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🎵 Soundtrack to this piece
I’m in a post-caring state, when it comes to my mum.
I don’t have much more to say about it.
Although, I did feel that old anger bubbling back up again, when I was talking things through with my Granny and sister, sending back the tide to reveal the jagged edges that lay beneath, reminding us of where these cuts and scars keep coming from.
And I do feel differently about her now. I feel less of everything.
The guilt has evaporated. I feel released from her. I feel such a sense of freedom. No more conflicting questions of “what is the morally right thing to do”, and “how do I maintain a relationship with my brother after she disowns me”, and of course, “should I reject my mother after what she did to my sister”.
It’s such a tremendous burden to carry: Having someone poisonous in your life, knowing the joy they find in malice, but feeling like you have to accept them.
You find yourself answering for them internally. Not defending them from other people, but from your own self. You become your own enemy, a constant argument between your mind and your heart.
With time away you slowly recover from the endless toil, then like a hammer to a vase they shatter you — with a phrase, a look, a tell that says yes: They are exactly as bad as you know they are. It is always devastating, because it forces you to, once again, confront the questions you don’t have an answer to yet.
And it’s always exhausting. Lying by omission every time you speak to them, or even about them, it takes its toll, it wears you down, and it never gets easier. On the contrary, the longer it goes on for, the more you hate yourself (“weak, foolish, there must be something wrong with me if I can’t make a decision”…).
And the wider the gap becomes between where you are now, and a version of you that is free from this, and has forgiven themselves.
—
There’s something very rotten about all of this. This balancing act you’ve been forced to maintain is all in service of that dreadful fact, which you’ve always known to be true: That, if you speak just a few honest words, they’ll completely disown you, and turn whoever they can against you.
It’s not a fair trade, is it? You, carrying all of this guilt, upholding their image (to whom?), and them, ever ready to turn against you, instinctively primed to pounce.
And they know all this. It’s part of their game. They’ve trapped you, by turning the number 1 rule that we all accept against you: No matter the cost, you don’t hurt people.
You can’t tell the truth, because that would hurt them. You can’t let them leave your life, because that would hurt them. You can’t be honest with yourself, because that would hurt them.
When I sent my sister a list of common phrases used by manipulative people, she picked up on one in particular: “That really hurts me”. She said this was one of my mum’s favourite phrases.
My mum’s entire doctrine can be boiled down to that one idea: the absolute worst thing you could ever possibly do is hurt her.
The suffering you go through when you’re away from her (which you feel entirely responsible for) stems from that idea. The power of it, and the hold it has on you, is enormous, and it’s constantly used against you. The whole game becomes about the things she can make you do because of it. Inventing new ways to make you believe you’re hurting her. Finding new ways to hurt you.
That’s why it’s so easy for her to turn my brother against other people. They hurt mum, therefore they are bad, and that’s all there is to it. Nothing to talk about, nothing to redeem. Disown them and hate them.
That’s why she can get away with abusing people in public. The people closest to her, who know exactly what she’d doing, are not allowed to speak up. They’re already imprisoned by their own guilt, as painful as it is to see her hurt another person — and one by one, new victims are ushered in like a cult, where the one and only rule is “do no harm”, but it only applies to her. Anyone else is fair game, with ritual sacrifices happening often to further cement that rule.
And finally, that’s why her toxicity works best against people who are good. The kinder you are as a person, the harder the internal battle you must face. The more she gets to hurt you. The more she gets to control you.
Every time I thought “I shouldn’t hurt her”, she won. Every time I thought “they hurt her, and that’s bad”, she won. Every time I ignored the truth, fought against myself, poured more and more guilt into my heart — she won.
—
Of course, it’s all for show. There is no real hurt on her part. There’s anger, but not real pain. There’s no sorrow over the breaking of bonds. No mourning for what was before, no denial or bargaining to reason away the hurt, no grief over the fallout. Nothing that lasts in a meaningful way. Just the moving of a name, from one column to another. And the presumption of acceptance, on your part, that her response is the rational consequence of whatever irredeemable action you have taken.
But it doesn’t feel fake in the moment. We’re told it’s real, over and over until the reality of what hurting actually is disappears. This illusion we’re left with, this “mum hurt” becomes an entirely new feeling, a toxic mixture of guilt and shame, entirely separate from any real notion of pain. On her part, a rehearsed line; on our part, an all-too familiar feeling of failure.
What it really feels like is that you are solely responsible for the entire ego of this hyper-fragile person, who will break down the moment you so much as suggest a mistake on their part.
But the reality is, she wants it. She wants the conflict. She wants you to be defiant, so she can be angry. So she can turn people against you. So she can be seen as justified in hating you, which is where she feels most comfortable. So she can stop pretending, and hate freely.
To an outsider, this notion that her true self consists almost entirely of anger and the need to control — I have no doubt that it’s a difficult idea to accept. But to me, it’s always been true. I’ve found it harder to accept that she’s a normal functioning person, because the version of her which I write about is the only one I saw growing up. Constantly guilting, lusting for fights, pushing people ‘til they break, always angry, always ready to bite. That’s the real her. That’s who she’s shown herself to be.
In the end, though, it really is about hurt. How badly will it hurt you if the balance is upset? How badly does it hurt already? Who is really suffering here?
These are questions I have struggled with for longer than I can remember. Since she started all this. Since she decided that the most important thing to her is hurting people, and the easiest people to hurt are the ones who already love her.
The weight of all this has been crippling. The guilt, the questions, the confusion — the idea that surely, if I just change myself somehow, this can all be fixed. The idea that, for all of my anger, my heartbreak, my depression, my constant sense of failure, my endlessly critical self judgment… my absent self confidence… the idea that I was the cause. That I’ve always been responsible.
—
Then, after I reached out to a former partner of hers who I saw her abuse, to see if the partner was still suffering — and they, in turn, shared that message with my mother — the decision was made for me.
And just like that, it was over. The crushing weight, it was gone. The once-inescapable mind maze suddenly evaporated, and I felt clear. I began to see things as they really are; as they always have been. I began to see her smallness.
My anger lingered, for a while. It’s hard to let go of something like that. It still felt like a part of me, a genuine facet of my personality for which I was responsible. It felt right to be furious, more now than ever: I had sacrificed my own humanity to protect an unimportant little creature that eats and eats and never gets full, that always bites when approached, and that made me believe that all the hurt, the scratches, the scars, the trauma they put me through, that it was somehow all my own fault.
But I came to understand that most of that anger was really pointed at me. I was eating away at myself. My fear over a constructed, unimaginable pain that I might cause her, had meant I could never truly be angry at her, so I’d been mentally self-harming instead.
Without that burden of responsibility, I didn’t need to hate myself anymore. I’m not responsible for her. I don’t need to feel ashamed all the time. I’m free.
And so, my anger turned to pity, which, in time, turned into a serene apathy: I hated her for her ugliness; then I saw how small she is; and then, finally, I stopped caring.