I just want to thank everyone – from the bottom of my heart – for your responses. I was unreasonably tense logging on - what if no one said anything? What if they all think I am the crazy one? I have taken the book recommendations and am heading to abe.com as soon as I post this. Your posts have helped. A lot. It’s almost ridiculous how greedily I suck up any validation whatsoever. You should see me when a professor/authority figure praises me – I practically leap into the air and beg them to be my mom/dad for the semester. I will continue to post here and will be reading some of your previous posts as well. I am Anna28, btw. When I tried to log on it told me someone had already taken the name. The someone was me, but I think I messed up the login procedure somehow.
Some of you asked for more history, so here is some of it, again somewhat randomly ordered:
My parents married young – when my mom was 21, but they did not have me (their first) until my mom was 28. They moved to Canada immediately after marrying in England and although they don’t talk about this period much, I know they were dirt poor. I think it
was a stressful time, but I also get the feeling they enjoyed their time together without kids around. Although I have never been specifically told this, I strongly assume I was ‘planned.’ Both sisters came in quick succession – the youngest is less than 4 years younger than me. The only tale my mother has ever told of giving birth was to tell us how, after my 3rd sister was born, literally seconds after she emerged, my mom just looked at the doctor and asked him for a tubal ligation right then and there. “No more.”
I have asked my father about my infancy. He says that I cried a lot and again – seemed inconsolable. He also told me once that my mother felt pressured to breastfeed (pressured by herself and by her doctors) and at 1 yr old another doctor told them she wasn’t producing enough milk, probably hadn’t been since I was born, and that I was crying because I was hungry. This is interesting – about the hunger – when I was 23 I gained 100 lbs. in little over a year. I lost it again over the next 2 years (probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done), but when I was very overweight my mother constantly berated my appearance and told me how bad I looked. She looked at me once in a pair of pants that used to be loose but were now tight and said “You’re looking more and more like a cow. You need to get off your ass and do some exercise.” These comments were fairly routine. And my mother is not an ideal weight! Not 100 lbs overweight, but I’d say around 40. When I lost the weight again both of my parents were effusive with their praise. In fact I have never received that kind of praise from them except for losing weight. She was constantly touching my body and saying “Oh, you look SO good.” It made me sick – I didn’t and don’t want to be praised for my appearance. I’d rather she just liked me as a person, fat or thin.
I am also aware that my middle sister was a calm, cuddly ‘easy’ baby. To this day her main goal in life seems to be pleasing my parents. My last sister had some health problems as an infant and my parents, my mother especially, have always been super over-protective of her. When I was 5, my mom told me she “wasn’t cut out for motherhood.” I know they had my 3rd sister to try for a boy, but I don’t think it was a huge disappointment that she was a girl. I have been told they thought I was a boy and had a boy's name picked out for me. But nothing else has ever been said.
My mother has only ever spoken of motherhood in general terms, and then it has been negative. I was warned numerous times as a child to “never have children.” When I was 9 she took some books out of the library and told my sisters and I about the birds and the bees. When I was 14 she told me if I ever got pregnant and was unable to financially, emotionally or physically handle it, to not come to my father and her for help.
Although sexuality etc. was never a topic for casual discussion in my house, the few references she made to it once I hit puberty were of the making-fun kind. When I got my period at 14 I couldn’t even say the word to her – and when I finally got it out she shook her head – she seemed disappointed, and then just said “Oh…you didn’t…” Then we went to the drug store to buy sanitary items and – never spoke of it again. I had to have a friend give me a bra at 15 when it became clear I needed one, and when my mother felt it through my shirt she just cracked a joke about it and said “what do you need one of these for?” I remember her making fun of my breasts when I first started developing – cracking about how the “boys are going to like those little palm fronds.” I still don’t quite know what the hell she meant by that. Palm fronds? The words didn't matter as much as the tone anyway - I was being ridiculed.
I was not an easy child. Both my sisters reacted to my mother by indulging her behaviour. I.e. they would do what was asked of them, even if they felt it was unfair or wrong. I was not that child. If I felt something was unfair, I would say so. I have very, very early memories of standing up at the dinner table and announcing that my mother was being unfair for punishing me for something I hadn’t done – getting quite heated about it, and being slapped. We weren’t beaten regularly, but when we were it was out of anger. I remember her watching me do something – draw pictures on paper or something, and I was drawing circles quite fast and she asked me to stop. If either of my sisters had been asked, they would have stopped right away. But, even when I was small, I had an overdeveloped sense of right and wrong, and I recall finding it unreasonable that I was being asked to stop drawing circles – I mean, I could keep drawing but not the circles?! Why? My response was to continue drawing circles, faster, while looking her in the eye. Of course this got me slapped and sent to my room. I think things would have been easier for me had I been more pliant like my siblings, but I just wasn’t and, in a way I admire my little kid-self for standing up to her.
One thing that also might shed light on our relationship is her politics. My mother is a 70’s style feminist (nothing wrong with that in itself) and from a young age we were given trucks and wooden building blocks to play with, dressed in dungarees and encouraged to play outside, on our own and be independent. I was allowed to go to the mall at 6 years old, alone, and it was a good 45 min walk from our house! However, I was not the girl-child my mother wanted, to validate all her principles. I wanted to dress in pink and have ballet classes and look after dolls and play house. I still have a strong girly/feminine streak in me, and although I am about to start attending grad school, my secret wish all along, that I have never admitted to her, was/is to be a mother and a wife. I do not long for marriage the way some women seem to do – if I get married, that’s great, but I have a maternal streak a mile wide. I was always the one clamouring to babysit other people’s children, always wanting to hold babies. I still can’t see a baby without getting itchy arms! Not allowing myself to give in to my desire to get pregnant has been a major struggle, one that I increasingly feel is not only futile but wrong-headed. I have a kind, understanding and long-term boyfriend (after a few major disasters with men) and we are thinking of trying for a baby within the next year or so. I have determined that if I do get pregnant I won’t be sharing the experience with my mother (I am moving back to Montreal for school in a few months, so I won’t physically be around her). Also, I am being practical – if I were to tell her I was pregnant she would freak out and I would get sent 25 page e-mails every day describing the many ways in which my life was about to get completely screwed up and how I should have an abortion at once. I have a feeling that isn’t what a pregnant woman needs to hear.
My relationship with my father is not perfect. He feels guilty about how my mother has treated me, but he will never stand up for me or say anything to support me. He shows his guilt by buying me little presents all the time, slipping me $20 bills when she isn’t
looking, taking me out for dinner when she’s out etc. I understand he is trying to compensate, but I am also angry at him for on the one hand knowing she has treated me badly and on the other hand never having the courage to call her on it. When my mother gets angry at someone, she often won’t speak to that person for days, and when we were all living at home, she was like a black thundercloud, it would poison the whole atmosphere of the place. So, consequently, my father is loathe to make her angry, because he lives there. She often throws a fit at Christmas or birthdays. A couple of Christmases ago she left right after Christmas dinner (which she insisted on cooking, alone, despite repeated offers of help from all of us) and only came back at 10pm. She spent the next 3 days leaving at 5am and coming back at 10pm. A friend told us she had seen her at the beach, sitting in the car chainsmoking. One of my mother’s classic lines is that I play the ‘victim,’ but this kind of utterly childish and self-indulgent behaviour is more her style, imo. When she came back everyone was afraid to make her angry again, so I asked her point blank why she had left for 3 days and she just said “because my family is shit.” She said it in front of everyone in the family. They all hung their heads like bad dogs. After specifically setting it up so she would do all the work for Xmas dinner (my youngest sister had also thrown a minor fit over not getting a present she wanted, which didn’t help the mood), she then flounced out and spent 3 days thinking about poor little her, and how under-appreciated she was. It made me sick. She’s done that at other family celebrations/holidays, too. My father deals with her through a combination of a) pretending her behaviour is not that serious (“No, Mummy didn’t mean that” etc.) and b) refusing to talk about/acknowledge it directly, verbally, ever. If I try to talk about he always denies it first – says she didn’t mean it, and then if I continue to press him, he literally just goes silent and won’t talk about it.
I have recently blocked my e-mail inbox to all mail coming from her. She made a comment about it in one of the e-mails I posted here – that I did it because she was ‘calling me’ on my lying. I need to cut her out of my life, I know this. She is nothing but poison to me. I know there is no hope of ‘fixing’ things – I have tried, numerous times, and I’ve always gotten slapped in the face (although the slaps are metaphorical these days). I told my father on the phone last night that I had blocked the e-mail, and got his usual reaction – faux bewilderment…”really…? Why…?” etc. He knows why. He’d just rather pretend that nothing that serious is going on.
Hopefully some of this helps you to understand some of the dynamics in my family. I will just say that I have never been in therapy. Only a few sessions are covered under healthcare here and I have a feeling I need more than “a few” – I’d rather not start at all than open myself up to someone only to have it end.
Again, thank you for your responses. Really, you have no idea how much it helps to not feel so alone. Actually, maybe you all do have a very good idea. J
