My mother's horrible secret

DX'd - Other
1

I was going through some old stuff my mom gave me from when I was a baby. I found her old journal, she has kept one for years now, and before she died my grandmother told me my mom has kept one since she was 12. Excuse me for being really emotional, or if I go off on a tangent or some ■■■■ like that.

The journal I am talking about is dated from Aug. 1st 1988 to Dec. 15th 1990. I thought it would be a great glimpse into my mother’s life in that first year I was born and just before. What I found hurts. A lot. The first couple months on it were fine. Then I come across my biological father’s name. Meaning that unlike my mom told me, he was part of her life for more than just that one week where I was conceived. I almost stopped reading there. Goddamn it I wish I had. In the early months of 1989, my bio father met my mother at a party of a mutual friend. They became friends.

All of that is normal, as far as I have experienced myself. Its the entries late in 89 that hurt. My mom was going to get an abortion. The only reason she didn’t was because my grandfather threatened to disown her if she did. The entry of 4-25-1990 is the hardest to repeat. It is the day after I was born. The people my mother had been intent on adopting me out to said no when they saw I was a boy, and not a girl like the doctor said I wold be. my mother’s exact words in the entry?

“I can’t believe I’m going to have to raise this thing that came out of me.”

My GF is trying to comfort me, she even came home early from work when I called her and told her what I found. I guess it makes sense though, the way my mother always paid more attention to my younger siblings, the fact that every time something broke or stopped working ‘I’ must have done something. How if my siblings got caught dong something bad ‘I’ was the one who got punished for ‘giving them a bad example’ I thought it was all normal stuff for the oldest child. I never resented my younger siblings, they were younger, they needed to have more attention to make sure they grew up right. But now. I kind of resent my Grandfather, the one person in my family who loved me from the start. If he had just let my mother abort I wouldn’t have been such a burden on her. I know its not ‘rational’ but when you find out your mother thought of you as a ‘thing’ for the first 2 years of your existence? I don’t know how to handle this, and my insurance will only cover one visit with my pdoc every 6 weeks. I refuse to end up in a ‘facility’, so i’m not even going to go there. Ten years ago I would have called my grandfather and cried to him. But now I don’t have anyone like that. My GF knows I hurt, but she grew up in one of those ideal family situations, her parents were in love, not drunk, and her mom and dad only had two children total, and both children are very happy, with no mental illness.

My normal support group is unavailable, the storm has stopped all traffic in my area, I just need some advice on how to handle this. I’m not going to hurt myself to make te pain stop, I could never do that to my dogs, who mean more to me right now than my own mother.

2

I just want to wrap you up in a blanket and make you soup. I am so sorry you found this. How incredibly hurtful.

My grandmother would offhandedly tell my mom how she wished she had miscarried her. In her selfish way, it made sense - she got pregnant as a teenager and had the life she wanted derailed by it. She was just stating a fact, in her view, and she couldn’t see why my mom would be hurt by it. In her view, it really had nothing to do with my mom.

Of course, my mom was hurt terribly, by this and by other things my grandmother did and continues to do. How could she not be hurt by it?

I don’t know if I have any really good advice for you, other than to realize that to your young mother, it really didn’t have anything to do with you. It was all about her, the life she wanted, the things she had to give up in order to be a mother. I think some of those feelings are to be expected when someone is suddenly going to be a parent. And if nothing else, she realized that it wasn’t about you and never told you about those feelings. Try to remember that - that whatever else she felt, she never wanted you to be hurt like this.

I hope you’re able to find some comfort with your girlfriend. She sounds sweet and caring, so let her care for you and accept that that’s what she’s doing. I hope you feel better soon.

3

I think @notmoses probably has some books specifically aimed at this kind of thing, being raised by an immature, selfish parent. Hopefully he’ll stop by and share some thoughts.

4

Thank you. I don’t think my mother knew the journal was in that box. I find myself wondering if it would hurt her all that much if I disappeared. I haven’t been this low in years. I’m so depressed that even the voices have stopped.

5

I suggest you to read this book. My mother also ■■■■■■ me over greatly. rather by erratic behaviour of random prais and punishmend. She hated me too as a 2-3 yo but she got ok afterwards thank god.
I believe people should pay for books but I believe your particular super emergency circumstances (storm and such) warrant downloading a copy from genlib until you can get a paid copy. it’s also available for kindle if you have one.
Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

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6

Along with the excellent book @anon81432425 suggested:

I am myself the son of an impulsive adolescent and her alcoholic lover. She left me with people who were too stressed to make good parents, though she would have been no better at the time. I learned that I had no choice but to try to make the best of a bad hand… and try to draw (and bluff) my way to a better one before the others called the cards. To switch metaphors, my life ran like a car on six-sided wheels. Until I found all this:

  1. Get properly diagnosed by a board-certified psychopharmacologist who specializes in the psychotic disorders. One can find them at…
    http://doctor.webmd.com/find-a-doctor/specialty/psychiatry and https://psychiatrists.psychologytoday.com/rms/
    .
  2. Work with that “psychiatrist” (or “p-doc”) to develop a medication formula that stabilizes their symptoms sufficiently so that they can tackle the psychotherapy that will disentangle their thinking.
    .
  3. Psychotherapies for that currently include…
    DBT – http://behavioraltech.org/resources/whatisdbt.cfm
    MBSR – Welcome to the Mindful Living Blog
    MBCT - Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy: theory and practice - PubMed
    ACT – ACT | Association for Contextual Behavioral Science
    .
  4. the even newer somatic psychotherapies like…
    MBBT – An Introduction to Mind-Body Bridging & the I-System – New Harbinger Publications, Inc
    SEPT – Somatic experiencing - Wikipedia
    SMPT – Sensorimotor psychotherapy - Wikipedia
    .
  5. or standard CBTs, like…
    REBT – Rational emotive behavior therapy - Wikipedia
    Schematherapy – Schema therapy - Wikipedia
    Learned Optimism – Learned optimism - Wikipedia
    Standard CBT – Psychotherapy | NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness & scroll down
    .
  6. Get two or more of those “down,” and one can use the skills therefrom in this way to combat delusional thinking and emotional reactivity very quickly: 10 StEP – Pair A Docks: The 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing
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7

I don’t know what to say but I’m really proud (if someone who doesn’t know you has the right to be proud) of you for being brave enough to talk about it. I have a shameful family secret too, only mine hurts other people. The only pain I get from it is empathy, sympathy, whichever it is, but it does hurt.

I don’t know if I can really call on God here, I’m not a Christian but I do go to church sometimes. The Presbyterian theory is that when God wants something done he causes a child to be born. Look back on your life. Just because you didn’t personally pull a kid from a burning building you probably have enabled that in ways you don’t even realize yet. You might have helped a young niece or nephew with fire safety class and inspired him/her. One of the dogs you love and raised might have made someone stop their car because, although they didn’t see the person just a little behind your dog, they saw your dog.

Every stone you throw creates ripples.

8

Thank you for the book ideas, I will download them to my kindle ( thank god for Amazon Prime). I called my mother at the insistence of my GF, and we are going to have a log sit down today to discuss this. Hopefully it was just the first year that she felt this way, since she was so loving to my younger siblings. I mean from a rational standpoint, my first younger sibling has severe developmental delays and needed constant watching to avoid him hurting himself (like when he stuck a fork into an outlet at age 4, got blasted back ten feet, then went to do it again) my next sibling was a trouble maker and was always looking for his next thrill, so he also needed to be watched all the time. My youngest brother was born on my moms birthday so of course he is special to her, and my youngest is my baby sister, who is the only girl, so again very special.

Growing up was tough, I was somehow supposed to be responsible for them. it made it almost impossible to have a real life, I couldn’t join after school programs because I had to be home to watch my siblings. I couldn’t sleep over at a friends house because I had to be home, to watch my siblings. And every time y sibs got into trouble it was either because I gave them a bad example, or because I wasn’t watching close enough.

The point is, from a rational view its normal for the oldest to have responsibilities like his, but when you factor in what I found in that journal, its the ‘Unwanted child being forced to care for the loved ones’. I don’t know if this is my paranoia talking or if it really is a case of my mom finding a use for me, after she had been forced to keep me.

9

Okay so finished talking with my mom. It was not a fun discussion…

She told me that for the first year and a half after I was born she was resentful, not at me directly, but at the fact that my biological father got her drunk and had sex with her without protection. She apologized a lot during the talk. When she found out she was pregnant with my brother, she married my step dad. She admitted though that she was always afraid of me…she was afraid would turn into the same violent, moral-less piece of trash that my biological father was. Which is why she always treated me different. As I said she apologized a lot, but I don’t thinks she’s actually sorry. When she apologized it was flat and without emotion, and she never choked or shed a single tear while we talked. Not even when she went on and on about how sorry she was for being so cruel to me.

You should know, my mother was almost an actress before I was born. She was in several local plays (including playing Lady Macbeth, and Juliet at a Shakespeare Festival) And she was the runner up for a supporting role in some late 80s cop movie. When you factor this in, it is obvious she is good at hiding her real feelings and putting off a different one as if it is genuine. So really right now I am trying to determine if she was using her acting skills to seem calm, or if she really just has no feelings for me. For now my GF Yuki is comforting me, as are my dogs and the foster puppies. I also kept going through the box that had the journal in it and found some stuff from when I was in 5th grade. Including a transcript from the school counselor suggesting I be tested for Schizophrenia after I had a break down in class because ‘Everyone was telling him to die’ when everyone in class was in fact lead out of the room because I was screaming at people who were not talking. I do not remember this event myself, but if that happened, then that means I have suffered from a mild SZ since I was 10…How I never noticed myself defeats my mental ability to explain, but it would make a lot of sense, since I was always getting into fghts with people who called me names who denied saying anything when asked by teachers.

This box is turning into a very dispiriting thing…it is the Pandora’s Box of my life I guess…

10

Take it one step at a time. I’m glad Yuki’s there - remember she’s there because she loves you and wants your pain to be easier.

I hope you get the books recommended and I hope they help. I know we like to imagine our parents as having exceptional powers to see the truth and to judge, but your mom is just one human being out of over seven million. Whatever special powers you give her over you are just that: a gift.

It sounds like you’ve never had it easy. But take advantage of what you have now - space away from your mom and a supportive ally in your girlfriend. Take care of yourself.

11

I was a film major, so I have gotten to know a lot of actors growing up. When they want to get an effect, they put on a show, but when they’re truly emotionally upset by something, they tend to go totally flat. It’s a common way to deal with intense emotions. Granted, I don’t know your mom at all, but that has been my experience. I am so sorry you had to read all those things and deal with growing up like that. No one should have to face that.

12

That helps, really it does.

13

When I was a teen, my mother told me, very unemotionally, that she had asked her doctor to abort me and the doctor talked her out of it. She may have asked due to an intolerant and jealous husband and the fact that she already had 2 small children, but her guilt showed itself in neglect. I was never anything but afraid of my parents.
So, I know your situation of getting news of being coldly unwanted.