Quote:
Originally Posted by mamamille  I think the day I could run faster than my mom was a funny day... out of the house and up the hill, and she couldn't catch me LOL
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I remember the day I first could run faster than my Mother. Best day of my childhood!
My Mother tried, and really did love us, but she was very young, very inexperienced, and very overwhelmed. I also suspect she was bipolar and somewhere on the spectrum. Of course, as a child, I didn't realize this, I just thought I had a mean Mommy.
There were three of us, at first. Me, my sister and my brother, all 2 years apart and by the time my Mother was 21 (my youngest brother came when I was 13 and my Mother had mellowed out alot).My sister had ODD and my brother, at the time, was misdiagnosed with ADHD. Me, I'm sure I had issues, also. We were a wild, wild bunch of feral children. We got into everything, did everything. For much of my childhood, my Grandmother was the only one who could "control" us. (Gramma didn't spank, but she'd get this stern voice and this tone of her voice that just got our attention.) My Mom spanked. And yelled. And punished. And humiliated.
I remember learning how to tell time, and the first time it "clicked" was when I realized I could read the clock and it was 11:30 at night and my sister and I were in the livingroom kneeling on rice (I was 7, my sister was 5), because one of us had broken something, and neither of us would admit to it.
I remember her grabbing my favorite doll and repeatedly beating the doll and smashing the doll against the wall, while yelling at me that she can't hit me right now, because if she did, she would kill me, and she can do it to the doll and it won't kill the doll. That incident was the second most scary incident in my childhood. (Can't talk about the other one.) It scared me more than any time she ever yelled at me or hit me, because I think, even at 5 or 6, I knew on an instinctive level that she was very near to snapping.
Anyways, we'd go out in public and we'd three take off in three different directions and hide. And she had to take us everywhere with her- no babysitter would watch us after the "babysitter incident".
The babysitter incident- My sister and I shared a room. We wrapped a lifesized doll up in my sister's bathrobe, pulled the hood over the head, and wrapped a belt around the neck of the doll and hung "my sister" over the door, and then called the babysitter, yelling hysterically that my sister was dead. After the babysitter came upstairs, figured out we were "demon children", she ran downstairs to call my Mother. I was six, my sister was four, my brother was two. Aparrently, my Mother asked her to go back upstairs to get my brother, but we wouldn't let the babysitter come back upstairs- we threw toys, shoes, small furniture, etc, down the stairs at the babysitter. (I heard the babysitter never babysat again, and chose never to have children, herself, also. She ended up sitting in the livingroom crying until my Grandmother and the church's pastor showed up.
) We had nothing against the babysitter, we just knew that was the only way to get attention from our Mother, even if she would beat us.
We'd intentionally embarrass her- I remember at, about 8, I watched part of "Mommy Dearest" at a friend's house, and the next time we went out in public, when it looked like I was gonna get in trouble, I dropped down on the floor, grabbed her feet, did my best acting job (think busy checkout line in supermarket) and started yelling and fake crying, "No, Mommy Dearest, don't hurt me, I'll be good, please, Mommy Dearest!" I knew I would get it as soon as we got home, but I figured, I might was well go all out and embarrass her while I'm at it.
For years (until I was about 10), in the summer when we were all home, she'd make us take naps from 12 to 3 (and still be in bed at night by 8), so that she could watch her soap operas, and I learned how to be very, very quiet, sneak in her bedroom, and things would get mysteriously broken or lost. I remember ripping a 100 dollar bill in half (and this was when my Mother could barely afford a gallon of milk) and making it look like her makeup case in her purse had ripped it. And more times than I can cound, I remember dipping her toothbrush in the toilet. I never got caught- I was very good at fake sleeping.
My Mother also dictated everything we said, everything we wore, everything we did. We weren't allowed to get angry, especially at her, and if we were laughing too much, it was "because we were getting into trouble". Crying was only okay, because then we "knew what we did wrong, and felt bad about it". I refused to cry after 7 years old and really haven't since then. It was my control over HER, by not crying, no matter what she did, even if it meant I'd get spaked twice as hard, twice as long.
I'm also highly gifted, but because I was allowed so little control in my childhood, and I knew my Mother wanted me to get good grades, I barely intentionally god bad grades for most my school years. The same with food- I mostly refused to eat. I was 7 1/2 and weighed 47 pounds while I was a head taller than my sister who was 5 and weighed 44 pounds. I chose not to eat much of my childhood.
What bothers me the most was, for years, most my childhood, my Mother brought us all to psychiatrists for our "behavior problems", but not once did any of them look into why were were all behaving like that. When I was about 10 or 12, I actually kept a secret paper and documented all the things that happened within a two or three week period, brought it to the psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist didn't even look at it, just talked to my Mother and sympathised, because my Mother, at that point, had her convinced that all three of us children were patholigical liars torturing this poor, overwhelmed Mother. At that point, I realized I wasn't gonna win, not as a child, but I remember promising myself that I would be a better Mother to my children than my Mother was to me. I won now.
