In year 20, when things began to fall apart, his alarm bells went off and he began to effort, ever so slightly. With all of his might, he began love bombing me and he did 2 loads of dishes. And then he did the unthinkable. He got into therapy. And one day he was following me around the house, sort of weepy, very sad and he said to me…
You were supposed to replace my shitty mom.
Later that night, he told me all the ways in which his mother neglected him and didn’t protect him. It was stuff like not stopping him from touching a hot stove, letting him play with a Swiss army knife… stuff like that. And he cried. He cried that she wasn’t there to hold him, comfort him and protect him from being a very active, very curious, very smart toddler.
I was sad that he hurt. I was sad that he was neglected, I had experienced it, too. But something was off… something felt overblown in the depth of the ways in which he blamed her. It was like he didn’t have to take responsibility for his current actions based on this. It didn’t make any sense.
She had PPD with him and she had severe PPD with her 2nd and almost killed herself, so the kids went to other homes (while dad had zero kids) until his mom was “better”. She was then placed on copious amounts of lithium, a new idea in the 1980’s, and she was a meek little braindead zombie until current day.
And the family blamed this woman for all of their money woes, they shitty dynamic and the kids and dad alike defaulted to blaming mom. Mom was the scapegoat.
I’ve spent time with her, she’s a whackadoo, but… she has zero power. None. She complained about a shower head at a hotel for 45 minutes. She’ll sit on the couch for dozens of hours just cataloging her stamp collection. And, while staying at their house, she wore see-through nighties every night. I saw everything. I asked my ex if this was normal and he said YES. I had NO idea until 2015! It was horrifying.
But the anger, the vitriol, the stories this family told about her being the root of the problem of that family. His dad even said to me “my life would have been so different if I would have married someone else”. I have SO much to say about how all the others fit into that dynamic, she deserves some blame, but she was completely abandoned and thrown under the bus. She had mental illness, but got zero support. And her husband was a doctor.
It was all the woman’s fault and that is totally acceptable, dogpile on the woman!
I was reading about men with mother wounds and how they get violent. They hate their mothers SO much that they take it out on all the women they meet. They believe women to be the reason the world sucks and the reason their lives are miserable.
And my ex, once in his own therapy, started to finally investigate his mother wound, but he only used it to be a victim, to blame her and then me. And he truly believed and finally conveyed that he expected me to make up for his mom, love him unconditionally, dote on him, kiss his boo boos and be the mommy he never had. And in this arrangement, he was the child. He didn’t have to show up as an adult for me, he didn’t have to take responsibility for his actions towards me or his inability to show up for me. Because, “he’s just the baby”.
He never believed he had to show up as an adult for me.
So I had a man who was a narcissist, who hated women, hated his mother, was looking for a mommy replacement and the moment I stopped being mommy, he wanted to annihilate me. And I had to go and do something completely egregious to give him ammunition to hate me even more… no wonder I was scared. No wonder I was stuck in fear and frozen in how to handle things.
I was dealing with someone who was angry at women to his core, expected me to be his mommy and my “reward” was getting to love him and be a mommy (and to be a wife, he believed this was my fantasy). When I stopped doing that, he hated me. And because I was so desperate for love from an actual adult man who bathes and sees me as a vibrant, intelligent, woman, not a mom… I did a terrible thing.
And here we are.
I’m still worried he may hurt me. I have told a few key people that if something odd happens, to know it wasn’t me. And I made sure my will reflected that, too. I’ve been so naive in the past, I didn’t realize how disturbed he was and I projected good onto him. I mirrored back that he was a smart, funny, worthwhile person… while deep down, I felt so hollow, invisible and like he was a parasite, draining my energy and my goodness.
And, he had two books in the house regarding a cult from the 1960’s that believed sex with women was the way to enlightenment. That women exist to give sexual and their feminine energy to men. That a woman on her own isn’t very worthwhile, but when a man takes that energy and alchemizes it, it turns into something bigger and better. And men were entitled to this. Men were meant to use women to reach elite levels of spiritual enlightenment. The parasite is worth so much more than the host, as a formal “movement”. Sounds like stereotypical vampirism. (Or the shit Pdiddy was doing,)
So, I was married to a baby vampire. I was in a bad movie series. Lord have mercy,
