nootka
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(this is the SHORT version, but it's long, so sorry...)
A couple recent threads have reminded me that some people don't always understand that just because there is a biological connection doesn't count for everything.
I know there are hundreds of stories similar to mine, I have friends with one but it's their father that acted this way. I thought I'd put this out there just so people maybe won't be so judgmental if they ever read that I "hated" my mother (I do hate her, I can't get by any other way). So I would never judge someone if they had cut off some member of their family, regardless if it WAS that most 'sacred' bond of mother/child. Betrayal isn't something you keep allowing to happen.
It started with my mother around when I was five. She was about 30 and began having some sort of midlife crisis or something so it would seem. She began smoking, smoking pot, drinking, and having lots of affairs with much younger men. My Dad finally had to leave for his sanity, but she got everything. He was so broke he moved back in with his mother in order to be able to continue working and paying for a house he could not live in, a car he could not drive, and a tv and furniture for my mother's new boyfriends and her to enjoy. He felt it was at least giving my brother and I a roof over our heads. Keep in mind that my dad had put off his college so he could pay for HERS so she could then get her teaching certificate, get a good job teaching then HE get his degree, but instead she got pregnant and he had to stay working. She never went back to work. About the time she would have, she found a wonderful boyfriend named Roger..he was about 18 (she was 30) and had never finished or even started High School. That was not his major shortcoming, he behaved as if he were about 13 all the time.
Violent and ill-mannered and of course he was not about working. My mom lied to him and told him things to scare him about my dad and so this violent and very big 18 year old man spent a lot of time harassing my father (my mom LOVED this stuff, she ATE IT UP that someone would "fight for her"), shooting the windows out of my grandmother's house and making verbal threats when he wasn't drinking and wailing on my 3 year old brother and I. He got my brother drunk when he was four years old, asked him to get a tire out of his pickup and of course Donnie fell, broke his arm and had to be rushed to the hospital to deal w/the alcohol poisoning as well as the broken arm. It nearly killed him, I'm sure, but Roger hated Donnie b/c he was my dad's son.
Mom didn't have any fears about leaving us w/Roger alone, though, and Roger's friends did inappropriate things when she wasn't around. She even let them "tuck me in" to bed at night. She didn't change anything when I asked her about it. I told everyone I knew but nothing changed. It took a long court battle for my father and grandmother to get custoy away from her. By this time, my mom had had another baby, a girl, I was 6. I didn't really want to leave my little sister behind, but I had to, the courts said so.
I lived w/my Dad and grandma (mom still got the house) and little brother in a small two bedroom house while my Dad worked to pay off the bills from the divorce. We got to visit our mom on some weekends and holidays. Mom made it all so fun and happy while we were there. I missed my little sister. My mom gave us guilt trips about being w/my dad so when we'd go home, my little brother would have nightmares and wet the bed that night after being w/her. I just felt sick and nervous all the time.
When I was 8, my mom finally talked me into going to live with her. She'd bought a house down at the beach and she was going to buy me a pony, etc., etc., life would be so good. Roger was "gone" and it was just me, my mom, and little sister, just us girls. We were living in the old beach house my Dad built in Ocean Park, WA. The just us girls didn't last long, as I did get my way and got to live with her. I woke up one morning and there was another young guy in my mom's bed (we had an open loft style house where no bedrooms, our beds were in the loft overlooking the living room where her bed was). I felt awful. He was nice at first, though. We moved to a house way out in the woods far away from everywhere it felt like.
"Dave" was young, though, and he didn't like being married, nor having kids. He was mildly violent but nothing like Roger. He ran away one night and never returned. Everyone said he was in Alaska, but noone could find him.
So we were alone again for a time, but not for long. Mom met "Dennis" a fishing boat captain and he was at least more her age. But he drank, a LOT and he had what I like to call "short man syndrome" where he likes to fight to make up for the fact that he was only about 5'4" tall. He and mom were pretty close, though, and when one night Roger showed up again and started shooting at Dennis, nearly killing him, it still didn't drive them apart. Roger went to jail and things were fine for a while.
My mom was still into marijuana, a little bit of drinking (we had a lot of keggers) and "magic" mushrooms. She gave me these magic mushrooms fairly frequently and I had weird hallucinations at times. I was 8 when this started.
But, we were left alone alot, me and my then two year old little sister, and the house was in bad repair, it caught on fire due to bad wiring one day while we were alone and I sat outside the house waiting for someone to come home after I had dumped a cup of water on the couch to stop the fire and ran outside.
It was hours til someone came home. I hated being alone, it made my stomach hurt and I worried and feared sometimes long after dark in those woods w/coyotes and bears rustling around. Dennis' fourteen year old son moved in with us sometimes around then and he was very persistent about bothering me in bed at night, his bedroom was right next door to ours.
Again nothing I said made any difference. I was 9 years old.
We moved in 1977, to Astoria. I was about ten years old. Mom and Dennis got jobs at Tongue Point nearby and I stayed home to watch Elena and in the summers when there was no school, I made lunch and kept the house for Dennis and Mom. I got yelled at when it was not good. I caught Dennis having an affair one day and boy don't you know I was his best friend so I wouldn't tell. I was ok with it, but eventually my mom asked me about it and I told her the truth. Nothing changed, though, so I guess it was ok with everyone. My mom gave me marijuana all the time, but I didn't want any so I gave it to my stepbrother. He was very happy w/that arrangement.
Around this time, Dennis started trying to get me to kiss him "differently" and guess what...I didn't want to. I told my mom but she said he was just my dad and loved me. I told her it was different, I was crying and scared and she ignored me so she could go back to partying with her friends. I stole a dime and ran to my friend Nathan's house to call my dad and tell him. I told my Dad and stepmom what had happened and my dad came to get me (he got stopped halfway by a cop for going 90 mph).
The police found me and took me back home to Mom and Dennis and they questioned me in front of them. Dennis screamed that I was lying and he made me finally say that I had been (I was not) and the cop left me there. I got beaten and hit with a belt and told that my dad would be beaten up too for coming down here and for calling the police etc etc. I never had any chance to defend myself and tell anyone the truth, not even the police or my mom seemed to care.
Luckily, I did finally get out of there, the courts were working in my favor, but my mom gave up and when I was 13, she let me go to be w/my dad. I had to leave my little sister behind, she was not my dad's daughter, but I had to leave as my stepdad and his son, my mom's friends were all getting too hard to keep away from me.
I was so glad to be w/my Dad, my stepmom and back with my brother. Still, my mom played for my sympathy and when I was old enough to drive, I went back down just to visit. She had her fifth husband by this time, he was much nicer and mellower than everyone else. I tried to be good to my mom, to be neutral and to maintain a relationship to have my sister again, but it wouldn't work.
My mom did everything mean that she could, trying to break me and my husband up by saying she'd "slept" with him, that he'd slept with this person or that person, she told people who would listen all kinds of things that were not true. I know she wanted me to be miserable o/wise why would she do these things, even the day I had my first baby she was busy telling people awful lies about my husband and me. I heard about them later. I had had no idea she was saying things. Luckily noone but other losers believed her.
We kept the relationship ok til my sister got out of the house. My mom started doing IV drugs at 49 years of age. She ended up dying at 51. In those two years, she tried harder than ever to make our lives heck, taking us to court to sue us for money which noone would give her, she invaded my home and I had to throw her out as she stole things from me and then she told my son that I'd beaten her, etc. it was horrible. At one point when I refused her money after her husband died (she was already living w/another man at this point), she asked why I was so angry with her. I told her of the times she'd failed me and she told me still, that I lied, that these things never happened (the abuse, the neglect, etc., the times I'd needed her and she had ignored me or turned the other way). I figured she'd never know if I could speak so frankly with her and she would deny it to her grave. And so the day the dr. called to say she'd died I was nothing but relieved.....Throughout her life, my mother claimed to be a Catholic, and maintained her belief in god especially when she would have her "episodes" (she would quit sleeping and would just freak out in the last few years of her life).
Sorry this is so long, but maybe you can understand why I am so very glad my mother is dead. Why I slammed the door in her face many times, why I avoided her and kept my family away from her. She was toxic and now the toxin has spread to my little sister. 'Nuff said.
I do think that if I had given her unconditional access to me and my family that my life and the life of my children would be vastly different. She was rather amused that I did not want to smoke pot and have lots of babies on "the system" she told me I was too much like my father.
The only person that is related to me by blood that is still living that I have a relationship with (other than my sons) is my father. I have my stepmom and that's about it. I've had to cut off the others for good reason, and luckily, my mother's sisters have very little to do w/me (they were nowhere near as evil as she, though they hated her and subsequently me). We have a very small family, but I have some wonderful friends in my life that I have made and they more than make up for what I didn't get in the "biological lottery". I firmly believe my mother should never have had children, she was always too self-centered and co-dependent. At one time she was an intelligent and attractive woman with a college degree and a job teaching, and a husband with a great job, a house, two kids...but it all went away pretty quickly when you think about it. 21 years from start to finish once she made her choice.
I am not perfect, far from it, but I like to think I am doing better than I might have, considering.
I could never imagine betraying my children the way my mother did.
Liz M.
Not sure why I felt the need to share this, but maybe it will help others to see a different point of view, maybe understand that there is more than meets the eye? If anyone else would like to share, you can pm, or call, etc. I know there are other stories out there, too, of the betrayal of that biological bond.
A couple recent threads have reminded me that some people don't always understand that just because there is a biological connection doesn't count for everything.
I know there are hundreds of stories similar to mine, I have friends with one but it's their father that acted this way. I thought I'd put this out there just so people maybe won't be so judgmental if they ever read that I "hated" my mother (I do hate her, I can't get by any other way). So I would never judge someone if they had cut off some member of their family, regardless if it WAS that most 'sacred' bond of mother/child. Betrayal isn't something you keep allowing to happen.
It started with my mother around when I was five. She was about 30 and began having some sort of midlife crisis or something so it would seem. She began smoking, smoking pot, drinking, and having lots of affairs with much younger men. My Dad finally had to leave for his sanity, but she got everything. He was so broke he moved back in with his mother in order to be able to continue working and paying for a house he could not live in, a car he could not drive, and a tv and furniture for my mother's new boyfriends and her to enjoy. He felt it was at least giving my brother and I a roof over our heads. Keep in mind that my dad had put off his college so he could pay for HERS so she could then get her teaching certificate, get a good job teaching then HE get his degree, but instead she got pregnant and he had to stay working. She never went back to work. About the time she would have, she found a wonderful boyfriend named Roger..he was about 18 (she was 30) and had never finished or even started High School. That was not his major shortcoming, he behaved as if he were about 13 all the time.
Violent and ill-mannered and of course he was not about working. My mom lied to him and told him things to scare him about my dad and so this violent and very big 18 year old man spent a lot of time harassing my father (my mom LOVED this stuff, she ATE IT UP that someone would "fight for her"), shooting the windows out of my grandmother's house and making verbal threats when he wasn't drinking and wailing on my 3 year old brother and I. He got my brother drunk when he was four years old, asked him to get a tire out of his pickup and of course Donnie fell, broke his arm and had to be rushed to the hospital to deal w/the alcohol poisoning as well as the broken arm. It nearly killed him, I'm sure, but Roger hated Donnie b/c he was my dad's son.
Mom didn't have any fears about leaving us w/Roger alone, though, and Roger's friends did inappropriate things when she wasn't around. She even let them "tuck me in" to bed at night. She didn't change anything when I asked her about it. I told everyone I knew but nothing changed. It took a long court battle for my father and grandmother to get custoy away from her. By this time, my mom had had another baby, a girl, I was 6. I didn't really want to leave my little sister behind, but I had to, the courts said so.
I lived w/my Dad and grandma (mom still got the house) and little brother in a small two bedroom house while my Dad worked to pay off the bills from the divorce. We got to visit our mom on some weekends and holidays. Mom made it all so fun and happy while we were there. I missed my little sister. My mom gave us guilt trips about being w/my dad so when we'd go home, my little brother would have nightmares and wet the bed that night after being w/her. I just felt sick and nervous all the time.
When I was 8, my mom finally talked me into going to live with her. She'd bought a house down at the beach and she was going to buy me a pony, etc., etc., life would be so good. Roger was "gone" and it was just me, my mom, and little sister, just us girls. We were living in the old beach house my Dad built in Ocean Park, WA. The just us girls didn't last long, as I did get my way and got to live with her. I woke up one morning and there was another young guy in my mom's bed (we had an open loft style house where no bedrooms, our beds were in the loft overlooking the living room where her bed was). I felt awful. He was nice at first, though. We moved to a house way out in the woods far away from everywhere it felt like.
"Dave" was young, though, and he didn't like being married, nor having kids. He was mildly violent but nothing like Roger. He ran away one night and never returned. Everyone said he was in Alaska, but noone could find him.
So we were alone again for a time, but not for long. Mom met "Dennis" a fishing boat captain and he was at least more her age. But he drank, a LOT and he had what I like to call "short man syndrome" where he likes to fight to make up for the fact that he was only about 5'4" tall. He and mom were pretty close, though, and when one night Roger showed up again and started shooting at Dennis, nearly killing him, it still didn't drive them apart. Roger went to jail and things were fine for a while.
My mom was still into marijuana, a little bit of drinking (we had a lot of keggers) and "magic" mushrooms. She gave me these magic mushrooms fairly frequently and I had weird hallucinations at times. I was 8 when this started.
But, we were left alone alot, me and my then two year old little sister, and the house was in bad repair, it caught on fire due to bad wiring one day while we were alone and I sat outside the house waiting for someone to come home after I had dumped a cup of water on the couch to stop the fire and ran outside.
It was hours til someone came home. I hated being alone, it made my stomach hurt and I worried and feared sometimes long after dark in those woods w/coyotes and bears rustling around. Dennis' fourteen year old son moved in with us sometimes around then and he was very persistent about bothering me in bed at night, his bedroom was right next door to ours.
We moved in 1977, to Astoria. I was about ten years old. Mom and Dennis got jobs at Tongue Point nearby and I stayed home to watch Elena and in the summers when there was no school, I made lunch and kept the house for Dennis and Mom. I got yelled at when it was not good. I caught Dennis having an affair one day and boy don't you know I was his best friend so I wouldn't tell. I was ok with it, but eventually my mom asked me about it and I told her the truth. Nothing changed, though, so I guess it was ok with everyone. My mom gave me marijuana all the time, but I didn't want any so I gave it to my stepbrother. He was very happy w/that arrangement.
Around this time, Dennis started trying to get me to kiss him "differently" and guess what...I didn't want to. I told my mom but she said he was just my dad and loved me. I told her it was different, I was crying and scared and she ignored me so she could go back to partying with her friends. I stole a dime and ran to my friend Nathan's house to call my dad and tell him. I told my Dad and stepmom what had happened and my dad came to get me (he got stopped halfway by a cop for going 90 mph).
The police found me and took me back home to Mom and Dennis and they questioned me in front of them. Dennis screamed that I was lying and he made me finally say that I had been (I was not) and the cop left me there. I got beaten and hit with a belt and told that my dad would be beaten up too for coming down here and for calling the police etc etc. I never had any chance to defend myself and tell anyone the truth, not even the police or my mom seemed to care.
Luckily, I did finally get out of there, the courts were working in my favor, but my mom gave up and when I was 13, she let me go to be w/my dad. I had to leave my little sister behind, she was not my dad's daughter, but I had to leave as my stepdad and his son, my mom's friends were all getting too hard to keep away from me.
I was so glad to be w/my Dad, my stepmom and back with my brother. Still, my mom played for my sympathy and when I was old enough to drive, I went back down just to visit. She had her fifth husband by this time, he was much nicer and mellower than everyone else. I tried to be good to my mom, to be neutral and to maintain a relationship to have my sister again, but it wouldn't work.
My mom did everything mean that she could, trying to break me and my husband up by saying she'd "slept" with him, that he'd slept with this person or that person, she told people who would listen all kinds of things that were not true. I know she wanted me to be miserable o/wise why would she do these things, even the day I had my first baby she was busy telling people awful lies about my husband and me. I heard about them later. I had had no idea she was saying things. Luckily noone but other losers believed her.
We kept the relationship ok til my sister got out of the house. My mom started doing IV drugs at 49 years of age. She ended up dying at 51. In those two years, she tried harder than ever to make our lives heck, taking us to court to sue us for money which noone would give her, she invaded my home and I had to throw her out as she stole things from me and then she told my son that I'd beaten her, etc. it was horrible. At one point when I refused her money after her husband died (she was already living w/another man at this point), she asked why I was so angry with her. I told her of the times she'd failed me and she told me still, that I lied, that these things never happened (the abuse, the neglect, etc., the times I'd needed her and she had ignored me or turned the other way). I figured she'd never know if I could speak so frankly with her and she would deny it to her grave. And so the day the dr. called to say she'd died I was nothing but relieved.....Throughout her life, my mother claimed to be a Catholic, and maintained her belief in god especially when she would have her "episodes" (she would quit sleeping and would just freak out in the last few years of her life).
Sorry this is so long, but maybe you can understand why I am so very glad my mother is dead. Why I slammed the door in her face many times, why I avoided her and kept my family away from her. She was toxic and now the toxin has spread to my little sister. 'Nuff said.
I do think that if I had given her unconditional access to me and my family that my life and the life of my children would be vastly different. She was rather amused that I did not want to smoke pot and have lots of babies on "the system" she told me I was too much like my father.
The only person that is related to me by blood that is still living that I have a relationship with (other than my sons) is my father. I have my stepmom and that's about it. I've had to cut off the others for good reason, and luckily, my mother's sisters have very little to do w/me (they were nowhere near as evil as she, though they hated her and subsequently me). We have a very small family, but I have some wonderful friends in my life that I have made and they more than make up for what I didn't get in the "biological lottery". I firmly believe my mother should never have had children, she was always too self-centered and co-dependent. At one time she was an intelligent and attractive woman with a college degree and a job teaching, and a husband with a great job, a house, two kids...but it all went away pretty quickly when you think about it. 21 years from start to finish once she made her choice.
I am not perfect, far from it, but I like to think I am doing better than I might have, considering.
I could never imagine betraying my children the way my mother did.
Liz M.
Not sure why I felt the need to share this, but maybe it will help others to see a different point of view, maybe understand that there is more than meets the eye? If anyone else would like to share, you can pm, or call, etc. I know there are other stories out there, too, of the betrayal of that biological bond.
