Author: Grace by any other name

I have seen this topic on YT where people or psychologists etc speak about toxic parents, narc parents…I came across a concept I shared with someone who because they’d never lived it, it didn’t even merit a comment. Yet is something extremely sad.

Losing a mother who didn’t love you.

I am grieving not the loss of someone who supported me, encouraged me, cared about me, called me to ask how I am, I grieve the fact that I will never, ever, experience that. Ever.

I come across memes (always did) about being grateful for mothers because they are our biggest cheerleaders, will fight for us… I stop reading. I stop reading because it is so untrue that it hurts. What 42 year old woman with a living mother drives home from a medical appointment crying wishing she had a mom? One whose mother doesn’t know how to be one.

Some people grieve their deceased moms terribly because they’ve left a huge hole in their lives. I have an acquaintance whose mom died over a decade ago I think, yet the pain is so fresh and awful even today. When she first told me how much it hurts to not have a mother, I naively told myself that the positive in not having a loving mother is that I wouldn’t feel such pain at her death.

It’s not actually true.

It’s still horrible.

Listening to the lies at the funeral was one of the worst things. I knew I hadn’t wanted to be there! Standing there next to my lying sister was HORRIBLE. During the week, she had sent through what she had wanted to read out as a “children’s tribute.” I told her point blank that it’s a lie. I told her should say “me, I” instead of using “we/our.”

She didn’t listen to me.

“Our mother loved us very much. We are what we are today because of her. She supported us…”Me are what we are because of her…” VOMIT! LIES! I had wept when her coffin arrived at home. My dear sister-who stole from her till her dying day- was busy primping and preening while the body arrived. Some friend of hers was putting make up on her much as a bride gets made up (Well, the bride who wears make up. I don’t.) She was naked under a towel- I assume so that her evening gown type dress didn’t get make up on it. The very picture of deep grief.🙄

She came up with some tears after lying about my mother’s final evening. I can bet anyone a million Rand that my mother was NOT dancing and singing to music by my sister’s singing group. I don’t even know that she was even home that evening. (She seldom is. Ask social workers currently involved. Yes, this year I’m telling all the truth.)

I was so angry at her lies about mom supporting us. Supporting where when she called me “a waste?” When she told me I was “lazy” for being my children’s teacher and my home’s domestic worker and children’s nurse? When she was ungrateful for food bought with our own money, busy telling her niece that we didn’t buy her meat when she had enough money to buy her own meat? Support my foot! Our singing friend had said that if we broke down, she too would break down and then she wouldn’t be able to sing. Well, the lies made sure I felt no grief. I definitely didn’t break down into tears. And I stupidly hadn’t fully realised how bad my sister was. When she broke down as we sang, I kissed her. I thought she had a heart.

Weeks later while she was out having fun, paramedics arrived at my dad’s house- where she lives. She had made a false call, stating that he was frothing and foaming at the mouth and was unconscious. She wasn’t even home. The neighbours had seen the ambulance arriving and had rushed over in a panic. My VERY WELL father was nicely seated in the house. He told the paramedics, “She took my bank card and was meant to buy grocery. She stole R5000. She hasn’t been back, she probably called you so you would take me to hospital so she can be free and not care for me.”

I kissed someone who could do THAT to their recently widowed father. Someone who helped get rid of three workers we hired to do her job as a young, able-bodied adult child living in her parents’ house, eating her sister’s food and using her electricity.

This post is going to be the start of my dealing with my life as the child and sibling of narcissistic people. I hope that in the same way I felt “seen” when I read others’ posts, my post will validate someone else suffering in silence and hurt . Only last week did I state to a friend, and then my cousin also state to ME , that I was not only abused, but am being abused today- by the very same father who we tried to get help for and were still feeding and giving electricity to despite him being able to afford it. This wasn’t only Black Tax, this was narc abuse. And I am trying to now come to terms with that. With what it did to me. What it has allowed others to do to me. And the fact that I was loved as long as I lived by their rules. But now that I’m an adult, that love was found to be conditional.

I didn’t ever have a loving mother. But my father is not loving either. Ask me how many times he has phoned in the last five years to purely ask how I am. Ask how many times he has called me asking me to phone my sister to ask where she is so she can go back home and care for the parents she tells everybody she is caring for. Ask me how many times he phoned me telling me I must buy more than what I had already bought him. Ask me if he at least tried to remember any of my chidlren’s birthdays, and I’ll tell you how he often tells us to remember my narc sister’s child’s birthday.

It all hurt. I have a relative who hated my mother so much that they said I had to now work on the trauma of her hating me. While I was still in touch with my father whose final phone call on Dec 31,2023 to me was to tell me my children had stolen his cellphone.

As my daughter said, “Grandpa knows how many thousands we spend on him every month. Over ten years of those thousands. If we wanted a phone, you’d have bought one for us yourself. We have money.”

I’ll elaborate on this later when I explain why I’ve gone no contact with him and my sister. A sister who stole so many of my mother’s phones that my mother in law stopped sending replacements.

I can’t heal while wounds are still being created.

And neither can you if you came here as the adult child of a toxic parent. You can merely survive. And survive I did. Able to love others. Never emotionally stunted. Able to be empathetic. Able to give my heart DESPITE, not because of her…I am who I am because that is my nature. (When I was a teen, my GP became exasperated with me for caring about a family at church so much that I got tension headaches and a huge IBS flare up.)

I am what I am, because God is my Father.

I know our experiences will be different, but the pain caused is the same. And may we who are believers find healing in Him Whose name we bear. Who is proud of us for following Him. Who loves us for obeying Him. (My mother criticized my decision to be modest over and over and even mocked friends who visited them in my absence when they heard my father was sick, telling they were dressed like me.)

I grieve what a mother should have been to me, and I rejoice in what my children think of me. I pray they always view me the way they do today- fair, not harsh, caring, gentle, very patient…I’ve certainly never whipped them with a cane as my father did, nor threw anything at them that took the breath out their lungs and caused them to wheeze for air. I will never have a mother who is proud of me for living right. But I will be a mother proud of every good thing my children do.