Why, For Me, My Mother Went From Dearest Mommy To 'Mommie Dearest'

I don't know whether my mother was always such a troubled woman, as I came to know her to be over time. Looking back, I suspect that she was, but that I had to grow up beyond, first, my innocence, and then, my naivete, to be able to begin to recognize the signs that it seems were there all along. When I was a very little girl, I adored my mother. In that complete trust that a child often has for a parent when very young, she could do no wrong in my eyes. It would have been completely unthinkable for me, then, that she could or would ever do any deliberate harm to me in any way. But she did. I never could have thought that she would be so willing to injure my innocence in order to satisfy her sins. But she did. I wouldn't have been able to believe that she would begin to deliberately discredit me, even while I was still a small child! But she did.

I had been exposed, through no fault of my own, to her ugly truths and dark secrets, which then caused her to view me as being a perpetual threat to her reputation that she demonstrated she was much more concerned about than my well being. I saw some troubling things about my mother, behind the scenes, which completely contradicted the facade that she made sure others always saw of her. I didn't understand how she could be more concerned with what people thought of her, publicly, than whom she showed me that she was (especially toward me, specifically), in private, all of which caused me to feel continually apprehensive because I was trying to deal with all of her incongruities. One of the most frightening things about her, to me, was how manipulative she was. The strategic subtleties of that managed to really blow my mind! I couldn't have conceived of the various ways that my mother would 'set me up' in order to distress me. As my parent, I felt she should have been the primary person protecting me from the dangers surrounding, even invading, my life; not becoming one of them herself.

All these things that my mother did toward me, as her child, were extremely disturbing to me, especially since she had previously been my hero, and my source of inspiration, when I was very little. I had idolized her then, although that had turned to disillusionment due to all of this effectively dismantling my image of her. I was left to deal with this intense emotional conflict caused by my going from loving my mother devotedly and trusting her completely to loathing this woman whose apparent values I could not share or endorse, and with whom I had no real sense of security. As a mother, to a daughter, she was also the primary role model for me of what a woman was to be, physically, relationally, morally. Because of this powerful position in my life, she was the major contributor to shaping my viewpoints on virtually everything, and more often than not these impartations from her were not positive ones.

She failed me in so many important ways, which deeply affected my personal development and who I became. I know that I have never recovered from that, or from the deliberately destructive influence she wielded over my peace of mind, my body, my soul. My sanity. More than any other relationship in my life, this one was the most hurtful, doing the deepest damage to me by far, even beyond what I went through in marriage from domestic abuse. Dealing with emotionally off balance people can pull us off balance ourselves despite trying our best to cope with the things that come at us from them, forcing us to have to deal with them as they are if we're in a relationship with them. What all this with her would end up costing me, besides all the emotional damage it left me to deal with every day of my life, was any possible relationship with my own mother.

It was traumatizing for me to see the depth of the darkness my mother carried within her, the presence of which also compelled her to be more than willing to undermine me, at any cost, even while I was still a very young girl with no way to protect myself from this toxicity to my soul, or to escape it. I grew up spending most of my childhood alone in my room, in a desperate form of damage control. Besides that, this was not a household that really offered me any genuine physical affection, or opportunities for true emotional closeness, for me to be able to develop any deep relational bonds with anyone there. I was the one who spoke up about us needing these things in that home, within the family. I was the only one, seemingly, who thought that telling the truth about things would make it better, for us all. All that did, though, was place me in the unenviable position of becoming the family's scapegoat. Whatever went badly in our family somehow, strangely, got blamed on or directed at me, from then on, even when I was not there for whatever 'it' was that had occurred, at all, or had anything whatsoever to do with the situation! It was a bizarre, extremely unsettling feeling, for me.

I had been singled out and silently selected, within the family dynamic, from an early age, and was then made to pay the price, in many ways, for any and all of the family's sins. This was an absurd situation for me to be in, as well as very confusing to me, especially since I was a 'good girl'. I tried hard to avoid being directly involved in the family dysfunction, as much as possible, keeping to myself all I could due to how unhealthy it always felt to me emotionally in that home. As soon as I reached an age to be able to escape it, I did, which was when I went away to college, attending both summer sessions right after my high school graduation. Once I was finally out of that house, I dreaded ever going back into all that misery there, again. Still, I tried many times, over several decades, to find some sort of healthier foothold with my mother, which almost anything else would have been, compared to what it was actually like between us.

As I became an autonomous adult, although one who is still greatly affected by the pain and unpleasantness of these childhood memories, I have chosen not to remain in, or to engage in, any more unhealthy relationships with others, because of my being forced to, helplessly and hopelessly, both by and with my parents. My troubling upbringing thoroughly damaged both who I am and how my life has unfolded. The hostility and rejection I experienced left me feeling extremely alienated and anxiously wary with people, even as an adult interacting with other human beings. Human relationships simply do not feel like a safe place, for me. The afflicting anxiety which my childhood provoked in me also left me with lifelong OCD, as a constant reminder of my childhood emotional trauma, affecting even the most mundane daily tasks that I must do. Any hope and healing I have found has come from the steadfast Love of God, for me, personally, which has greatly counterbalanced the grief I have been subjected to by people. It has also given me the refuge, relationally, which I was left so in need of, in my life, after living through what is so innocuously called 'my childhood'. I don't believe that I would still be alive on this Earth now, or even as intact as I am, as a person, or as caring and gentle, at all, without the pervasive presence of, and this relationship with, my Loving Lord and Savior.

My Aunt Gladys was my favorite among all the extended family members, because she saw the truth and addressed it directly with me, seeing me being hurt by the situation as it was, while the other relatives all made the choice to overlook it, making it even worse for me to endure. She shared with me that she also felt deep heartache and frustration, on my behalf, as she saw me being treated that way by my mother (her sister) especially. This was a much needed reality check for me, regarding this unstable ground on which I was trying to find my footing as a girl growing up. I was immensely grateful to my aunt for her honesty with me about it! She was also the most Christlike relative that I had, giving me, by her example, a lot of my ability to trust, therefore, that God's Love for me was different than these harmful things being done to me, supposedly in the name of love, by my parents. So many people on Earth have great difficulty believing in or trusting in the Love of God for them, precisely because He is called our Father, a parental term often connected to negative views of the word due to the bad behaviors of Earthly parents. With my Aunt Gladys, I was able to experience God's Love being modeled by her in a real way, toward me, and to see it as being thankfully unlike the dysfunctional interactions that I experienced with my parents. My aunt even told me that she had so often wished she could have removed me from that situation, and made me her little girl, to give me the love that I was so lacking with my own parents. How deeply I wished she could have, too!

While it is a 'falling from grace' for parents, when their children begin to grow up, and see-- and have to come to terms with--- the fact that their parents are by no means perfect people, society in general can't seem to accept certain truths where parents are concerned. Even in the face of actual evidence to the contrary, adults especially often choose to cling tightly to these myths that all parents always love their children and only want the best for them; would never hurt them on purpose, or expose them to any danger or harm, but would give their own lives, if needed, to protect their children from danger and evil. While these are certainly 'Disneyesque' themes in fairy tales, which people often seek to instill in us, they simply don't bear up under the glaring light of day, which exposes the uglier reality for many children. You would only need to watch the TV newscasts a very short time to see the stories of what children are enduring, sometimes even to their untimely deaths from neglect or abuse, in the care of their own parents. It is a fact that almost anyone can produce a child, simply by seeking their own sexual gratification with another, but not everyone is, or should be, a parent of another human being! Especially when they are willing to destroy that child in some way, shape, or form, due to their own personal demons. There are horrifying situations, some of which are being exposed, that children are enduring around this world, often at the hands of their own parents.

I thank God to this day that my experiences with my parents weren't any worse than they were, although what I went through was more than enough to set me up for failure in significant ways. My sense of proper personal boundaries was destroyed, which has left me open to exploitation by people who see or sense that about me. My acting rightfully entitled to both have and use my own voice to protect and advocate for myself in this world (which is more than willing to victimize those unable to do so) is a constant source of struggle and anxiety for me. My confident belief that I have any real or lasting worth, or lovableness, has been severely undermined, leaving me quite emotionally crippled, even maimed, as a human being, a woman, a soul. There were many things done to me deliberately in order to punish me, to keep me in line, to keep me intimidated enough not to venture talking openly about the 'dirty little secrets' of the family (even in order for me to receive any help or comfort while going through them!), including being indirectly threatened with the withholding of love from me (which I never really felt was there in the first place, leaving me bitter, cynical, and distrustful of anything that people called 'love').

So, although it was far from the worst forms of child abuse, and likely my parents would never have been willing or able to perceive any of these things as being actual abuse of me, the signs of this devastating implosion (caused by my having no alternative, growing up, but to 'stuff' all these things deep down within me), are and have been clear not only to myself, and to Aunt Gladys (and I'm sure to some other relatives, as well, that made their choice to just look the other way), but to any counselor that has ever discussed my life, its course, and its outcomes with me. Abuse isn't always about external injuries. The worst are internal! Bruising a child's fragile self esteem, undermining their feeling of worth or lovableness, destroying their sense of personal safety, encouraging them not to use their own voice to advocate for themselves, teaching them that their silence and compliance is their only hope for receiving even the tiniest crumbs of affection they are starving for, creating hurt, confusion, anger, and rage, in even a sweet, loving child, and signaling very clearly to a child that they must allow themselves to be abused in some way, or else be rejected and cast aside, dismissively, are only a partial list of the deadly, selfish, sins done toward me by one or both of my parents. I will cover those of my father more specifically in a separate post. However, it must be said here that both of my parents' behaviors, combined, effectively destroyed me.

God's Love is clearly the ONLY reason I have survived, at all, and still been able to function, especially as a deeply caring human being, even though I still struggle daily with my underlying issues of detesting and distrusting people. These place me in constant internal conflict, since I am Called by God to love others! Also my continually vacillating sense of self worth, and my mighty struggle against my thorough conviction that, based on outcomes, I am not truly lovable by other human beings, torment me. This, although God--- Whom I love and trust COMPLETELY!--- tells me that 'I AM VERY LOVED', by Him. Sometimes, when I have tears falling down my face from yet another hurt that people have caused me, adding to my already deep heartache left me as the legacy from my family of origin, I confess to God that it's HARD sometimes to allow His Loving me to cheer me up, in the face of the pervasive lack of love shown by the other humans around me on this Earth. People oftentimes afflict me rather than bless me with their presence in my life, due to how they behave toward me, and the further harm which that causes me.

I tell God, at those times, "Well, of course YOU Love me, because You ARE Love! So, YOU don't have a CHOICE! You can't BE or DO anything ELSE and still be YOU! People have a CHOICE, though, and whenever I let them in my life, I ALWAYS REGRET IT! Once they come into my private life they carelessly CRAP ALL OVER IT, ADDING to my GRIEF. You've Called me to Love them, and I DO TRY to show them YOUR Love, because that's all I have IN me to show them. I'm relationally bankrupt, myself, at this point, due to far too many withdrawals by people and almost no deposits, as far as human love goes. I TRY REALLY HARD! But, actually, I'm to the point now in life that I CAN'T STAND HUMAN BEINGS! I don't even know how YOU stand human beings, God! You're Love, so YOU HAVE TO, I guess." 

All this struggle, conflict, anger, and heartache, which I deal with daily, to some degree, directly stems from those critical relationships with my parents, which were my first exposure to other human beings and what that was like. They taught me, by example, what family, relationships, and human beings in general were all about, and it wasn't a pretty picture. Childhood is when these concepts are first developed, then becoming mindsets that are with us for our lifetime. Counselors basically can only try to help us deal with them. Things this deeply ingrained are rarely if ever completely eradicated from the person who has been experiencing them. These are in fact sometimes referred to as being SOUL WOUNDS.

The first time (of the two) that I was raped, at age 21, by a stranger, I called my mother, sobbing, to tell her, and her response to me was simply "I have to go. My blueberry muffins are in the oven and I don't want them to burn." That was all she had to say to me about it. Ever. When I found myself pregnant, and all alone in Mississippi, having just lost both my jobs there, also, due to my extreme Morning Sickness, I called my mother. She told me over the phone to get an abortion, because I was "always bringing shame on the family", then she hung up on me. Later, when my son was about to be born, in Nebraska, she initially refused to even fly out to meet her first grandchild, saying to me angrily that she was too young for me to have gone and made her into a grandmother (she was 50). She did finally come, but by then the underlying rejection--- of me, not the baby--- had been brought into the situation, to always be a prominent part of my memories as a first time mom.

When I lived in Wilmington, North Carolina for awhile, my mother came through to visit along with her sisters (my aunts), since it was on their route home from their beach trip together. When my Aunt Jo stood by me, for a photo together, which my mom was taking of us, mom kept delaying and delaying and delaying and delaying actually snapping the photo! My aunt and I had both begun this with our camera friendly smiles intact, but as my aunt began to protest that having the bright sun directly in her eyes was harming them, and then started saying that, now, it was also giving her a headache, as well, my smile increasingly faded away, during all that, as mom just kept waiting, as if nothing was being said to her about getting on with it already! My aunt kept on asking her to snap the photo, but even so, my mom simply kept putting it off. Finally, knowing there was absolutely nothing actually preventing her from taking that picture of us, I shot my mom a look of great (and understandable) annoyance, directed at her, since my aunt had been repeatedly protesting and saying that her sun-sensitive eyes were watering and her head throbbed now due to the bright sun. This aunt was the one most needing to see clearly, without damaged eyes, since she was the one driving the car for this group!

Just when I gave my mom that scrunched up face of frustration with her, she (of course!) took that picture, right then! Knowing her as I do, I am sure she was waiting, specifically, for that glare from me, since she knows that my compassion would have moved me to be very concerned on my aunt's behalf, and the delay would therefore be upsetting to me. She didn't push the camera's button for so long because what she was actually doing was pushing mine! She delighted herself whenever she found a way to discredit me, especially with others, such as my aunts. My mom didn't hesitate to send me, and show other family members as well, copies of that photo with me wearing this mean-looking expression toward her. She had set me up, once again, in order to falsely 'document' that I was the unloving one, of the two of us, and not her.

When my only, older, brother shot himself, dying by suicide, I was far away in Nebraska and his funeral was going to take place there in North Carolina. For me to attend, I would need to fly back there to arrive in time. It was later told to me that my wealthy uncle had offered to pay for my plane fare, which he could easily afford, but that my parents told him not to bother, because they didn't want me there! I ended up having to sit it out, alone, in Nebraska, the day he was buried. However, my mother did send me one small full color photo of my dead brother, lying in his casket! I had nothing whatsoever to do with my brother's killing himself, yet my parents felt quite comfortable telling relatives that I wasn't welcome to come to my only brother's funeral! Things like these, which have been done to me throughout my lifetime by these people, have boggled my mind and shattered my emotions. I don't know how someone is ever supposed to truly recover from such treatment by their own family members. I have never been able to.

There are so many of those type of things that my mother did to me in my life, like these I just described here as merely a sampling, that I cannot even come close to putting them all into a single Blog post. Sadly, I would actually need to write a book to cover it all, and I am not emotionally up to that challenge. So, I will close this post by telling you about the very last time I was with my mother. It was our final chapter together. I had moved to her town to try to be helpful, since she was then divorced and living mostly alone (she had a boyfriend by then whom she bragged was on Viagra). She didn't have any use for me, still, and again demonstrated that she didn't want me around, so not having any other real connection to there, I decided I was done trying to find any place for me in either her life or her good graces.

I packed up my apartment, I had there, to move away again, for the last time of several tries with her, over the years, but I needed a place to shower and sleep for the one night before I left town that following morning. She said I could stay at her house for that, but she complained that I would be leaving her with used bed sheets that she would then need to strip and launder, creating extra work for her. So, I actually just laid down right on the thinly carpeted bedroom floor, using my own jacket to cover my shoulders as best I could for warmth, so as to not use the bed at all or be any trouble to her. It was very uncomfortable, but I was so exhausted from packing all day and loading my rental truck that I was still able to fall asleep that way. Even more uncomfortable for me, though, was this woman always being that dismissive of me.

That evening, when I had arrived at her house, she kept telling me, again and again, in rapid succession, that she would not even be home the next morning when I left town, because she would be at her exercise or yoga type class at the Y. It seemed very strange to me that she went out of her way to drill down on the point that she would NOT be home the next morning when I would be leaving, because she had no dementia or any issue causing her to forget that she had just repeated this to me several times! I thought then, knowing her, that she was just trying to underscore how little it meant for her that I was even there, or that I was leaving. So, the next morning, as I lay aching on that hard floor, I heard her alarm clock go off. It was the LOUDEST alarm clock I have EVER heard! It rang and rang and rang, and was getting even louder, it seemed. I expected my mother to shut it off, but thought perhaps she was sitting in her bathroom at the time and couldn't get to it.

Eventually her cat, who wasn't very friendly to me, either, came to where I was, and then walked back toward her bedroom door, as if looking for me to stop that loud noise or to help in some way. I sighed, got up from the floor, and looked in my mother's open bedroom door. There she lay, on her side, facing the door, with that alarm clock blaring at the head of her bed. She had a slight smile on her face (rather like a possum, I thought warily, from knowing her as I do). The other thing I noticed was that the sheet was totally tent like around her, smoothed with no wrinkles and only touching along her upper side, so that there was no way to check her breathing by seeing the sheet going up and down by being close to her body. The sheet was much too neat and precise, in that way, to be accidental, and as I surveyed the scene with the clock still clamoring, it looked to me like another one of her setups that she was always doing to discredit me in some way. Knowing CPR, I still had no intention of touching her myself, at all, as she had tried to assign assault to me, a couple of times previously, when I made physical contact with her. I had learned not to trust her! At all.

So, I did finally turn her alarm clock off, and then I yelled, "MOM? MOM! MOM!!!" I shouted it as loudly as I could, to which there was no response from her. So, still feeling in my gut this was another type of her traps where she would 'set me up' and then assign false motives to my actions and/or discredit me in some way, I called 911 instead. The alarm clock had gone off, for several minutes, long and LOUD, and my voice had called out to her LOUDLY, several times, but she had just laid there looking the same, on her side, with that faint possum smile on her face. Even if she WERE dead, which was the appearance and the scenario that I think she was staging, in order to see, and then discredit in some way, whatever reaction I might have had to that, I STILL was NOT going to TOUCH her AT ALL, because of my years of past experience with her pulling this kind of crap on me. Frankly, by this point, I wasn't feeling sad or upset, had she actually been deceased, as my emotional connections to this woman were so severed, for so long, because of her bad behaviors toward me, that I honestly felt indifferent regardless of whether she were alive or dead. I thought, cynically, maybe someone else in the family would just send me the complimentary color photo of her, in her casket, as she had done for me with my brother. I told 911 that I could not rouse her, and had not touched her.

Soon, I heard the ambulance siren getting closer and louder. Then, I met the 2 attendants on the front porch and escorted them into her house, toward her bedroom. ALL the LOUD COMMOTION, before this moment, with the clock, my shouting, and the siren, and she had not budged a bit. But, then, JUST as I GOT TO her bedroom door, with the EMTs, she simply IMMEDIATELY propped herself up on one elbow and smirking, said softly, "Deborah, WHAT have YOU done NOW?" She made it look as though NOTHING had gone on before this moment that they entered the room, and like I was just some over reactive hysteric. [She loved, especially, to try to make me come out looking like a crazy person, and other things, such as mean, or mad.] It was just as I had thought; it was all only another one of her 'Gotcha!' games she loved to play on me, to keep me off balance and distressed, in some No Win situation for me, with her. I wasn't even surprised. It was exactly what I expected from her. It was nothing but 'mom, as usual', toward me. I was the only family member that she ever did those type of things to. No one else. Always me. Seeing the lengths she was willing to go to to make me look bad or insane, I realized that this woman is actually the crazy one, at least when she is dealing with me. That day was it, for me. That was in 2007, and I never saw her again, nor wanted to. 

I. Was. Done.

I am not able to officially diagnose my mother's emotional ills, although my descriptions of her have caused people to usually assert that she was certainly a narcissistic person. When I Googled information on that term, I did come to agree with that assessment of her. Hence, the title of this post, paralleling her with the autobiographical movie of Joan Crawford, written by her daughter, called 'Mommie Dearest'. Christine Hammond, MS, LMHC, has an excellent Blog post online about this--- both the movie, 'Mommie Dearest', and what it is like for someone to be the daughter of a narcissistic mother, at https://pro.psychcentral.com/exhausted-woman/2017/11/mommie-dearest-daughters-of-narcissistic-mothers/. There are also many other informative sites about this, online.

It was very helpful to me to have others be able to comprehend and categorize my mother's behaviors, and her treatment of me, because one of the things she always did so well toward me was to undermine my self confidence and cause me to second guess my gut (which I now personally recommend that NO one EVER do!). This led to my being so conflicted internally that she was ALMOST able to CONVINCE me that I WAS truly the CRAZY person, in the interactions between the two of us. To protect myself, from her manipulations, I finally had to trust both my gut and the advice of counselors I have had, over the years, and sever any and all ties I had with her. When I last attempted to deal directly with her, which I just described to you here, I was in my early 50s, and she in her mid-70s. Sadly, she had only gotten worse, behaviorally, over time, in her interactions with me.

Years ago, I was selling shoes in a JCPenney mall store. Right in the middle of an extremely busy Saturday work shift, I found myself waiting on a mother and her grown daughter, overhearing the conversation between them as I fitted them with the shoes they were interested in. I personally and painfully recognized the denigrating, disparaging way with which this mother was directing every comment at her daughter, and the daughter's worn down, beleaguered, resigned responses to her mother. This conversation was the closest, of any I had ever heard anyone else engaged in, to what I had always experienced in trying to communicate with and relate to my mother. Hearing this going on, between them, and desperately wanting an answer, for myself, as to why any mother speaks to any daughter she supposedly loves in this destructive, debilitating way, I dared to blurt out to the mother directly, "Can you please tell me why it is that you are talking to your daughter in this way?" I knew most people would be shocked that I asked, intruding this way as the sales associate serving them, and would most likely decline to answer such an impertinent question as that at all. They could even make a complaint to the store management. 

I knew all this.

But I was desperate for the answer to this burning question that I had needed an answer to all my life. This woman was behaving exactly like my mother always had toward me! I had never really seen anyone else's mother treating them like this so openly, except for mine, making this a rare opportunity being presented to me. Without blinking an eye, this other mother responded to me with no hesitation at all. My blood turned cold, when I heard her answer, as I immediately recognized that she had just told me the pure, plain truth. Her doing that was a real gift to me because she had finally, fully, answered that question I had always carried, in my own heart, from the deep wound that I had due to my mother's behaving toward me exactly as this woman was behaving toward her daughter. She said, with no sign of guilt, remorse, or intention to change course, "I just want her to be as miserable as I was!". THAT was EXACTLY it! Just like from my mother, toward me. From my dearest mommy to my 'Mommie Dearest'. That woman spoke the truth of what it was! Of what it all came down to. Sometimes there just isn't going to be a positive outcome, or a happy ending. Sometimes, there just has to finally be an ending.