I Was An Emotional Prostitute Part 37

As I’ve written this, I’ve begun to see something else. I wasn’t allowed to be angry or to express that anger when I was growing up. If people did something that hurt me, mother basically told me I was out of line to get angry. Yet if she got angry with us for some reason, heaven help us. No wonder I’m still dealing with anger issues; especially in regards to her!

I know people don’t understand why I don’t just talk these things over with my mother, well as a general rule; one or more of four things happens:

1.                  She makes an excuse.

2.                  She tends to think I shouldn’t let it bother me, especially if she’s given me her “reason” for whatever it was that she did.

3.                  She’ll get defensive and say, “I’m not perfect you know!” I don’t expect perfection. I expect her to take responsibility for her actions, but obviously that’s too much to ask of her.

4.                  Often times, the only way she does listen to me is when I get angry enough to scream at her and I really don’t like to do that. She’s also supposedly enough of an adult that such tactics should not be necessary.

            I’ve been told she loves me and she’s the only mother I’ll ever have. If she loves me so much, why doesn’t she listen to me and respect what I have to say? I know she’s the only mother I’ll ever have, but I didn’t get to choose who my mother was, so why should I let that affect how I feel towards her? I believe parents need to earn their children’s respect just as much as the child needs to earn the trust and respect of their parents. I cannot go on stuffing the feelings down and looking the other way. I’ve done that for too long and in the end all that happened was that I became an emotional volcano just waiting to explode.

This isn’t so much a case of repressed memories as it is a case of looking back and taking off the “rose-colored glasses” I’ve worn where she was concerned. I think the reason I didn’t really see her actions for what they were, was a matter of emotional survival. With feeling abandoned by my father, deceived and abused by her second husband, made to feel too sensitive and as if I cried too easily and too much by her third husband, then used by virtually every man I ever went out with, I desperately needed to believe there was at least one human being in whom I could place my trust. That made it all the harder to confront my real feelings about her.

Mother did come to me once and tell me that the Lord had shown her something about the way she treated me when I was growing up. Apparently she had developed a rapport with a bus driver whose bus she frequently rode. One day the driver told her that it must have been intimidating for me as a daughter to grow up with her as my mother. The Lord used that statement to show her that she had controlled my life when I was growing up. She also said she hoped and prayed that someday I’d find it in my heart to forgive her. I think she knows that in a lot of ways, she did the same thing to me that her mother did to her when she tried to control me while I was growing up.

Even now there are times when she has tried to control me and unfortunately she occasionally succeeded as I had not gotten used to standing up to her. For instance, when I was pregnant and living with her I was on WIC. She asked me one morning if she could use some of the milk WIC supplied me with. I gently explained that it was against the rules and that if anyone found out, I could get in trouble. She had a fit and told me she should be allowed to use it as her tax dollars had paid for it too.

Another time I was at her house for some reason and just before I left, she and I were standing out by my car talking. We were leaving at about the same time as I needed to go and she had to catch a bus to go somewhere. She asked me if she could get a ride to the bus as she was cutting it close time wise. I told her I was sorry but I really needed to be on my way. She got upset with me and cried, “What?! You can’t wait 30 seconds for me to pull myself together and then give me a ride?”

That simple statement and the attitude that came with it, made me feel as if I didn’t have the right to refuse her request, even though it was my car and my time she was asking for and the bus stop was in the opposite direction of where I needed to go. It certainly wasn’t my fault she was cutting it so close to the time the bus was due. She did apologize on the way to the bus for her attitude, but I still felt like I had been manipulated. I wish I had simply driven off without her.

When my nephew graduated high school with his two – year college degree in hand in addition to his high school diploma, my mother and my son were invited to the ceremony, but I was not. Mother told my son, Caleb to not tell me what was happening. When I learned he was going somewhere with his Uncle Mike beyond hanging out their house that night, I asked where they were going. He said he couldn’t tell me. Nothing I said made any difference. So, I called my brother Mike and asked him. He told me about my nephew’s graduation and that he hadn’t told my son to keep it a secret from me. At that point, I knew it had to have been mother who’d told him to keep it from me. I was furious.

I got her on the phone and asked her if she’d told Caleb not to tell me about my nephew’s graduation. She said she may have as she didn’t want me to be upset because I hadn’t been invited. I started yelling at her that it wasn’t her place to tell my son to keep those kinds of things from me and that if she ever did such a thing again I would cut off all contact between her and Caleb – period! I also made it very clear that how I reacted to and dealt with such news was my responsibility, not hers! My brother arrived just before I got mother on the phone and heard my end of the conversation with her. As he was going out the door with Caleb, he told him that the only kind of secrets that should be kept from someone are those related to things like birthday gifts.

Part of what scared me about this was that if this sort of thing had happened when he was younger; he could easily have learned that keeping things from me, such as someone touching him in an inappropriate way was fine. I’ve worked really hard to be sure my son knows it’s okay to talk to me about anything and that if anyone ever touched him in the wrong way or without his permission, it was okay to do something about it and to report it to another adult. It bothers me that with one incident my mother could have undermined what I tried to build.