My Mother Lives In Her Own Reality

My mother posted on Facebook, "My grandchildren are bright, brilliant, and they take after their grandmother."

GAG.

This is the same woman who hit me on a regular basis as a teenager.

This is the same woman who thinks she did a good job counteracting bullying when we were kids.  The subject of bullying came up recently when we were down there, and she said, "When (my sister) was in junior high, there was one time (my sister) was being bullied and I nipped that in the bud!"

She said this like she took care of it ALL.  HEL-lo!  Um, Mom, we younger three kids of the 6 kids were bullied mercilessly for over a decade, EACH!  You think you did GOOD?  You don't even KNOW what was going on!

And, I think she's forgetting the time I and my younger brother were sort of kidnapped; I very fuzzily remember that I think that was one thing she found out about, and my parents talked to one of the teens involved (just one?  why not both?).

She doesn't know I was beat up, several times, and THAT's why my glasses were broken; it wasn't because I slipped and fell in the snow . . . she doesn't know I was whipped with a jumprope with all those sliding plastic thingies on it, and that the pain from that was like a hundred stinging bees . . . and so much other crap.

CLUELESS.  Although she shouldn't be about the hitting thing, but then again at the time she saw nothing wrong with it; why would she now?  Then again, each of us kids holds a part in the fact that she's clueless; our relationship may not have been good enough then for us to want her to know?  But when older, we could have told her . . . I dunno that the relationship has EVER been good enough to tell her, though . . .

UGH ugh UGH.  Keeping my mouth shut when she exhibits her pride in her mothering skills, or anything else I've mentioned, is both hard and easy.  Hard because . . . I'd so love to verbally slap her in the face with reality.  (Hmm, the violent metaphor there, is probably not too hard to figure out why.)  Easy, because . . . she has no idea we look down on her for stuff, that these things happened (or that they were wrong), and we do, and she looks the fool to those of us who know . . .

It's sad, really, that she is so . . . out of touch.  Sad and pathetic . . . although I remember the raging mother coming after me physically and cornering me before whaling on me . . . and then I stop feeling sorry for her.

I dunno.  Empathy is good, but . . . when she throws this stuff in MY face, empathy is the furthest thing from my mind . . .

This whole situation reminds me of something one of the Mythbusters says, "I reject your reality and substitute my own!"  The difference here being that she either doesn't know she's doing it, or any glimmers of what reality is are too painful for her to face, so she lives in a constructed shell of glossed over (maybe painted over) memories.

Comments

[Chewing Taffy]

The "fill in the blank create your own reality" drives me crazy, too. Both of my parents do it.

It leaves me wondering...what REALLY happened...

[Sara]

Thanks, CT/. I read your most recent blog post, and my heart goes out to you. Although now I'm picturing an almost Michelin-man type person in a hula-hoop suit . . . 8^D

I realized in my post above I used the word Empathy, for what is actually sympathy, and a contemptuous sort of sympathy at that. However, while I was writing, I was also thinking about a way in which I have true empathy for her, and later realized that there's this contempt/sympathy/empathy seesaw going on . . . a future post.