An Actual Step in the Journey, AKA I'm Glad My Mom Is Dead

Hey y’all, it’s A.K. I came to a revelation today, after watching a video on YouTube about narcistic relationships, that if my mom weren’t dead, I’d be no contact. That makes me feel… I don’t know. When I was young, I was always plotting about how I was going to get away from her. Then, when I was 14, she tried to kill herself. I almost lost my mom. I remember my sister and I went into survival mode when they took her away in the ambulance. We raided the change stash and took all the quarters. We didn’t know how long we’d be away from home; our grandmother was coming to pick us up and we were going to stay with her.  I remember all the blood on the bed. My mom kept the mattress; changing the sheets was a recurring reminder. That was my first day of Freshman year of high school. My mom always ingrained into us that we were all we had, the three of us. I felt responsible for my mom. And this wasn’t the first time she had cut herself. For some reason, my instincts to flee my abuser were being overwhelmed by my sense of responsibility for her. My dad had “abandoned her” (us). We had to stick together. She needed me. (Recently, while talking to my dad about my mom, he revealed to me that at one point my mom said to him that she “needed us to take care of her,” as children.) I was already being groomed to be my mother’s caretaker while she guilted away my instincts to get the fuck away. The whole time, further suicide attempts sprinkled in. She was never happy with her lot in life. She said she always wanted to be a mom, but she sucked at that. She didn’t make a good wife. She didn’t do anything. She was a horrible example of what to do and be. She was a narcissist. I’m terrified of becoming her. I always have been. She tried to make me into her for a long time. And for a long time, I just went along with whatever she wanted. Because at some point I stopped fighting.  I go back to that day. That’s also around when the isolation started. A year later she was pregnant, and her future husband (not the baby’s dad) told me I was responsible for taking care of the baby. I remember that day very well, too. I remember dropping down to my knees in the kitchen, in tears, being told I was responsible for this child. I didn’t get pregnant, yet I was responsible for a baby. I lost my fight. I’m sorry to say. I’m ashamed to say. And for 16 years, I took care of that kid. I did my best, at least. I turned 16 right after he was born, for Pete’s sake. I moved out when he was 16 and I was 32. And he was pissed. Pissed that I was so old when I finally moved out; pissed that I moved out at all and “abandoned them”; pissed that I left him in my place for Mom to turn on. To be fair, he had always been the golden child, and I hadn’t the slightest clue that she would turn on him when I left. When I moved out my mom said she was “mourning the death of her daughter”. Like it’s not normal for adult children to move out of their parents’ homes. Especially dysfunctional ones. She wouldn’t speak to me. I was disinvited to Christmas. It was fucked up. Then they moved to Colorado. We started talking a bit on the phone. Then she had the stroke. And I came running. To take care of my mom. Because I was responsible for her. She had a tracheotomy and couldn’t talk at one point. So, she wrote in a notebook. She asked if I would come back and take care of her. I told her I would. She wrote something along the lines of I have been blessing her life since I was a baby. And then not a couple weeks later she died. She never took accountability. She never made things right. She was just gone. If she weren’t I wonder where I would be now. Would I be lucky enough to have my wife still? Would things have still gone the same? Things leading up to that would’ve gone differently. Suffice to say, I’m glad my mom is dead. I wouldn’t be living the life I’m living now if she were alive, and that’s pretty fucked up to think about. If she were alive, I wouldn’t be able to have contact with her, so it would be no different than it is now anyway. Though, now there are probably less complications because she’s not producing drama.

I hope you enjoyed my rambling about my mom and my complicated feelings toward her. What’s your relationship like with your mom?