Thanks everyone for your likes and your comments.
@Not Important - I too have been made to look like I'm bad (and crazy) for stopping contacting my mother almost seven years ago. She herself left me a voice message which comes to mind, telling me that I'm "a very selfish young lady". I hate that abusers try to make their victims look like the bad, crazy, selfish ones, when they are the ones who - yeah, second Holocaust sounds a suitable punishment to me.
I wasn't going to start this but I really need it all out of my system. I'm sorry to read that others here have also had abusive mothers.
It'll probably take me several separate posts to do this because it hurts my heart to even type a little bit.
I went to sleep after typing and ended up having the same old nightmares, ones that, when I was a child, I couldn't understand why I was having them, ones that, twenty - one months ago in the process of seeing a psychologist for my eating disorder, I finally understood. Sickeningly, when I had them as a child, it was my mother who I would call for help, I'd tell her what the nightmare was and she'd just do her false laugh and tell me that it was just a silly dream. It wasn't a silly dream. It was my young mind trying to process what she was doing to me in reality. Her sadistic sexual abuse of me, her only daughter, her only child. I should have been able to trust her, be looked after by her, be comforted by her when bad things happened. I couldn't because, she was the bad thing that was happening to me.
She kept me almost completely isolated, every time I tried to have friends she done everything she could to put an end to the friendships, in childhood, I basically had one male friend. She tried to ruin it too but I managed to stay friends with him until he left school when we were both sixteen. The only family I got to see regularly were my mother's sister and parents. There were rare visits from my father's side of the family as my mother made it clear she didn't like them. She even managed to keep it secret from me that I had cousins who lived less than a ten minute walk from our flat I grew up in. So I was very isolated. No siblings. I was very quiet and shy at school. Usually good at my work, I'd get my head down and just get on with it. Never raised my hand to answer questions even when I knew the right answers. I doubt anyone would've imagined that at home my own mother was terrorising me.
I am unsure exactly when my mother began sexually abusing me, but I do remember her doing things from when I was about four until about nine years old. After nine there was still what is described as non contact sexual abuse. I still have no idea how many times she done these things, I have a lot of gaps where I just can't remember much at all of under the age of ten. If there was more than what I already remember, I don't want to know, because the little amount I do remember is terrifying and devastating. Even if I'd known that what she was doing was wrong (she made the very worst thing look like it was necessary and no one ever warned me that you shouldn't let people touch you "down there"), I'd have been too scared to tell anyone. Sometimes she would threaten me by saying I'd be sent to the "home for bad girls". I was just too terrified of her anyway.
My father was usually high on cannabis. He was pretty much no use, a typical male chauvinist who believes that housework is for women. What they had in common was they are both selfish, narcissistic and incapable of loving others, including me.
There was no way, and no one to tell about the abuse. So I think I used dissociation to cope. I created another person to be, a boy, I called him Sean. And usually when things got too stressful I became him instead. I spent a lot of time as him when I was a child. I still have this other part in me now. When my mother's mother died thirteen months ago, I became Sean again as it was the only way of coping. There was no way I could be there because my mother would be there, I had remembered what she had done eight months prior to this and it was likely if I came face to face with her, I'd either harm her, myself or both of us. I was still full of rage over the memories. So I missed out, I didn't get to see my grandmother in her last few weeks of life or get to go to her funeral.
Three months after my grandmother died, my mother sent me a wedding invitation, she was marrying her boyfriend she'd been with for about nine years. It went ahead, needless to say, I didn't even respond. The new husband is perfect for her because his line of work lets him travel all over the world. Since I stopped talking to her seven years ago, I've lost count of the different places she's lived in (she pestered me by phone and sending letters even though I never responded to her). Different parts of Scotland, England, Hong Kong, New Jersey (where, ironically, there is a therapist who specialises in mother daughter sexual abuse), back to London and goodness knows where else. It seems she doesn't want to stay in one place too long. Funny, that.
