Hi Beth,
If you ask my mum about our family history, she will paint you this glorious picture of a poor but happy, honest, hard working family who filled their days with sunny picnics and lashings of ginger beer. Everything was perfect until I went mental and ripped the family apart, and now they are these poor, wretched people who never see their daughter or grandson because their daughter is so severely mentally disturbed she hears voices and fantasises about splitting the family up.
She always fails to mention the alcoholism, the sexual abuse, the beatings, the three day silences over some minor misdemeanor (potatoes weren't peeled, hoovering wasn't done etc), the affairs, the nine marriages between a total number of six different parents resulting in six children by two men and four women, each of whom were abused by a different parent in a different way, the fact that not one of us has a single memory of any of our parents reading to us, playing with us, teaching us how to do anything or saying anything other than a constant complaint and the fact that, of those six children only two speak to either of them now and they only see two of their eight grandchildren. She also keeps quiet about the various criminal records picked up along the way and the dodgy tax evasions that go on to this day.
She claims my version of events is the result of my mentally disturbed mind. Funnily enough, my sister and I (both long time sufferers of depression) haven't had any mental health problems since we went NC.
My therapist is encouraging me to talk about my childhood and asks me a lot of questions which I am finding helpful because it helps me to believe my own memories. I've also been struck by the number of people who know my mum casually and, when I tell them I don't speak to her anymore, say "I never did like her, she always seemed a bit odd". I guess the truth is too hard to bear so they create their own ideal. My mum used to tell some people that she was a stay at home mum when we were babies and told others that she worked full time. She can't have done both! I think she's not even sure herself anymore.
