail. This often happened, it is withdrawal of love, which no child deserves.
She did this many times over the years, with me my dad, her sisters etc.
I only found out about 12 years after my dad died that he and mum were not talking on the day he died. (She was not speaking to him.) I think she actually felt guilty about this because she projected her behaviour onto me and accused me of not talking to him and being mean to him and always blamed me for causing his death. (I was 18 when he died, we were very close) She has never had a good word to say about dad.
I found out that she wasn’t talking to dad by her own admission in a letter. This came about after the following incident. Me and my husband went to friends for dinner and mum babysat at our place, which was a rare occurrence. We were back later than we had hoped, although there was no set time. She didn’t phone us although we left the number. When we got round the corner we saw her waiting at the top of our road. She had left our flat door wide open and was looking for us full of anger.
We were very upset that she had left our daughter (then a small baby) unattended and in a vulnerable situation. Mum was 'upset' because we were late, as the evening was the anniversary of dad’s death (a man she never had a good word for alive or dead). She wouldn’t accept that she had posed a threat to our daughter but stormed off home. We then got a nasty letter full of vitriol that also explained that it was her not speaking to dad when he died. I suppose the truth would now make her look like the martyr/victim she wanted to be. We never let her babysit at our place again.
