My kids are grown now, and they each took a piece of my heart that will forever belong to them. I long to see their faces and spend time with them and their families. I think of that constantly and that is my “wishing dream”.

I’m writing this to let my kids know exactly how much they meant to me and HOW DEEPLY I LOVED THEM, THEN AND NOW, even when I was living through some of the harder times in my life and had no clue what I was doing. When my actions screamed “I’m a bad parent” … My heart screamed back, “I loved you still”.

There was NEVER a time that I didn’t love you. I had such high hopes of being the best parent ever when I was a little girl dreaming of a family, but that was never realized for either one of you kids and for that I’m sorry.

I loved my children FIERCELY, as I do today. I always have and I always will. I ache for them daily and it is my soul cry to see them and hold them once more.

It was my dream to be able to be a great grandmother (Momo) but that was viciously taken away from me years ago with nothing but the silent treatment ever since.

That in itself was a form of abuse (called grandparent alienation) so I guess my daughter is getting me back, using her children to do so. There is nothing right about that, any way you flip it.

I’m 55 now and a SURVIVOR of addiction, as well as a survivor of domestic violence, and a lifetime sufferer of ADHD. I say “sufferer” because it still remains undiagnosed and untreated to this very day. But even though it is undiagnosed, that doesn’t stop it from making you suffer.

I was never the best parent, it’s a classic symptom of adult ADHD (esp unmedicated), but there is also one thing that you must know.

This is one thing I must get written down so that my children will read this and see my heart.

I always loved my babies, with every single piece of my heart and soul.

I grieve for them in my life, especially in the present tense. I made a lot of mistakes and bad decisions but they were my pride and joy. They were the only two things I ever did right.

I was just not guided correctly period and I just didn’t have a clue on how to show them. It’s NO excuse, it’s just true 😞 I just never knew how to be a mother, pain and simple. I really didn’t know how to be a person either.

… It is what it is …

I take full responsibility of all my wrongs, but those wrongs were caused mostly by an unrecognized disorder coupled with being raised by a narcissistic monster. This unrecognized disorder was the underlying culprit that caused a domino effect of events and decisions to unfold in my life, and with a tornado of people left in it’s wake.

I’m not using this disorder as an EXCUSE by any means; however, it was the reason things went in the direction they did. The beginning of the domino effect, if you will!

Because of this disorder, my thoughts were completely distorted and all over the place. It was hard to know which thoughts were mine or not.

The intense insecurities I felt were off the chain, along with major anxiety and the poor life coping skills I displayed. I had no real life skills to be a valuable person in society at all. At least that what I was told, especially by my mother.

Let me also get this straight. I’m NOT writing this to bash my mother. I do have to say this though, if she was ashamed of how she treated me and didn’t ever want it “out there”, she wouldn’t have done it. She was an adult so she knew what she was doing (according to her) and I knew nothing.

I can’t tell the story and leave her part out because each piece of this story, made me who I am today. I fought VERY hard to become her. Again…..

… It is what it is …

So, when I made life decisions during these times, they were made from a very clouded and distorted viewpoint.

Does this make any sense?

I wish someone would have stopped me from making wrong decisions. Problem is, I probably wouldn’t have listened even if they would have. I’m sure my dad and friends may have tried to but I was so out of it, with this disorder taking over my whole life. I refused to listen to anyone and also I hated everyone at the time, but worse, I hated myself as well. I felt if you weren’t helping me, you were against me. It seemed then, that no one at all, was helping me. I always felt very alone and sad as a child.

Most normal young people are rebellious to a degree anyway, so you can imagine how much worse a young teenager (that suffers from a crippling mental disorder that no one was aware of at that time) could be? I see it all clearly now, looking back …

LOVE would have easily made me a different person, I see that in hindsight!

Oh, I wish that someone would have seen the symptoms in me back then. But ADHD, when I was a teenager was unheard of. That didn’t stop it from devouring me emotionally.

… But no one seemed to see me struggle ...

This is where my memory fades from the timeline. (Yet another symptom of adult ADHD)

My parents thought I was just making excuses for my grades or mistakes when I forgot something or acted up due to what was blowing up in my head or just got in trouble for.

They labeled me rebellious, lazy and selfish and I was told I couldn’t possibly care about them or myself either or else I would “stop this craziness right away”.

I knew it wasn’t true, because I wanted so bad to be loved by them and to show them I could love them and be good at the same time. I did love them but they couldn’t see that through my emotional shortcomings.

Sadly, I’d failed, time and again, to “show them” with my actions. In their minds, knowing they had discussed my behavior with me, and NOT being able to see a change in me (for the better) it was automatically assumed that just I didn’t care.

This was sooooo far from the truth. I wanted so much to love them and be loved by them but I felt like they looked at me with so much disgust (in my distorted mind that’s how I perceived them looking at me) that I would eventually stop trying, altogether.

I always knew my Dad wanted me when I was adopted, but did he love me? I wonder that now because he allowed my mother to much freedom when it came to me. He was her “flying monkey”. A “flying monkey” is someone the narcissist recruits as a sidekick. They are just as guilty of inflicting abuse as the monster narcissist is because they watch it happen and do NOTHING about it.

I never questioned his love for me until recently, after I found the Facebook group for adult daughters of emotional abuse Narcissist mother’s. My mother never wanted a child in the first place. This was told to me more than once by different family members. She never loved me and I knew that without being told. I realized my dad could not have loved me or he would have done something to have stopped my mother for emotionally demolishing me. That was a hard pill for me to swallow because my dad was my hero, until I learned all this. He was no one’s hero. He helped her get away with everything.

A kid can feel love and they can also feel it when you don’t love them.

She would forever tell me things like, “your not going to amount to anything when you grow up”… and similar things that no child should hear from a parent.

She told me things that probably should have broken me, but didn’t.

I tried even harder to please her, but I never quite did. To this very day, I have never pleased my narcissist mother. They cannot change and it’s all on them. I’m the research queen, believe me, so I’ve learned A LOT about Narcissist mother’s recently. Once I knew her evil had a name, that is. I finally stopped trying to please her when I was around 47-48 years old. I had worn myself out all these years trying to please her, so she would love me. That is a shame 😞

I used to hope that I would learn that she was abused or something as a child and that would explain her abusive behavior towards me. But all I learned was that she knew how she treated me and others and didn’t care because her personality disorder was in shambles and could not be fixed.

She just made my childhood a lot harder to deal with.

(Let me say I do not blame her for any bad decisions I made because of her negative contribution in my life. I take full responsibility for all the wrong things I did)

In my mind, I was a huge disappointment to them (her mainly), so I actually hated myself for the longest time. I actually felt that I was completely stupid or I would have done better and therefore, they would have loved me.

I became pregnant with my daughter at 20 years old and I was so excited and nervous at the same time because I wanted soooo very much to be a good mother.

That was the burning desire of my heart at the time.

I had no clue how to be a good mother because I didn’t have the best role model and I certainly did not want to be a mother like mine was to me.

Of course, I was considered to be a heathen and/or slut at this time because my mom, this time joined by my dad, never hesitated to tell me how disappointing I was to God and to them. She would even throw my grandmother’s name in there telling me how disappointed she would have been in me pregnant and unmarried. My grandmother was my world as a child, she passed away when I was only 13. My mother knew that she would crush my heart with those words. That is exactly why she said that to me. Evil.

*Our family were not regular church goers but they held fast to those same beliefs. They were right beliefs but they had left out the love of God and forgiveness of Him out of things when pointing fingers at me. I went through life thinking God was a huge man that was always disappointed with me.

Think about it, that’s a HARD load to carry as a young child.

Once my beautiful little girl was born, I was determined to be the best Mommy ever.

… That was short lived …

My mother began telling me from day one after my daughter’s birth, that I was a bad mother and that I was doing everything wrong and I no clue as to what I was doing. You name it, if it was negative to me about my MOTHERING skills, she said it. Of course she watched what she said when my Dad was around.

She would then keep her opinion to herself, for the most part because of Dad. Regardless, I could always feel her disdain and her critical eyes watching me like a hawk, waiting on me to enevitably mess up. Thanks to her telling my dad who knows what about me, he looked at me with that same disdained looked. He didn’t help me or stand up for me. She had her narcissistic claws in him then.

Especially, if we were somewhere visiting, like my cousins, for example. She always embarrassed me in front of them somehow, like clockwork.

I thought it was

because I was deserving of it. I can’t make myself remember what emotion I was feeling when she did those things to me. I have blocked a lot of those feelings out. I remember what happened but the emotions that went along with those times, are gone. I feel more that they were to traumatic for me to remember, even now. I just know it was sad, but I remember thinking then, it went way deeper than that.

She usually didn’t have to wait long for me to “mess up”.

She wasn’t physically harmful to me, but for the mind, will and emotions, she was indeed dangerous. One incident stands out in my memory. It was the closest she ever came to physically abusing me. I was around 11 when this happened. I was a bed wetter from as far back as I can remember until the age of 12. One morning I remember getting up and my stomach dropped with the realization that I had wet the bed sometime that night. Inwardly I was scared of what Mom would say. She picked that time to come in my room and she automatically knew what I had done in my sleep the night before because she could smell it. She was instantly angry and she charged at me and grabbed me by the hair and shoved my face down in the wet sheets. She was smearing my face in the urine soaked covers, similar, I guess, to how you would rub your dogs nose in it’s accidents. This happened so fast and came completely out of the blue. She took me totally by surprise because she’s normally not physical with me. I could never describe the feeling I had during her outrage but I felt like I disappeared and remember it felt like it was happening to someone else. I shudder at what that monster did to that little girl that day because inside something was different, it was like something broke inside of me or detached. I remember that because after it was all over, somehow I knew that I would never be the same, I just knew it even as a young child.

Her negative treatment of me just escalated and magnified the already present underlying problem of the ADHD I was suffering from, although still no one knew it at the time.

Her negativity caused more anxiety, which triggered the ADHD problem more than ever and the war was on once again, in my head.

Stress is no good for anyone suffering from ADHD, especially a child whose personality was in the process of forming or a young woman’s who was already quite sensitive in becoming a new mother.

Moving ahead a couple of years to after I left my daughter’s father, I moved in with my parents to get on my feet. We later moved to Houston, because my Dad found work there, and I needed work as well. Our small hometown did not have a lot of jobs. I found work fast and I also made some friends. I was “seemingly normal”, I guess, but I was never happy especially under the eagle eye of my mother.

I eventually went to business college for a word processing course in 1990-1991 while working two jobs. I would go out with my friends on weekends. I would take my daughter out with me a lot of the time because my mother would complain that I was irresponsible. (I actually was irresponsible because of low self esteem and low self worth due to unrecognized ADHD symptoms. My thoughts were not usually my own and it was very confusing to me … and the emotional abusive words my mother would throw at me),

I felt like damaged goods…

I just had no clue how to interact properly with people and how to essentially, be a mature young and grown up person that I was expected to be. I’d had no guidance whatsoever. It was so painful, I recall, looking back with tears in my eyes!

Now I need to make one other thing clear …

I keep saying it because I’m afraid my daughter will freak out and never speak to me again after I publish this. This is why I called and spoke to my oldest best friend, Sarah about it … She said to write and publish it for me and to hell with what anyone else thought. My daughter hasn’t spoken to me since I’ve come to Longview, Texas to live anyway. She’s kept my grandkids from me as if I were poison.

This comes back to haunt me more time than I tell you…My mother swore to me years ago with a vicious voice, when my daughter was a young girl, that she would turn my daughter against me one day ~ and she finally did 😭

My baby girl will think I’m looking for pity writing this and I’m not. She will think it is for attention and it’s not. I’ve had all the attention I have ever wanted but didn’t need in my life up until this point. No, I’m not writing it for any of those selfish reasons ~ God knows my heart 💓 so I have His back up on that being true. I’m not one to say that type of thing flippantly (about God because I know God is God and He is real and His son Jesus is my Lord and savior) I respect God, although for years I rebelled against Him. I promise to God that I’m only writing this to help someone who will need it later on, for my healing and for my voice to be heard because it was always shushed. Nobody’s shushing me now. What I went through and felt all these years matter. I matter and I deserve to be heard and taken seriously. I’m not a joke. The only ones who would possibly have a problem with MY STORY are the ones who were trying to keep me shushed. As long as I was shushed, they could keep blaming me for things not in my control and the lies they were told could be considered truth.

I’m writing this so my children will know, that despite all I’ve gone through, I have loved them with every single fiber of my being.

This is also important to me that my kids hear my story from me and no one else.

I’m not blaming anyone for anything other than what is their due and I’m not writing this to bash my mother. She’s insignificant to me and to my life now. The world no longer revolves around her and I will break the silence. She’s still alive and can defend herself if she so chooses. I forgave her long ago because if I wanted to move forward in life, I had to forgive her. It’s no longer about her but it’s about me for once. I’m no longer her victim, i am a SURVIVOR! I have just now met some precious women, all ages and nationalities, and they are all women of emotionally abusive (Narcissist) mother’s. When I found that small closed group in Facebook I immediately requested to join. I found out that I was not alone. It blew my mind because I thought no one had a mother like mine. Other people had grown up with mother’s just like I had. I thought I was the only one until now and that’s the God’s honest truth!

I learned she was evil and loved no one but herself and her severe personality disorder could not be fixed. Through this little group and just knowing they went through the same things that I did and made me finally understand …

… IT WAS NOT MY FAULT LIKE I THOUGHT AND WAS TOLD ALL THESE YEARS …

and I wasn’t bad or crazy. I’m able to heal more now than I ever have.

It’s time I told my story. My gut is telling me it is time. My kids have told theirs through my mistakes, my mother has told hers, to her family especially, and I was left out and forgotten by them all it seemed. I was always the bad guy in her stories and she was my victim.

All I ever wanted was THE TRUTH to be told. The REAL truth, not my mother’s warped version of it. I hated people seeing me as she was portraying me to be. It just wasn’t fair but I was helpless against this narcissist monster, I just didn’t know it at the time.

*Narcissist mother’s are lethal to their daughters. Narcissists aren’t some poor souls that were abused when they were a small child, therefore possibly explaining their nasty treatment of their own kids, no not at all. They know EXACTLY what they are doing and they do not care. Google Narcissist mother’s of daughters and you will learn a LOT about how my mother ticks. That’s why I say she was evil, because she KNEW EXACTLY what she was doing to me and did it anyway. It’s impossible for them to love anyone but themselves, even their own children.

… now it’s finally my turn to tell my story ~ unsensored.

That being said, it was not long before we moved back to our hometown from the big city. My daughter was around 10 at this time.

During that time in her childhood, I experienced issues that were hard for me to deal with. I always crying and I always anxious. I finally went to our small town doctor and (sadly) was diagnosed with severe depression. Of course, it didn’t “fix” me like I had prayed it would because the medicine was not meant to treat ADHD. I don’t, to this day, understand why I wasn’t tested for ADHD, but I wasn’t. I didn’t have enough knowledge of the disorder plus, back then, it was thought that only children were affected with this disorder. That’s what they believed back then anyway. It still led to me being undiagnosed and not have the right medication I needed to feel “normal”!

This narrow minded thinking led to a whole generation of adults being untreated or misdiagnosed for ADHD. That is very sad.

I had played around, experimenting with drugs the same as many young people did back then. During my teenage years, I had played around and used marijuana and took some pills here and there but nothing more unless you count a beer here and there when I was out of my parents sight. However, as a young adult with a child, I’d only used marijuana from time to time. I just never did classify marijuana as a drug.

(Marijuana is a plant, not a drug. It was WRONGFULLY placed on schedule one because of people’s STUPID racism at the dawning of it’s becoming illegal in the first place.)

*This was indeed, setting the scene, for my hard core addiction that was to come years later.

My daughter went through a special kind of hell, I’m sure during the years we lived behind my parents house. (It was never a home.)

This was when I was being treated for depression instead of ADHD. So when I went for help, I was not diagnosed correctly so therefore the meds I was given weren’t going to help me.

I tried so hard to be “okay” and “normal“, but nothing changed.

I didn’t know what “okay” and “normal” was.

It only worsened and reared its ugly head in several self-destructive ways during the course of the rest of my life.

My daughter has her own version of my story, that would reveal her feelings around that time, from her perspective. I can’t change how she views things back then because I didn’t feel what she felt. I’m sure I’m the bad guy but it’s okay. I’ve long since paid my dues on anything I’ve ever done wrong, in my mind. I’ve paid dearly to finally have a peaceful mind … Like I said I fought to become who I am today!

However, it cuts me to the core of my very soul knowing I caused her unnecessary pain, but it was not on purpose.

I’m not saying I shouldn’t be accountable for that (because believe me I WAS held accountable and like I mentioned earlier … I paid my dues and then some), all I’m saying is, that I was dealing with something inside me that seemed alien and very frightening. “Why was no one helping me”?

I thought I was going crazy (remember, I had no idea I suffered from ADHD) and I thought I was for real crazy. That was scary for me thinking this about myself …

I was really scared that there was truth to my mother’s words after all. I would get so angry at myself for not measuring up and in doing so, I was proving all my mother’s negative words that she’d used in describing me, to be correct.

A never ~ ending cycle …

As time went on, I couldn’t keep any relationship with a man very long at a time (another classic adult women ADHD symptom) because I usually chose the wrong type of man. That and the fact that I was still trying to put the pieces of my fragmented life together. This would take another thirty years to happen.

The majority of those men ended up being controlling and later on abusive, physically and emotionally. I went from dealing with my mother being controlling and emotionally abusive to being with obsessive and controlling men that wound up being emotionally and physically abusive to me as well. I drew them like flies because of my weaknesses. (no self esteem, no self confidence, no self worth, confused all the time, etc.)

By this time, I thought I deserved the type of treatment I receiving. That is why I accepted the treatment for as long as I did before ever fighting back.

I’m not going to get into details about any of those relationships because this is about how much I loved my kids despite the fact that most of my actions and decisions probably did little to prove that love.

I felt so unwanted and useless back then that I actually thought I was doing my daughter a favor by not being around her like I soooo wanted to be.

That was because I never seemed to do anything right, according to my mother.

When I started shutting down she saw that as her opportunity. In her mind, by shutting down, I was asking her to step in and be my daughter’s mother. So that’s what role she took. All the while making sure I knew what a disgrace of a mother I was. She would tell me that I didn’t love my daughter or I would spend more time with her. So when I tried to spend more time with her she would never seem to leave us alone and if she did, she would go out talking about how my mothering skills were horrible, etc …

… So, I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t. I was utterly and forever confused by this time.

I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere and that nobody loved me because I was weird, different and mentally sick. That was shoved down my throat as well and being sick in the mind, remember was looked down on and thought bad of back then. It was like I could help it or something.

I felt so alone and afraid.

But what nobody ever knew until now was that I wanted more than anything in this world was to take my place as my daughter’s mother. I wanted to show her how much I loved her and to take her in my arms and promise her that I would never let anyone make fun of her or hurt her in any way. I would protect her like I thought parents were supposed too.

But that was not meant to be.

(My father had passed away not to long after August 4, 1998 was the day the father that I adored left this world. I just never understood how he could let my mother hurt me so much and not help me if he loved me. In my research today about Narcissist mother’s, he would have been considered to be her “flying monkey”)

During this time of extreme guilt and grief on my part, my mother once again started in on me. This time she wasn’t kept in check, because my Dad was gone. So she could basically say whatever she wanted. She did just that. She came at me in the worst way she possibly could.

She told me with a smirk on her face, I will never forget it, that it was my fault that my Dad was dead. He died from the stress of having to deal with me and because of me, she was now all alone in the world.

Those words cut through to my very soul and I was literally sick to my stomach for days…

It took me years to finally realize that what she said to me was not true.

Eventually, I was able to move forward from that, but those paralyzing emotions I felt when she hurled that horrible accusation at me overwhelmed me to an almost numbed state for a very, very long time.

All I knew was in my mind, I had failed, again, to be a good daughter and now my mother hated me because I supposedly stressed my father out so much, that I killed him.

My heart breaks now for that young woman because I know what she had to live with and face after that.

I’ve never told anyone, until now, how devastated I had been and how crushed my soul was because of that accusation. I think I will always hate her for that.

It still hurts like crazy today when I think about it, even though I knew I wasn’t the cause of his death.

I hated myself for being a horrid person that only brought misery and death (evidently) to her family. But, life went on and I stayed ashamed and full of guilt.

I remember, thinking back to when my daughter was 10-11 years old, I was begging her almost, to not allow her Mamaw to come between us. I recall being almost frantic as I begged her to please not allow her Mamaw to take her away from me. I was almost begging her for real I remembered, thinking back. My daughter reached her little arms out and she then wrapped them around my neck promising me that would never happen. I still hear and see that instance, clearly in my mind today.

Now the tears are coming fast and furious, as I write this, because I know that little girl loved her mommy more than anything in this world. Later, I would feel that I let her down, the same way my parents let me down.

However, my mother’s shadow was all around us, watching and waiting to pounce if she felt my weaknesses rise. My mind back then stayed in a muddled and confused state. I was not doing any drugs during this time although I constantly accused of it. Her treatment of me kept me right where she wanted me. Anytime I felt strong and in control of myself and my life, she would knock the wind from my sails. Then she would complain that I was not responsible. She would put herself in front of my daughter as a “mother” figure, so I couldn’t be seen by my daughter in any given situation and my daughter would have no choice but to ask my mother for help instead of me. I would then try to get involved with my daughter and her life, and my mother would pounce telling me how unfit I was as a mother, maliciously adding that she was afraid my daughter would be ruined if I was the one in control of her.

Again, just her saying that, I was damned if I did, and damned if I didn’t…..

It wasn’t long after my Daddy passed away that I got together with my son’s father in May of 1998.

I was still so gullible and trusting and still exhibiting ADHD symptoms that had not yet been recognized in me. I had long ago stopped taking antidepressants because they weren’t helping and I didn’t like the way they made me feel. I decided that I would much rather deal with my own natural roller coaster, than a chemically induced one.

…..Part two will be published soon…..

💜💙 Thank you so much for reading, commenting and following 💚💛