Hi Sallying, Whatever the diagnosis, your grandmother was a very twisted and sadistic person. Your mother probably hated and feared her. I would say refusal to come home until your grandfather got there was a pretty good clue. As harsh as your grandfather was, he probably felt much safer to your mother.
With a background like that, and the total inability as a narcissist to examine her behavior, your mother would favor and not be bothered by your two younger brothers, the children of the same sex as your "safer" and more stable grandfather. It's totally unfair, it's totally wrong, what happened to you. Ideally, your mother would have examined her favoritism and realized that it stemmed from a very frightening childhood and worked to change it. Ideally, she would have owned the damage she did to you. However, in the kind of families we here on this board came from, that kind of healthy stuff just didn't happen. In fact, you were the scapegoat and were blamed for causing her to be that way to you. Had you been a male (not surprising so many of us wanted to be boys), she would have treated you differently. I am so sorry. I know how much it hurts and how wrong your mother was to treat you that way. Of course it occurred in probably every issue that came up, time after time.
Sometimes it can be something as crazy as bearing a family resemblance to a parent that your parents hated. In your case, I think it has to do with gender.
A similar dynamic occurred in my family.
My mother was unwanted. Her mother let her know that every day of her life. She was cruel and rejecting. Her father was good to her, but ineffective. Mom also had two older brothers who were good to her and an oldest sister that she hated and who was cruel.
My father grew up as the only child in a home with a cold, non-nurturing mother and a warm, happy go lucky but often absent father.
I was born into the family as the only girl and the older one. I had one brother, three years younger. Who do you think got favored in our family? My brother got everything he wanted and to this day does not feel that our parents were abusive. I, on the other hand, was constantly criticized and deprived. My father hit me and beat me. I was constantly blamed and was told that I didn't deserve anything, even shoes that fit. (I have the most f****d up feet you will ever see because my size 9s were crammed into my mother's used size 6s and 7s.) I got nothing I asked for, no dance lessons, no music lessons, no sailing lessons, no decent clothes, and barely any toys or books. If I asked for anything, I would receive a diatribe about how I didn't deserve it. My brother had sailing lessons and my parents even bought him a boat. He wasn't interested in music or dance, but whatever he wanted, he got. I was even told that the family dogs didn't love me. I remember saying to myself over and over again as a child,"I wish I had never been born." Doesn't take a genius to figure out where that message had been coming from.
For a long time I tried to figure it out to see if there was anything about me that I could have changed to stop the abuse and the neglect. I was told that I was a difficult child and "unbearable" to be around. As an adult, I never could understand that because by nature I am a sunny and happy personality, which is pretty amazing.
When I did the simple genealogy and saw the relationships, the people who were considered "bad" by my parents, I understood. They both hated women. Being N's, they just moved the abuse on down the line to the nearest female, who just happened to be me. My misfortune was to have been born with a vagina instead of a penis.
Once I understood that unless I had become the world's youngest and first transexual (and that probably wouldn't have been good enough...lol), the quality of my childhood was foreordained the day I entered this world. My parents never really saw me for who I was...they saw me as the embodiment of all the "bad" women who had made their childhoods' miserable.
I have nothing to do with my brother. He is an N who took part in the humiliation and the abuse. He has never "gotten it" and never will. He loathes me as much as my parents did. He didn't exactly nurture his daughter either.
Am I angry about what happened to me? Yes. The anger is much better than the depression and the deep belief that I was somehow flawed that I had prior to therapy. Do I think about my childhood very much? No. The present, while not perfect, is beautiful...and it's all I've got.
