Yesterday, I was bitching about my hair on facebook, and a friend passed on her mother’s advice about spending too much time at the mirror.
I couldn’t even imagine my own mother giving me any advice, although she did warn me not to have ‘intercourse’ after I started coming home at 3:AM. She was pretty useless in the advice department. She didn’t prepare me for anything except a conviction that I would never, ever, grow up to be like her.
Look at her body language in this picture. She holds me like I’m a time bomb or some infectious agent. And me, I look away anxiously, maybe at someone less scary.
It is pointless to blame your crazy mom for all your shortcomings, and yet. Getting over a crazy mom is a tall order.
An interesting school of psychology maintains that Adverse Childhood Experiences can represent trauma that doesn’t just ‘go away.’ Having a crazy mom is an ACE; enough ACE’s and you are screwed, unless other factors were present to create some resilience. You can get your ACE score here.
“The CDC’s Adverse Childhood Experiences Study uncovered a stunning link between childhood trauma and the chronic diseases people develop as adults, as well as social and emotional problems.This includes heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes and many autoimmune diseases, as well as depression, violence, being a victim of violence, and suicide.”
Bummer! On the one hand, you now have an excuse for being dysfunctional. On the other, it is awful to reflect on your childhood helplessness, or on your own failings as a mother.
Thoughts?
I haven’t been to therapy in a while, but the next time I go, the last thing I will do is rehash the past.
I was just talking to my sister yesterday about our mother. The only thing I took away from my childhood was to do the exact opposite of anything my mother did. And honestly it has worked pretty well for me. She had no natural mother instincts and no interest in learning them. I’m afraid to look at that test. But I will.
My Mom has been gone for 8 years now. I go back and forth with her as a villain, and her as someonewho did the best she coud with the tools she had been given.
Her mother was a bitch frim hell, whom I never liked-even as a baby I would cry and struggle to get away from her.
So what chance did my Mom have at knowing how to raise a child? I was inconvenient and disnt fit in with her house cleaning schedule. Yet I was always tidy amd well presented, and had lovely meals to eat.
Around and around in my head.
There are some days I try to take in the total context of someone’s life, like say my mother, and then I understand her behavior, or at least try to. Sometimes I just can’t imagine what another person felt, tolerated, learned, experienced, suffered, was incapable or capable of. I’m not trying to be an apologist, but sometimes instead of blaming/shaming an individual, like a parent or a self, I need to have some context other than that person failed as a person. I’d rather like to say that society failed that person, etc. I think in the end the lone cowboy against all odds does not serve us, but that we need a village . . .
How about a good mother story?
My mother was my best friend and the greatest mother ever. She died, while living with me, 19 years ago, at the age of 87.
Not a day goes by when I don’t think of her and miss her.
RIP Alice (Mim).
I’ll drink to Alice, Andra, and also to Jean Ann Mary Mackay Campbell Duff, my mum! True, she was a bit careless in failing to actually bring along a husband (and father) to our life together but, hell, I didn’t miss him because I never knew him. However, I knew her, and in retrospect and bearing in mind tough wartime years and not much better post-war years with no spare money at the end of each week, she was a diamond.
I go along with Bessie and Kellie. My Mum is a bit on the mad side, but she had an evil step mother, and this has shaped her into this irrational, paranoid, self obsessed sort of person, but she did her best, and we had nice food and clean clothes, infact I scored 0 on the ACE thingy. I have no excuse for the social inneptitude I suffer with. And try as I might to blame my parents for all my problems, it doesn’t take them away. I have to sort them out myself I suppose.
I do not have a crazy mother, but I have spent some time being angry at the childhood I was dealt. And I didn’t even have a bad childhood. We’ll all find things to resent if we look hard enough. To the people with real childhood trauma, I’m sorry you had so much to deal with at such a young age.
We only remember the past through our own perspectives, and therefore only have half of the story. Trying to understand it is useless; if not impossible. It makes us live in the past, and stops us being here, right now. It can be addictive, looking and trying to make sense of the past, and then we define ourselves by it, slipping in pieces of information to friends who we feel like deserve to ‘who we really are’. By doing this we’re giving our a bad experiences a importance that only we can give them. We continue to live within the bad memories.
My whole family is bat-shit crazy which is why my brother and I never married or dared to reproduce. Our little sister, however, did. Today is the 1 year annivesary of her sons suicide. I am in awe of happy families and people who are able to raise other happy people. The concept is lost on me.
My mother was a really good human being. Died of breast cancer at the age of 62, far too young, and I’m sorry I did not tell her that I love her more often when I still could. My father, on the other hand… had no idea what to do with children…let’s just say not an easy person to be around. We had some sort of reconciliation before he died. Oh well. They both did the best they could. No hard feelings.
I have told people that it’s easier to have a dead mother than a crazy mother. Only people with crazy dead mothers seem to get it. Everyone else thinks I’m cold.