((((((((((beth))))))))))
People don't see it because it's too painful, or it's too much work, or dealing with it once they see it would be too much work, or too painful.
Work is hard. Painful work is almost impossible. In a way, the Ns are both to blame and to thank. If they did not cause such wretchedness, we might take even longer to awaken... because Ns make it more painful to stay unaware than to face the truth of what they are and what they do to us.
About my mother: I knew some things all my life - her actions and her words never, never matched, and somehow I was always able to stay aware of that. I just didn't fully realize what it meant - that she was so hateful to me, with such consistency, because she hated me, with such completeness.
She hated my father, and at the same time she drained him, sucked him dry. I was trained to play a similar role, and all her hatred and fury emerged when he became incapacitated and I refused to 'put on his harness' - refused to move back into the house, refused to move back into the neighborhood, refused, refused, refused.
But even then, most of her venom was directed against me 'behind my back', because she was still using me financially, and didn't want to lose her cash cow.
Only after she died did people begin to compare what she said about me with what I actually did, and was. Then quite a few of them felt driven to make amends, and in THAT process I heard things that amazed me... but they were so consistent, no matter who was telling me about them, it was clear they were factual.
Lies she told... things she said I had done and said, horrible things - that she had actually said and done to ME [so I knew these witnesses must have been telling the truth; only she could have inverted the evil so exactly].
And the reverse. Things I did for her, things I gave to her, that she claimed my Nsibling had done or given, or that she had acquired for herself. [A particularly nasty twist: some major appliances I bought for her that she claimed she had taken out a home equity loan to buy for herself because I refused to help her.]
Vicious, vicious stuff. It took me ages to deal with it.
I was, thank God, not hindered by disbelief. The one saving grace that I had was that because I'd known all my life that there was something 'wrong' in her relating to me, I could believe all of it when it finally came into the open. It made sense of all the weird little things I'd heard, all the strange little things she did, the furtiveness, the sneakiness, the witholding of information, the mean little 'gotcha' games she used to play. It all fell into place perfectly without a seam.
I hated her then. I pity her now. I doubt that I will ever mourn her.
