Dear Reader:
This is the saddest thread I have read on this forum. I read many stories of people in pain, great, intense pain, yet this is the saddest story for me. It is what the writer did not mean to write about that makes it so sad. She meant to write about her distress but without intending to she told the story of her neglecting and abusing her own two children. They are a side detail in her story, far from being the center of her story, far far off and this is what is so sad to me.

She wrote: “All my life it seems I have done nothing but rode the never ending emotional family rollercoaster. I am the baby of seven and have always got the bad end of things and constant blame. My father was an alcoholic, my mother…requires my attention 24/7. Just with the emotional abuse alone (I’m not good enough, I’m the never should have been child, the worse one out of the seven, the loser, etc) I’m drained; emotionally and physically drained….(the main topic of her thread: how her siblings do not take care of her mother and how bad they are for not doing so and in them not taking care of the abusive mother, they are hurting her etc. etc. etc. lots of drama…lots and lots of drama between her and her siblings and their children)…

…I’m married and have two young children. I don’t work mainly because of having to take my mom everywhere… I am always having to lug my children with me… My children are involved in activities and other than that suffer from not getting to play with friends often because of my mom’s needs and going to a friends house often doesn’t work because of timing.”

This is all that is said about her children, her young children. The mother, the writer of this thread, noticed that their after school activities are disrupted. This is all she noticed. She lives with her abusive mother. She and her children live with her abusive mother. She places her record of how her mother STILL abuses her in parenthesis as if it was of minor importance and not the issue. She tries hard to win her mother’s approval by taking care of her mother who keeps telling her she is a loser and the worst of her siblings. She sacrifices herself and her husband and her children for that aim, driven. She misplaces her anger at her ongoing abuse to her siblings while all along…

Her young children do not get the attention that they need. They cannot possibly be getting the attention that they need by this mother who is overwhelmingly occupied in getting the love she needs from the person least likely to give it to her. Her children NEED her love- she is their mother- but she is otherwise occupied, driven in other directions. Her young children most likely think that they are not getting her attention because something about them is lacking, unloveable. They think she has SEEN them and decided they are not worthy of her loving attention, of her LOVE. They need her love. They are not getting it. They are dismissed as largely irrelevant in her quest for “greater things”- getting the love of her abusive mother, getting all her siblings and their children to do what she thinks they should do.

The writer of this thread was obviously neglected and abused as a child. Yet she is not neglecting and abusing her own children, two young children. The abused and abuser are now ONE. This is so sad for the children. They are silent in this thread- they are not the ones writing it but being human myself, knowing the attachment to one’s mother, I can hear their aching voices.

This brings me to my own mother. She too was occupied elsewhere, in ongoing drama with other people.I wrongly thought she SAW me and then decided I was not loveable. Then I proceeded to live five decades believing i was unloveable, a painful life. My distortion has been: she didn’t SEE me to begin with. There is a difference there- my mother not loving me was not about me being unloveable, it was about her being too busy trying to get her love from other people, approval of other people yet the person who really loved her so intensely was right in front of her the whole time.

As she tried to get the love of others, I was THERE in front of her the whole time, loving her intensely, lastingly. I still feel it and there is nothing I could ever do – to make her see me, to make her love me, to let her take in my love for her.

Somehow she did not see me, didn’t see that I loved her, that all she had to do to feel loved (which she desperately needed, so it seems to me) was be loved by who already loved her- that was me. Hey, I was right there, day after day, night after endless night. I was there, a person who loved her so intensely, a person who looked up to her as the most important person in my life- I was RIGHT THERE.

But she was busy elsewhere day after day, night after night, year after year and forever after.
anita