But a mother without compassion, who fails to forge a bond with her daughter, provides for that daughter only when it is in the mothers best interest. Her daughter thus learns that she can’t depend on her mother. She grows up apprehensive, worried about abandonment, expecting deceit at every turn.

Therapy is getting harder and harder every day, but not in a negative way. The more I get into it, the more that it uncovers and I have to face it head on. all the things that I have been avoiding for the past 10 years, everything I’ve been trying to sugar coat so that I can feel better, my own personal issues and problems and things that I’ve swept under the rug to survive I’m facing right now. It’s not a bad thing at all; actually it’s kind of like a breath of fresh air. Don’t get me wrong, I still have my bad days but the good days are becoming so much better than the bad ones.

Since divorcing my family I feel free. Like I have no ties to them, they can’t hurt me anymore, especially my “mother”. I’ve took my power back. This whole time I thought I was supposed to take care of her, I felt like the mother until one day I started cooking for just me, and my daughter. I had gotten tired of feeling unappreciated. I would clean up after everyone, and cook 4 course meals every day and i was the only one eating it. One day I just cooked for me  and she came up to me and was like whens dinner ready. I said I don’t cook for everybody anymore because no one eats it. The food I cooked all last week is still sitting in the refrigerator. (By then I had stopped cooking for everyone for at least a week and she didn’t even notice.) Without a second thought, she went up to my “sister” and asked her to cook her dinner. (She went in there and cooked her dinner like she was her slave, my mother just sat there on her ass like a queen on her throne).  It was like no matter what I did or how hard I tried to make her happy or love me, I couldn’t force her to do it. And that’s when the hurt began. But the truth also started to come out also. I had opened my eyes up to her and realized that she doesn’t give a damn about me or anyone else; she only cares what you can do for her. She will die that way too. I’ve already accepted it and that’s ok. I’m an adult now; I don’t have to answer to her. I still respect her until the day she dies, and along with that respect comes my right to divorce my mother and my family.

Yes I said it and I don’t care what anyone feels about it. You don’t live my life, you don’t live in the same house as me and no one will ever understand it unless they have dealt with a Narcissist before. Growing up wasn’t physically abusive as it was more emotional abuse from my mother. I will still never understand why you would tell a 5 year old that you’ll cut off her hair if she flips it again. My “mother” is not a mother. Any woman can have a kid, it takes a real woman to have a connection with that child and want them to succeed in the world. It’s always some half ass excuses with her when you confront her, or shell twist your words and pretend like she doesn’t know what she’s doing. If you get the best of her one time, shell go back and tell everyone you both know how much you hurt her and how she doesn’t understand why you don’t love her when its actually her that hurt and betrayed you.

And the funny thing is, it’s not like I never tried having a relationship with my mother, I tried up until this year and I got sick of her shit. In high school I wrote her letters telling her what was going on with me and what was bothering me and how I needed her. She never responded back, the conversations that we had, she ignored and changed the subject and tried to blame me for her own actions. Or my favorite apology of hers is “if I hurt your feelings then I’m sorry”. I’m telling you that you hurt me so why can’t you say I’m sorry that I hurt you and leave it at that. Every excuse you make after that defeats the purpose of even apologizing. If my daughter keeps coming to me saying she hurt and she needs you there and that I was hurting her feelings but not accepting her then I would stop what I was doing to try and fix the problem.

 This year I even told her why I was upset and the things she did, like leaving the hospital and not being there for me after I was raped and apparently according to her it’s my fault that she doesn’t want to sit in the hospital all night. And of course my Narcissistic sister took my mother’s side saying how when I was in high school I had this attitude that I can do it by myself, I don’t need anyone else’s help. Geez………I wonder where I picked that up from, maybe because I had to do it by myself in school as much as a begged for my mother to be there for me she wasn’t. She didn’t feel like going to any of my graduation activities, she sure as shit didn’t want me to pick the activities I wanted to be in like chorus. Because she doesn’t feel like doing all that driving around( Ummmmm……..news flaws, you weren’t the one driving me anywhere dad was while you stayed at home because you didn’t feel like seeing me sing) hell she didn’t want to take me to get tampons but you can make a drug run. HA don’t make me laugh.

I took the blame for every negative thing she’s ever done to me, I made excuses for her so that I could survive knowing that my mother wanted nothing to do with me. She told me to my face she didn’t care if we had a relationship and I still gave her the benefit of the doubt. Still holding on to hope that maybe one day she might change her mind and want to be my mother. And now that I think about it, it’s actually really sad, knowing that my “mother” wants nothing to do with me, only what I can do to make her happy. 

I am jealous of the relationship that my “mother” and “sister” have. It’s like they can talk about anything and she listens. They watch movies together and talk and when I tried to do that with her (after my dad went into the coma) it’s like I was being a bother to her and she ignored me. I now I’m grown but I did feel rejected and unloved and unwanted. You shouldn’t feel that from your own mother. She’s supposed to be there for you but mine was not and never will be. I feel like if I have to kiss her ass and suck up to her and sacrifice my daughter and husband to make her happy then I don’t want to have any relationship with her. It’s like to have a relationship with my mom I have to do what she tells me to do and let her raise my daughter and let her do whatever she wants. That’s not going to happen and I would never call a “woman” like that my “mother”.

As a parent now I understand that parents do make mistakes, they aren’t perfect, they fuck up; I’ve fucked up as a parent too. It’s nothing to be ashamed of; the shame comes when you put it on your child instead of on your own actions. Children rely on their parents a lot, especially daughters on their mothers. When you grow up without having that emotional connection with your mother you don’t know who you are as a woman.  You don’t know what you like, you don’t have self-confidence especially if it’s been taken from you by the person who was supposed to protect you and that’s a hurting thing to realize and deal with and try to fix, especially if you realize this when you’re an adult.

It’s like starting all over again from the beginning and learning what you should have known when you were a child. It wasn’t my fault. I sat there and thought about how her childhood was but then I realized that her mother was always there for her whenever she needed it. Because at first I thought she hated me because of her childhood until I realized that she didn’t treat her son or her other daughter how she treats me. Maybe it’s because I look like her, or because I don’t kiss her ass anymore and actually tried to stand up for myself when I was a kid but whatever it was, it started in elementary school and got worse from there. She chooses to act the way she does, no one makes her do it and the fact that she’s aware of what she’s doing only lets me know that it is a conscious choice. 

 

I’m putting the blame back where it belongs on her. She was the adult, I was the child, you are responsible for how you treated me, not me and not someone else, only you and with that I’m letting go of you.

As an adult woman can hunt for and find her own value. She can graduate herself into importance. But during the shaky span from childhood to woman hood, a girl needs help in determining her worth-and no one can anoint her like her mother.

“Young Children believe that Mother is the true source and has all the answers. If a mother dislikes her child, or thinks she’s not good enough, the child believes she’s unlikeable and inadequate. If someone does not challenge this distortion and show the child that she is worthy and precious, she will internalize these negative beliefs and eventually decides that she cannot be different.”

I’ve been thinking for a while, about how I’m doing in therapy and my progress. So I’ve have homework and everything and one of the things I’ve done was a billboard of positive things and things that I like that make me happy. I do have pictures of myself on the top of the billboard with encouraging words and I have post it’s on it with positive things about myself and my body. I also have a book of positive affirmations that I carry with me all the time that I created myself. That got me to thinking of why I even have to do either one of these things just to make myself feel better. I sat down and thought for a little bit about what caused all of this and how it started. I thought about how I felt about myself when I looked into the mirror how I felt about my body and my feelings towards me. After thinking and crying I realized that I don’t have self-esteem or confidence.

I don’t know what confidence feels like. I don’t know how to think about my body but the only thing I do think about is having thunder thighs and my mother always getting on me about becoming a roly-poly and losing my baby weight. I felt the same thing about my hair and my complexion. Shed called me nappy hair because I have kinky hair so she put a perm in my hair when I was 12. After I had the perm in my hair for a while, it started to break off my hair and I started wearing hair weaves because I wanted long hair. All the boys and men around her like black women with long hair so that’s what I wore. I had curly weaves, crinkly, curly, multi colored weaves, I’ve even wore a wig before. I was ashamed of my hair. I was ashamed of the length when she made me take my senior pictures with my own hair. I hated the length I felt ugly. I hated that I had to put a perm in my hair to make it straight and that I had to put hair weave in it to make it longer and I still didn’t feel pretty. The only thing I kept thinking of was I was ugly. There were days when I had the weave in she would comment about how bad my hair looked, her and my dad would always say why you keep that crap in your hair. I was a teenager at the time and I remember thinking because I’m ugly. I’m not pretty and no one is telling me I’m pretty and no one is giving me that attention that I need. It got to the point my mother wanted a weave in her hair and she went out and brought the same weave I was wearing but in a different color. The thing that I had to myself I no longer had. I went natural in 07 and every comment out her mouth was when are you going to do something with that nappy head of yours. She tore down every positive thing about my hair that I had and I didn’t have the confidence to even get it back until now. I have dreadlocks and I wouldn’t change it for the word. It’s me, I love the way it makes me look, I love my hair, even the kinky part of my hair I love. I would never put another perm in my hair again.

I don’t have self-confidence; I didn’t have it when I was growing up. I wasn’t given those resources and when my mother did give them to me it was only a little bit at a time but she would come back and break me down again. My weight is something that I’m still a little bit insecure about. I’m still a little insecure about the way my body looks. Over and over it was drilled into my head that I have thunder thighs and a big stomach. When I was little, as soon as I hit puberty in the 5th grade I put on weight in my thighs, hips and my breasts. I’m short so of course it went to those places. I’m not fat, just thick and I love it now and I understand it now but then I thought I was fat. I never weighed over 150lbs in school but when I was in middle school my mother put me on a diet to make me lose weight. Then I was 85lbs in the 8th grade. I could run a mile in 8 minutes but she still thought I was fat and made me very aware of it.

She would tell me how I needed to lose weight because I was getting big. She would tell me that if I didn’t lose the weight I would look like a roly-poly, those toys that waddle but they don’t fall down because their bottoms are big. Then I would have to ride the exercise bike for an hour crying. She made me run up and down the steps for 30 minutes while she sat up stairs watching TV and eating. This one time she made me get on the exercise bike and when my sister came in the room to try to cheer me up she yelled at her to get out of the room. In elementary school I used to eat everything like all the time. She put me on a diet then and limited my portion size so after everyone else went to sleep I would sneak out the bed room and eat because I was still hungry. She preached and preached about control my portion sizes and how I’m eating too much. I have such big anxieties about eating now. Like I only eat once a day because I don’t want to get fat, I don’t want to gain any more weight. I still feel like I’m 10 being told I’m fat and I need to lose weight, that voice is still in my head and I’m fighting every day to try and get it out.

When I was pregnant with my daughter I only gained about 30lbs and that was just in my stomach. A couple of months later my mother asked me when I was going to lose the rest of my baby weight. (my mother is twice my size, she smokes, does drugs and works 3 hours a day, when she gets home she sits in the kitchen, in front of the TV and eat until it’s time for her to go to bed. She still has her baby weight). When I started to lose the weight and started wearing tight jeans shed always have something to say about why I’m wearing tight low cut jeans. My shirt was long enough so you didn’t see anything even when I sat down. I ignored her. So you don’t want me to be fat but you don’t want me looking nice either? In all of my school pictures I was not allowed to wear skirts or dresses. Especially in elementary school. She would put me in old jeans, boots and a sweater when every other girl in the class had on a dress for picture day. So when I would come home and tell her they were teasing me she didn’t care, her response was tell them if you don’t like my clothes go buy me some. That was her answer to everything, feelings didn’t and still don’t matter. We had dresses and nice clothes in our closet but she wouldn’t let us wear them, she would make us wear things she wore as a child.



 I wore make up in high school my freshman year. She hated it, I liked the glitter and the eye shadow and doing my eye brows but she hated it. She hated everything about it because she didn’t wear it growing up. She told me in front of my friends and her coworkers that I looked like a clown with all that junk on my face. I remember walking away holding back the tears because I was still around my friends and I didn’t want them to see me cry. I thought I looked pretty but to her I felt like I looked ugly. I was always insecure about my completion. To this day I still think I’d rather be a dark complexion than the caramel complexion I have now.

I feel like I’m not light enough to be pretty and I’m not dark enough to be pretty either. I feel like I’m in the middle and I feel lost. I got tired of hearing her talk about how light my complexion was, how I didn’t look like anyone else on her side of the family and how I was the odd one out at every one of her family events. Her brothers would make fun of me because I was so light and because I “talked like a white girl” (proper English). She never stopped them she would join in and comment about how she told me to lose weight, how I would be prettier if I lost the weight. And that’s what keeps playing in my head. Where I live, men like light skinned women (red bones) or you have to be loud and ghetto. And I’m not close to either one. I’m still unsure of myself when it comes to my husband. I don’t think he thinks I’m pretty enough because I know he likes light skinned girls with red hair and I’m not that. And I guess it just makes me think of how I wasn’t good enough growing up because of the complexion of my skin and because my hair wasn’t long enough or curly enough or even straight enough. This one girl in my neighborhood would make fun of my complexion all the time all the way up until high school. My first boyfriend broke up with me to be with her because I was too dark skinned and that hurt it still there in my heart.


Growing up I wasn’t called pretty, I wasn’t called beautiful, my mother never told me any of this; my father never told me any of this. The closest thing I was told was that I looked nicer in my clothes after losing all my weight. That’s not a compliment, that’s an insult. I wanted to feel pretty, I wanted to feel beautiful, and no one told me any of those things so I went looking for them. The boys my age didn’t find me pretty either so I went to older men and that’s when I met my ex, which was the worst thing that happened to me in my life. A lot of things I didn’t have growing up that I should have had but I never got. And I dint think that it would affect me as an adult but it does. I don’t have as much confidence in myself as I should. I don’t believe in myself as much as I should and I’m trying to learn it for the first time. I do feel empty, I feel broken, and I feel like not myself. How can I be confident when I don’t know what it is? How can I be sure of myself when I don’t even know who I am? I know what I like, I know what I don’t like, I know who I love and I know who loves me but I don’t know me. I don’t know myself. I feel like I’ve been beaten so many times that I’m struggling trying to get up again. I feel pretty now, I just don’t feel whole. While I’m going through therapy I feel my inner child talking to me and I talk back to her. And I can feel her crying and it’s so loud and that pain I had from being a child is starting to come out.


 Right now I’m scared of changing but I’m excited at the same time. It’s so scary for me because I haven’t felt like this before. I wasn’t allowed to think for myself and now that I had the freedom to say what I want and how I want it I guess I’m careful on how I do it. For so long I’ve carried this around with me because I was taking the blame for when my parents failed, especially my mother. She was the one who was supposed to be there and guide me growing up and she didn’t. That’s not my fault. I was under 18 and a child, I’m not responsible for her actions and I never will be. I’m responsible for what I do after I turned 18 and what I chose to do now. I used to think that because my mother had a bad childhood that was she did to me was excusable and that she didn’t know any better but she does. I see now that she knew exactly what she was doing, that it wasn’t an accident or something that she can blame her childhood on. That was her conscience decision and I’m not taking the fall for it anymore.

 You don't have to wait for someone to treat you badly repeatedly. All it takes is once, and if they get away with it that once, if they know they can treat you like that, then it sets the pattern for the future.

I’m just so irritated annoyed and ready to go home. I feel so much more stressed out now than before I came here. Since the fight with my mother who out right told me that my feelings didn’t matter and that she didn’t care how I felt I decided to let her spend time with my daughter and to give her a chance until the end of the year. Which now I know that she’s never going to change and you know what, I’m ok with that.

I was talking to an older friend last week who knows some of the situation between me and my mom. She tried to tell me that my mother loved me and that parents say and do things to make their kids better. That my mother lacks emotional connection (I’m thinking in my head, what does that have to do with knowing what’s right and wrong) and she doesn’t know how to express herself. That she’s mean to me because she doesn’t know how to show her love for me so she plays it out the other way. She also tells me that I can’t live a whole life without my mother that the bible says to love our parents that we have to respect them no matter what they say or do because they are our parents. We then talk about her experiences and how her partner is. How she treats her bad but shes not going to leave, she just ignores it.

This is when you notice the generation gap. The difference of opinions and really understand how you are supposed to be treated. I don’t believe in the MYTH of every mother is a good mother deep down inside. I believe that people make choices to do the things they do. That everything is done for a reason. I don’t believe that you should have to put up with abuse just because it’s your parent. I don’t give a damn if it was the pope and he was emotionally abusing you, you have the right to protect yourself from that person.  By any means nesseciary with in the law of course.

That is what’s wrong with the older generation. Yes they have taught us morals and values and have showed us many priceless things that the new generation of is parents can’t but when it comes to children and their feelings, they have failed. I have realized that most children who were born in the late 70s to mid-90s have this problem. Out parents do not pay attention to our emotional needs. They pay attention to how we are doing in school, what’s going on with us, what we are up to but when it comes down to it, they don’t pay attention. And I do understand but when you ignore a child’s emotional needs it affects them all the way up to adult hood. It affects their personal life and their future family life also. It affects their children and grandchildren. Having a healthy emotional boundaries and feelings are a necessary part of life. I feel as though everyone has the right to one.

So when people make excuses for other parents you are only holding us back as a new generation.  They are only coving up a bleeding wound. It’s like they accept that their parents hurt them, they look at it as oh well they were trying to help me be a better person so I’ll accept it and leave it as that. They don’t look at it as it being wrong. What they are really saying is yes your mom said she didn’t care about you but she had a hard life. And our generation is like I understand that she had a hard life but what does her hard life have to do with how I’m feeling? The whole process of it all doesn’t make sense because if our generation can see what’s going on and change our behavior so that we don’t expose our kids to what we went through, why didn’t your generation do the same thing? If someone is calling you stupid all the time and you don’t like it so you ignore them but you walk past a couple when another person is being called stupid but you don’t say anything.  YOURE CONDONING THE BAD BEHAVIOR. How do they expect us to stop the cycle if they are only adding to the problem?