Mother got rid of a lot of grievance about her mother by taking it out on me. As an older child I think I thought I really was my mother’s mother.
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I’m sorry that you experienced that.
Actually, it’s quite common. When I was young, “granny dresses” were popular.
My mother (psz) didn’t like women, so my being female was a problem to her and she treated me quite badly. Did your mother have a problem with women in general? Did she have a mental illness?
It was wrong for your mother to treat you badly! You deserved a loving mother who treated you as if you were precious! Be around people who care about you!
She did have MI but was never diagnosed. Her mother taught her everything about child care, cooking, cleaning, mending, etc. but for the wrong reason. She wanted mother to do all her work for her. So, mother hated the female role. And she did the opposite with her daughters - taught us almost nothing to the point of neglect. I know she wanted a son when I was born (back then, one couldn’t know ahead of birth a except by intuition) and that gave me quite a forceful identity crisis. Yes, she was a feminist but I think she clung to her husband because of social difficulties during my formative years.
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Neglect is difficult to cope with…I experienced that too.
And granny glasses -
My brother once said to us that he was going over to our grandmother’s house to confront her for passing on the mental illness and addiction genes because he was tired of struggling with it. He considered her selfish for having a child (our dad) and neglecting him which he considered abusive.
Knowing that my grandmother’s mom was put in a hospital for “melancholy” (depression) and my grandmother (the last of 5 kids) was given to the neighbors to be raised since her father didn’t want her because he blamed her for her mothers condition.
My grandmother always told us “there is no love when your adopted” and the times she saw her father, he would beat her without reason. I can only imagine what his father had taught him.
Abuse is a cycle handed down generation to generation. I told my brother not to get upset at our grandmother because she had only done the best she could. You can’t put babies back once they are here, and babies are constant work. No one is perfect, mistakes will be made. The best thing he could do is stop hating our grandmother because to blame her means he don’t have to take responsibility to make an effort to change what he don’t like about himself.
@PinCushion your mother was also abused and neglected as well, and society back then made it near impossible for a woman to raise a baby on her own. She may have wished things were different, but the sad fact is, she was stuck were she was.
If you go up the ladder of abuse, your grandmother probably was abused/neglected as well and tried to do the best she could at the time. Life is far from perfect for most people, but all you have to work with today is what you can do for yourself. Time to spend what time you do have left improving the things you don’t like/want.
It’s up to you to do the work to make the second half of your life better than the first.
As it’s said, your parents may have ruined the first half of your life, but you don’t have to ruin the second half of your life by yourself.
Kind of like they don’t even half to be there to continue the abuse because you have picked up where they left off.
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I only know a little about my grandmother. She became an only child when her sister died, I think of tb. and she was orphaned as a teen. This was at around 1900 so you know there wasn’t a lot of help for her. Yes, I am working and growing in understanding and acceptance. What gets me is I used to fool myself into thinking I was a good friend to myself. I wasn’t.
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Maybe at the time you did what you needed to survive, then looking back, it seems different.
It makes me sad that you are so hard on yourself, you really deserve to enjoy life too.
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