confidante

After my parents got divorced my mother expected me to be her husband, and her shrink, and her all-around whipping post. It was all about her, getting her needs met, getting her anger out, taking care of her. She told me things about my father and their divorce that were certainly not appropriate to be sharing with a 9 year old, then told me that she was only sharing these things with me because I was so "mature" and she knew that I could "handle it." However, this confidante relationship was by no means reciprocal; I couldn't tell her anything without her ignoring me or flying into a rage. Or later, once I was older, flat-out laughing at me.

I think when you grow up with a mother like I had, one who continuously ignores you and takes advantage of you, that you don't know what to do - mothers are supposed to love their children without condition and completely, so you keep thinking that the next time will be different. Next time she'll listen, next time she'll be happy for me, today she's just having a bad day. Until you learn that every day is a bad day unless the topic is her. I think it took me until I was in my late 20's to start realizing that I'd be better off accepting my mother's limitations instead of thinking that next time I needed her she would be there for me; she wasn't going to change. She'd learned her script long ago and she had it down perfectly.

A real turning point in how I viewed my mother came for me when I was nineteen and home from college for the summer after my freshman year. It had been a strange year for me, I had gone from my hometown in Ohio to Texas for college, claiming that I needed to be far away from home and that I wanted have warm weather. Excellent criteria for choosing a college. The university that I had chosen to attend, Southern Methodist University, had a reputation for being a bunch of spoiled rich party kids and my mother did not approve - she wanted me to go somewhere more intellectual and with a liberal arts curriculum (in retrospect, she was right on that one). While I liked being in a bigger city, Dallas, and I made some great friends at SMU, I kind of lost my way there - or maybe I was on my way to finding myself? I'm not sure. But in contrast to my prior good girl record, my grades my freshman year were not great, and instead of a good girl I was a total party girl - the kind of lush that people whisper about in secret, wondering if she's an alcoholic in the making. I loved being away from my family - I felt such freedom. But I also knew that a lot of the choices I was making were not really me.

In fact, the whole Southern thing really bothered me. I felt that many of the people I came in contact with were not at all authentic, they were instead all wrapped up in image and talked about money constantly - who had it, how they'd gotten it, whether it was old or new. I also encountered true racism for the first time, the kind that's learned from parents and grandparents and inherently accepted as truth. I was surrounded by kids from Georgia and Alabama and Tennessee who thought nothing of making racist jokes out in the open, around people they hardly knew, without the slightest inkling that their way of thinking was not the norm for most people. I was also surrounded by women with profound insecurities, who believed that leaving the dorm without setting their hair in hot rollers was a sin and who thought it was normal to stop in the bathroom after lunch to stick a finger down their throat. The conventional wisdom on my dorm floor was that many of the women were there to get their M.R.S. degrees; those women who were there with other ambitions were seen as mysterious or odd and usually were from outside the South.

After my freshman year I went home for the summer. I tried to cook something up to live with my roommate in Atlanta or even to work on a cruise ship, but I couldn't pull it together. Plus, I had been writing letters to a boy from my high school class that I'd always been interested in throughout high school but the timing had never been right - we'd always both been dating other people. That summer we hit it off and started dating; I loved his mother I think more than him, she was warm and nurturing and always willing to listen. She was something of an artist, she wove baskets and made homemade pesto and generally took care of me that summer. We talked about art and writing and she was warm and encouraging and most of all she listened and took me seriously, validating my desires to write and to be something different than what I was. I was in heaven, spending much of my time at my boyfriend's house.

One evening that summer I was at my mother's on a rare night when she happened to be home also. Both of my sisters were out and so there we were, in the kitchen alone. My mother was in a good mood that night, so she offered to make dinner for me; I accepted her grilled cheese, thinking that this would be a good time to talk to her and tell her what I was feeling. I had begun to realize that I didn't want to go back to SMU, that I wanted to finish college somewhere that had a good writing program and where I could be myself instead of a faker wearing pearls with a tee shirt. My mother was prattling on and on about my return to school later that summer; she couldn't wait to get me out of the house again so that she'd only have to deal with two kids instead of three. Once I was gone my middle sister would be a senior and my baby sister a junior, so the finish line for her was in sight.

 "So I've been thinking about going back to school," I said to my mother. 

My mother turned from the stove and looked at me with suspicion, realizing the seriousness of my tone. I think she knew something was coming, and her good mood instantly vanished.

"I guess you're going to be pretty broken up to leave Mrs. Tartin. Maybe Tim can transfer so you can all still be together." My mother, although never having wanted to put in the work to have a close relationship with me, realized that I had grown close to my boyfriend's mom and was threatened by it. For once, her condescending tone made me feel sad instead of angry. I wanted to let her know that I could confide in her too.

"Elaine," I said solemnly, "I think this is real." I never called my mother mom, only Elaine, her first name.

"What's real?" she looked at me in exasperated confusion.

"I think I'm in love. I think Tim and I are in love. It's the first time I've ever felt this way."

I wish I could convey the spectrum of emotions that I saw cross my mother's face at that moment. I was hoping that she would put down the spatula, cross the room and give me a hug, hoping she would act excited and happy and motherly and that we'd finally connect and have a Hallmark mother-daughter moment. Instead, she practically sneered with disgust at me.

And then she laughed at me.

"Oh really," she said with disdain, "huh. Isn't that rich. I wish you a whole lot of fucking luck with that." Then she laughed her crazylady laugh even louder, as a hyped-up exclamation point on the end of her very pointed sentence. She took the frying pan off the burner, threw it in the sink along with the spatula, and left, maniacally laughing all the way.

Oh god.

I felt so stupid for thinking that my mother would be able to connect with me, stupid for trying to talk about my feelings with her, stupid for bringing up love. Why had I even bothered? I stood at the sink munching on the remains of the grilled cheese, sick with rejection. Then I walked upstairs to my childhood room and lay on my bed, wondering what had just happened. Why couldn't my mother ever feel happy for me? Why was it that whenever something good happened in my life she had such contempt for me? I was confused and hurt but I'd learned something. My mother and I were never going to be a made-for-TV-movie mother and daughter. After trying yet again to open myself up to her in hopes of being embraced, I was rejected, belittled and scorned. Instead of drawing her in, my vulnerability, especially in matters of love, was repellant to her. Never again would I put myself out there to be laughed at and disdained by her. And that was the beginning of my journey away from my mother.

yoooo hooo

I've always known that my mother believes that she was robbed of the life that she was meant to live, mainly by my father but also by circumstance, by chance. She is always the victim; never has it occurred to her that she too made choices in life. Her woe is me routine is embarrassing to watch. Case in point - recently my sister J got married. Weddings seem to bring out the crazy in my mother, in fact, some of the worst behavior I've ever witnessed from her has taken place at or leading up to a wedding. When J got engaged my best advice to her was to "buckle up, baby". But, my mother has always had a more even-keeled relationship with my sister than she has with me, so I was hopeful she'd be on her best behavior.

For the most part I think E. conducted herself pretty well in terms of my sister's wedding; there were only a few minor moments that I witnessed where I wanted to get the muzzle out. The dinner before J's bachelorette party, which my mother and J's future mother-in-law, Bonnie, were invited to, was one of them. We tried to strategically seat the mothers apart from one another since my mother had already demonstrated an inability to control her comments around Bonnie, but it didn't work. Surprise.

After announcing out loud in her fake whisper voice about six times that "this restaurant is so expensive" (it wasn't) I told her that I would pay for her dinner. My youngest sister B was already kicking me under the table and we hadn't even had the appetizers yet. I took it upon myself to order a bottle of wine; when it arrived, the waiter poured a glass for my mother. She eyed it with suspicion and immediately made a production of scooping the ice cubes out of her water glass to put into her wine - no matter that it was already perfectly chilled, that's how she likes her wine. Fine. I decided to let that one go. You have to choose your battles with her.

Halfway through her glass of sauvignon blanc, the wheels started to come off. First she asked the girls sitting across the table from her, who were talking about their children, how old they were. When they answered 24 and 25, she turned to me and said, "See, they had their children young, hmmmmpf." Not sure what that was supposed to mean but the effect was as intended - to embarrass me. The 24-year old, trying to be nice, said, "Oh, your daughter can't be much older than we are!" and my mother in turn announced, "Well, ha, thank you very much but she's 34!" The usual omigod, you don't look that old pleasantries ensued. My mother started stroking my hair and batting her eyelashes at me and I just wanted to smack her. Instead I poured myself more wine. In therapy I learned that's called a coping mechanism.

"Bonnie," my mother half-shouted, "how old were you when you had your children?" She didn't even listen to the answer, just launched into the next point she needed to make, "Oh, but you and Chester are much younger than I am." Obnoxious? Check. Inappropriate? Check. Untrue? Check. Just then my sister's friend Tanisha arrived, all decked out in red and took a seat at the end of the table. My mother does not like Tanisha because Tanisha works for my father, which must make her a bad person. After blatantly looking Tanisha up and down for a minute, my mother said, "Well Tanisha looks very mature this evening."

Tanisha doesn't take shit from anyone (probably part of why my dad has her working for him). She raised one perfect eyebrow at my mother and said, "What Elaine, are you saying I look old?"

My mother, totally called out on her bitchiness, fake laughed and said, "Oh no, of course not, I meant that as a compliment, you look nice tonight." Tanisha gave her a look and let it go.

Let's take a moment to remember that reason we are at this dinner is to celebrate the marriage of my sister J. Not once has my mother said anything nice about J. or her fiancé, or asked my sister about wedding details, or tried to engage her daughter's future mother-in-law in a pleasant conversation. Nope. As we ate our dinner, my mother picked and pulled at her salmon and pronounced it "too rich for me" and then looked at my plate and said, "I don't know why you ordered pasta," which is code for why would you choose pasta, you don't need to be eating that you fat little doughgirl. Actually, I don't usually order pasta, I probably chose it because I needed some comfort food to make it through the dinner. My mother cannot eat out at restaurants, she thinks it's a waste of money and she doesn't actually ever sit down and eat a meal, so it's foreign territory to her, she doesn't quite know what to do with herself. I had lost my appetite. Time for more wine.

The waiter came to clear plates and asked my mother, who had consumed maybe 1/3 of her fish, "Are you finished with your plate m'am?" A simple question. My mother leaned over to me and said loudly, "Well can I take it with me?" I asked the waiter to wrap it up for her, then gave him the go-ahead to take my food. "Aren't you going to take yours?" my mother asked.

"No, because we're going out after this, I don't want to carry it."

"Well I don't know what you're thinking, because I'll take it." What happened to pasta being so evil? Across the table, one of J's bridesmaids indicated that she was finished with her chicken dish, which was also mostly uneaten.

"Jessi," my mother said loudly, "are you going to finish that?"

"No, I don't have anywhere to put it, since we're going out." Jessi paused - knowing my mother well, she added, "Elaine, you're welcome to take it."

Exactly the opening my mother was looking for. As Jessi directed the waiter to wrap hers up as well, my mother yelled, "Yoo-hoooooooo" to the waiter. He turned to her expectantly.

"Yooooo-hooooo, can you put that all in one box for me?" she trilled, then turned to me and said triumphantly in the loud stage-whisper voice, "That will feed me for a week!" Dear god. I turned to my sister to roll my eyes and show my solidarity, just in time to see Bonnie, my sister's future mother-in-law, roll hers. Total mortification. My mother was pleased. Woe is me mission accomplished.

autopilot

It seems that on some level my mother herself was the very thing which she always accused me of being - selfish. But really I think it goes deeper than that. I've come to believe that her father's inability to love her, compounded with my father's rejection of her, impaired her greatly. It caused her to believable that she was unlovable, flawed, and damaged in some fundamental way. In turn, I think this affected her ability to love us. If no one has ever treated you with real and authentic love, how can you in turn give love to someone else? Especially when those "someone elses" came from one of those failed relationships? Of the three girls, I am most like my father, so it would stand to reason that my mother would have the hardest time showing love to me. A note to all of you parents out there that get divorced - you cannot disparage and put down your ex in front of your children. It will ruin them in some way.

When you're young, your mother is the center of your universe, the person you look to for approval, for comfort, for love. You need your mother more than anyone, perhaps especially if you're a girl. I learned to cope without a mother. Who did I look to for approval, comfort, love? Well, I still looked to my mother, I just didn't get what I was looking for, so I turned to school, to my female teachers specifically, to get it instead. I could always read more books on the reading wheel or memorize more of the world's geography or diagram a sentence for approval. School was Approval Central for me.

For comfort, I think I just did without. I learned to numb myself up at will, burying myself in a book. I was seriously one of those kids that had a flashlight under her bed and would get in trouble for reading under the covers. Reading was a whole other world to me, in the stories I read people had perfect families and didn't have divorced parents. The mothers loved the fathers and the parents loved the children. The Sweet Valley High twins were pretty and smart and perfect and fun, just like I wanted my life to be. Comfort? Who needed comfort? I learned early on how to operate on auto-pilot. If I was scared or angry or worried about something, I would just turn my feelings off.

As for love, I was still loved. I was cared for in the most basic ways, I never lacked food or shelter or clothing. I lived in a beautiful house in a rose-colored room, and was dressed impeccably; our diet of doughnut holes and cheddar cheese cubes with Coke may have been questionable, but it worked. The thing that I do feel was lacking was attention. When you're a kid, a lot of what love is isn't your parents telling you "I love you" but the attention that you're paid. I was dying for some attention.

My dad did his best but he was (is) a classic workaholic. He always provided for us financially, took us on fabulous vacations, and spent plenty of time hanging out with us on his assigned weekends. I loved being with my dad, he was always so even-keeled, full of encouragement, and normal - he was a rock. Unlike my mother, you could always count on him. But he wasn't the adult that was around us day to day - that was my mother, who was trying to cope but not doing a great job. I felt like she was in "get through the day" mode a lot - and getting through the day didn't include sitting down for dinner and having warm and fuzzy time at the end of each day. Get through the day mode meant baked chicken or grill cheese for dinner, tv in the den for us and smoking in a dark bedroom for her. Always talking on the phone in hushed tones - I still don't know who she was talking to all those years.

My sisters tended to get the limited attention that my mother did have, since it was assumed that I was the oldest and could take care of myself. Sometimes I would retreat to my room to read or do homework and the numbness would overtake me, but I wanted to be strong because that was my role, that was what I was praised for, being so self-sufficient. But I also wanted some attention and I guess I wanted to feel something too. So I started trying to break my own arm. I would take a running start and crash myself into a wall as hard as I could, bouncing off onto the floor, shoulder aching, arm bruised. Over and over again, night after night, day after day. Sometimes I would try to break my hand instead, since the fingers were smaller I reasoned they weren't as strong as the arm was. I would punch walls, scraping my knuckles and leaving scabs. I never managed to break anything, just managed to beat myself up even more. My mother never noticed anything, not the noise I would make running into walls and punching, never noticed my red raw knuckles. Sometimes I would complain that my arm hurt and she would glance my way and say with exasperation "You're fine." I was fine. But I wasn't feeling loved, or paid attention to, or much of anything except ignored and unimportant, and since those weren't good feelings to have, I turned my feelings off and went back to life on autopilot.

flirtation

My mother used to love to tell me how selfish I was. And for years, probably until I got out of college and lived on my own for a bit, I believed her. If someone tells you something enough you do start to believe it, good or bad. When I was still in junior high I decided that I would grow up and live by myself in a huge mansion; then I could do whatever I liked. At the time I didn't see this as lonely or sad, I thought it was very glamorous and noble of me. My motto was "no men in my mansion." Once my aunt asked me with concern, "No men at all?" I reconsidered and responded, "Well, maybe the butler." I guess you can't grow up with Ms. Drama as your mother and not harbor a little bit of drama yourself.

In college this theme continued - I would tell my friends that I could never get married because I was too selfish. That I liked my alone time too much. That married life just wasn't for me. I believed it. I kept believing it for years, until about the time I turned 30 and was still playing the family caretaker and realized that it would be nice to have someone take care of me sometimes (is that selfish?) From the moment my parents separated, my mother was no longer capable of taking care of anyone but herself, and I'm not sure she was even able to do that much of the time. When it was time for the three of us to go with my father for the weekend, we had better be packed and ready to go by the time we left for school on Friday morning, b/c when we got home our father would be there and she wanted us out. She wasn't even apologetic about it, just get your shit packed and get out, I need some time to myself. I felt like we were the biggest drain on her imaginable, that the minute we left her world relaxed and became a better place. It felt like she'd rather do anything then be with us.

I don't know what she did on those weekends without us. Shortly after the divorce my mom started dating Paul, who was much younger than she, maybe 27 or so. After accepting that the divorce was inevitable, my mother decided she was no longer going to be seen driving a tomato-red Volvo station wagon (my dad took the Bimmer), so one Saturday afternoon on the way back from our grandparents house she stopped at a car dealership on the way home, a Volkswagon lot. Our salesman was a young cute guy with longish hair and an earring named Paul, who must have been nuts to flirt with my mother with her three young daughters in the car. But flirt they did and within days the Volvo was no more, we had a brand new Volkswagon Quantum and my mother had her first official post-divorce suitor. For one of their early dates he picked her up on his motorcycle wearing a leather jacket and whisked her off to Hara Arena (think of a place where monster-truck rallies would take place) to see Billy Idol in concert. The neighbors loved it. Apparently so did my mother because despite the fact that someone in front of them at the concert got overly excited during "White Wedding" and took a flying dive onto the concrete floor, resulting in a huge commotion and an ambulance being ushered in, they continued to date.

One weekend when we were staying with my dad, I left a math book that I needed for an assignment that I had to work on over the weekend at my mother's house. That was another known no-no with my mother, we couldn't even think about coming home Sunday night with homework that wasn't done. She didn't want to deal with it, she didn't want to hear about it, end of story. So on Saturday early evening we went out with my dad to pick up pizza and on the way back we stopped at my mother's house. It was fall and rainy and the wet leaves were coming off the trees in clumps but the light was on on the front porch.

I hopped out of the car, put the pizza box on the seat, and ran up to the back screened-in porch. The old screen door creaked open and as I stepped onto the porch I noticed two things; one, that the house seemed to be very dark and two, that there were a pair of men's boots by the back door, as if someone had taken them off before going into the house not to get the floors wet. As I grabbed the back door and twisted it to go in, I was stopped dead in my tracks. The back door wouldn't open. The back door was locked. Locked? I couldn't remember a time when our back door had been locked. Maybe on Christmas Day when we went to see my grandparents and left all of our newly-unwrapped presents in the living room under the tree, but that was it. I stood on the back porch, flummoxed. I didn't even have a key to our house because it was never ever locked. I tried the door again, rattling it good and hard in its frame and peering in through the door panes. That's when I saw my mother.

She came charging around the corner from the kitchen, half-dressed in a bubblegum pink terrycloth robe and no shoes or socks. Her hair was totally messed up on one side and ooh could I tell she. was. pissed. Lithium.

I saw her turn the lock and then rip the back door open with all of her strength. In doing so her robe, which she had been holding closed with one arm, fell open. Underneath was what can only be described as a black, full-length lace body stocking. Skimpy lace. My mouth fell open, horrified. My mother looked down and yanked her robe closed. She hissed in her stage whisper, "WHAT are you doing here?" Her eyes were crazylady eyes.

I live here, I wanted to say. This is my house too. Instead I focused my attention on the sign hanging beside the door that said "Back Door Guests Are Best" and said meekly, "I needed my math book."

"How did you get over here?" she said, sticking her head onto the porch and craning her neck to look out into the driveway, still clutching the front of her robe. "Your father!?" she hissed hysterically. "Your father is in my driveway." She said this as an accusatory statement in her normal every day voice. "Jesusfuckingchrist."

"Can I get my book?" I asked.

"Nooooo, you cannot get your goddamn book. Go back to your father's house and come back tomorrow after you call first. Now get out." She gave me a push toward the door to the porch and her robe fell open again. I looked at her outfit pointedly and she screamed, "NOW!"

I turned and ran off the porch. As I climbed back in my dad's car and he asked good naturedly, "No book?"

"I didn't see it," I said, making no mention of all I had seen.

crazy land

Growing up in crazy land made me think that I had to prove myself on the outside so that everyone would think I was normal even if my family wasn't. The small tight knit community where I grew up (which, by the way, was referred to often by it's nickname, The Dome, i.e. we all live in a bubble - this was also the name of my high school newspaper, snort) knew all about my family's divorce from the day my parents separated - it was big news. I was on my way to Courtney Gabel's birthday party at Rollerworld when they told us they were getting a divorce, and I didn't want to go but my mother told me, "You're going." I just wanted to sit on one of the carpeted blocks by the rink, my skates heavy on my feet, watching everyone else having fun while I felt miserable. Instead I faked it, skated to the Moonlight Skate with my friends and ate too much cotton candy, trying to put on a good face. A lesson learned early on - sugar can always make things better.

One of the first things my mother told us when they were separated was that when kids' parents get a divorce, often they are upset and get bad grades or act out in school, but she knew that wasn't going to happen to us. We could always ask for help with our schoolwork. First off, this was bullshit b/c if I ever did ask for help with schoolwork it was math, and the only one that knew how to do any math was my father, and he wasn't going to be living with us anymore. This meant that even more than usual, I was on my own. I had to work even harder to prove how smart I was. Besides, the better grades I got, the more my mother seemed to be in a good mood, which was rare at the time. So I made it my mission to be Super Straight A Girl for the sake of a happier home life for me and my sisters. And it made me feel good to be praised for working hard in school - it seemed like it was one of the few times that my mother really paid any attention to me since she was so wrapped up in her own world.

Now that I'm older I realize that being perfect on the outside doesn't always make it all ok, although it helps. Seriously. One thing that I can say about growing up the way I did is that the emphasis on always faking it to seem like everything's fine has served me well in my professional life. People perceive me to be confident and smart and it's gotten me through grad school and pretty far in my career(s). I've been told through crises that I always seem to be perfectly calm and in control, although the truth is internally I am freaking out and probably feeling like I didn't do a good enough job. But no one sees that, I just have to live with it. I always feel like on some level I AM faking everything and that it's only a matter of time before I'm found out. I can accept success and recognition, but I feel like I got it through dishonest means, that I fooled everyone or that I got lucky. I am constantly living in fear of failure, because to fail would validate the idea that I'm a fake. So I keep doing more.

But lately I'm tired. Tired of the rat race, tired of overachieving, tired of feeling like my self-worth is tied up in what I do or how much money I make. But it is. It's innate for me. I don't know how to get past it. I think that on some level I know that it's time for a change, I think that's part of why I wanted to move, to take myself away from all of the other overachievers so that I didn't feel so compelled to compete. For all that I've achieved, I feel remarkably unfulfilled. The longing has never gone away, I just managed to distract myself from it with allof the busy busy busy bustle of life. As I write this I realize how scary it will be, to have to go there, to have to dredge all of this shit up to the surface, to write about everything I feel. Because in truth I've been good a punching back how I feel, so that I can go on functioning. When I went to therapy a few years back, before I got married, my therapist pronounced me "better" for the time being but then said "when it's time for you to have kids, you'll be back." And here I am, clock ticking and full of self doubt and questioning everything.

I want to write this all down, in a book, spew it all out there. What I know is that it will be the hardest thing I've ever done, because there's nothing I'm more afraid to fail at. That's why I've procrastinated all these years, always taking a new job or starting a new career -  because I know those are things I can do and do successfully. But can I write a book and do it well? Same goes for the kid question, can I have a kid and not screw it up beyond belief? For both, can I let myself be that vulnerable? I think I'm ready to try. But the pull to just numb it all back up and go back to Super Straight A Girl is overwhelming at times.

"High achieving daughters with the imposter syndrome are at great risk for ‘generalized anxiety, lack of self-confidence, depression, and frustration related to inability to meet self-imposed standards of achievement,' and cannot usually stop proving their worth until they work through a recovery program." - Karyl McBride, PhD.

* * *

I'm not without sympathy for my mother. To be 37 years old, just a few years older than I am as I write this, and to have three daughters and a high-profile attorney husband, to have just moved into your dream house and gotten a brand new BMW and to feel like you'd finally MADE IT, only to have it all taken away from you without warning, would be horrible. To have quit working to stay home with your children and to be settled into the groove, only to have to go back to work in the social work field which paid practically nothing, and to be dependent on your ex-husband whose distaste for you is palpable, and to still love him, would be a nightmare. Although did she love my dad, or did she just sense that he would take care of her? I've never been able to figure that out. It's funny to think about how this cycle plays out.

My mother, as a child, was constantly told by my grandfather that she had a "face only a mother could love." She was one of 4 children, two boys and two girls, and the boys were prized over the girls. She grew up with a massive inferiority complex (she and my aunt both have it) and lacked a father figure who took care of her and validated her. She grew up needing more love. Needy, a word I hate even today. Needy, something I strive never to be. I have such scorn for neediness. Being vulnerable is maybe the hardest thing for me, probably b/c I associate being needy with being vulnerable and being vulnerable with rejection. I think when my mother and father got together, she was incessantly needy but she tried to take care of my dad. In doing so, she let herself become completely dependent on him - totally vulnerable - she put all of her hopes and dreams and trust in him. She also became completely financially dependent on him. When he rejected her, she felt horrible shame and anger but most of all she felt again as if the prophecy were true - she was unlovable, just as she had been as a child. Failed relationships are looked upon as embarrassing on some level - each time my mother has had another one that failed, especially her first and later her second marriage, it's reinforced the idea that no one is able to love her, that she is unlovable. Hell I have a hard time loving her, she does her best to push people away from her with all of her drama and all of her antics.

I have always thought I understood why my dad left. It's not an acceptable thing to say maybe, but having lived with my mother for 18 years, I get it. She's tough and she can beat you down. If I had had a chance to leave, maybe I would have done the same thing, but for me it was different. You can leave your wife but you can't leave your mother, at least not in the same way. My mother needs constant attention; if she's not the center of attention, she will act out to ensure that she is. It's exhausting. I think my dad just couldn't take it anymore. Part of me thinks he wanted to take my sisters and I out of that environment by having his own home where things were more normal. I do think he meant to do this; when he left he bought a house in the same town as my mother and we were always welcomed and encouraged to stay with him. For a long time we did this rotational schedule where we spent every other weekend with him, and then every third month one of us would live at his house. In theory this was a great idea, but in reality my dad was a super-workaholic, so when we were at his house, he wasn't always around much. I don't blame him for it though. When he was spending time with us, he was the other end of the parenting spectrum from my mother, which was something the three of us certainly needed - any kind of balance to her narcissism was an absolute blessing.