I know I didn't. You all probably tire of hearing about my formative life but the problem is Mormonism is such a part of it that it defines my recovery.

This article was a great focus for me in understanding the main person behind my neglect and abuse apart from her religion.

Our world worships mothers and it is hard to take especially with the Mormon sexism and religious adoration of motherhood.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/childhood-emotional-neglect/202205/the-elephant-in-the-room-mothers-day-emotional-neglect?amp

My mother wasn't perfect, but she was quite empathetic. She didn't always know what to do with all of us (6). I know your mother had more than that. I only have 2 and OH MY! I wanted 8. I'm sure glad I only had 2. I had to do the child raising myself for a long time and I know I didn't do that well. I've told my kids thank you for raising yourselves. I tried, but I had a lot to take care of.

My mother had more to take care of than anyone should. I've said on here before that she is my hero. Many of my family say our dad was their hero. He is, too. Mom comes first. She was the first child of deaf parents and she learned to sign before she learned to speak. Then she had to communicate with her younger siblings for her parents. She was their interpreter all her life up until their deaths. She was hard of hearing as it was. She had to see your lips so she could read them a lot of the time. She had a son who had a stroke at birth and the doctor didn't tell my parents. They found out about the time he was 18 months old. Then he drank paint thinner, then fell off the sewing machine stand and had a bunch of stitches, jumped out of a tree with a cast on his leg, AND got hit by a pickup on his bike when he was 5. He was in a coma for 2 months. My dad never left the hospital in those 2 months.

THEN my oldest brother had a hemorrhagic stroke at age 42. Lost his speech center of his brain. He had been in the army in Berlin as a translator for Russian aircraft in about 1975 to 1978. He was in college getting a degree in Russian and German when he had the brain bleed. My parents took care of him. He had 5 brain surgeries and 5 years of speech therapy. He has never been the same.

And the rest of us haven't had it easy either. But nothing like them.

My mother was everything to everyone. Anyone with someone in their family who was disabled was my mom's friend. My dad said that when she died and someone would call for her, he'd tell them she had died and they said, "Oh, she was my best friend."

She wasn't perfect, but I miss her everyday. I miss my dad, too. Wish they were here.

My mother MADE us get jobs and we worked on the farm, too. My younger brother who had the stroke has limited use of his left arm and left leg. He limps and his arm is always --I can't think of the word. He holds it high up on his side. Since my mother made him get jobs all the time, he still wants to work after she died. He got a job doing some cement blocks they put on the highways. He fell off something and split the top of his head open from front to back. He is bald. He put the picture of his staples on his head on fb.

In January, he had a new job doing some cutting of wood. He was splitting logs and he cut off part of his index finger on his good hand (the right). He can still use it. He wants to get another job. We all say NOOOOOOO!

Being a mother is harder than I ever thought it would be. I have a 36 year old son with mental illness.

Wow. I'm sorry. It seems the universe had it out for you and your family.

No, I don't tire reading your posts EB.

I think it's the reason that I continue to share my wacky Mormon experiences because it didn't work well for me.

And thank you for sharing this article. I liked how the article mentioned that mom could be very active in a child's life (the soccer mom ie) but completely detached from emotional support.

Yes, that is the one that stands out. There but not there emotionally. It is like no true natural affection. And Mormonism to my knowledge did nothing to preach or teach affection for family. It just abuses I guess their holy ghost guides it into their followers.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/17/2022 06:14PM by Elder Berry.

I can relate. I’m doing a deep dive on healing from patterns of abuse, the extent of which I’m only just realising.
Since you mentioned abuse as well, I was literally just watching this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V87G95bGTTk
It’s really good

Nope, EB. My father was an ambitious church man and never had time for us. My mother was probably even worse: she craved public recognition, for what I could never figure out.

Once she even challenged an apostle for dismissing her too quickly as a churchman's wife; she wanted to be seen by him as a force to be reckoned with. It was very silly, and not helpful to my father's aspirations although he still got quite high in the organization, high for "hired help."

For my mother as well as my father, having a quiver full of children was like my brother's boy scout merit badge: something that you take out and display to others when appropriate.

My mother sounds similar. It sounds a bit on the anger at sexism side of things. My mother never wants to change status quo but loves challenging it in her search for prestigious accolades.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> For my mother as well as my father, having a
> quiver full of children was like my brother's boy
> scout merit badge: something that you take out and
> display to others when appropriate.

My mother made matching outfits and had us sing in wards all the time when I was young. The Von Trapp badge.

We didn't have matching outfits, but we were forced regularly to trot out for family photos for the church and the local newspaper. Keeping up appearances, you know. There were many last minute bouts of furious maternal wiping of children's tears before the shutter snapped.

It sucks being an arrow in a quiver.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> It sucks being an arrow in a quiver.

It sure does and when your father is caught molesting the two adopted kids to make us their even dozen it really sucks.

It's horrific.

My mother did the best she could. But she had probably never experienced emotional support herself. She certainly wasn't getting it from Dad. Mom was placed in sort of a middle manager position in our family where her job was to administer Dad's directives. That didn't leave much room for emotional involvement. She loved us and she probably empathized with us, but as far as actively demonstrating it? Not so much. At least not to the point where I would say, unaided, "Mom was emotionally supportive."

They exist?

Dear god, no. I still live with her. She's a covert narcissist and I've always been her target. I've just finally gotten old enough to not put up with it anymore. Then I get the sulky, silent treatment, but I just no longer care. She's 94. She has mellowed a little bit. Not that much, but a little.

I was a Daddy's girl. I miss my Dad. He's not here to be a buffer anymore.

Never in a million years would we have been trotted out to sing in church. My mother was antisocial basically. I did play the piano sometimes when they'd have >>>>>. I can't believe I did that.

My dad wasn't into being a leader in the church. He had a farm and taught school. He wasn't home much, BUT we were on the farm a lot and our mother was with us. She was in the RS presidency once. Otherwise, she was home with us except primary. She always taught primary. My dad had jobs like ward clerk, which he hated, and he locked up the church at night. He always went to the farm at 10 p.m. for some reason and so he'd lock it then.

I can say that when we were sick, my mother babied us. I was sick a lot as a child. I'd feel bad when I went back to school as I missed her so much. I didn't like going to my aunt's to stay for a week as I missed her.

I was the most devout of the family so my parents were shocked when I left the church. My older sister said they used to argue about which one of them caused me to leave the church.

Growing up, I always envied the kids who had emotionally supportive mothers. I did not, and I'm not sure my Mom--throughout her lifetime--ever even KNEW an emotionally supportive mother of any kind, so she literally didn't know what an emotionally supportive mother was.

As an adult, I now realize that in her case she lived all of her adult life in terror--terror that I would find out (from my paternal Grandmother and paternal Grandpa most likely) that my "father" (the man she was married to) was my biological uncle, and his brother was my actual biological father.

I did not learn the truth for many decades (I was decades into my adulthood when I learned the truth), and only then because (I think) my [paternal] Grandma threatened to tell me.

My Mom drove all night, from northern California down to southern California, to "tell me" in an intensely convoluted way: My Mom related to me a complete, month-by-month, chronology of where everyone in our close family was on the planet, during the year before I was born--which I am pretty sure she expected me to eventually decode, and I eventually did.

(It all centered on me being, notoriously, supposedly "six weeks late" when I was born.)

Subtract out that infamous "six weeks" and what is left is: when I was conceived, my father--the brother married to my mother--was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the US Navy, and his brother was here in Los Angeles with my Mom. My Mom's Ob-Gyn went along with the fiction, and did what was necessary to convince the family at large that I was, indeed, six weeks late.

Looking back, I now realize that my Mom lived her entire adult life in terror that she would be outed as a "bad" woman--most especially to me.

What she was incapable of learning or intuiting was that I really don't care [and wouldn't have cared], because either way, I still have the same paternal grandparents, and they were TREMENDOUSLY important to me when they were alive, as I was growing up, and they still are now, though they have been deceased for decades.

I wish my Mom had not had such a haunted and terrible adult life--especially since it was all SO UNNECESSARY!!!

I wish that my Mom's Death Certificate, and my Dad-who-raised-me's Death Certificate, did not have "End-Stage Alcoholism" listed as the primary, or the secondary, cause of death.

I wish all those people's lives (including my paternal grandparents, and my biological father's later wife-and-offspring family) had not been destroyed, or massively damaged, by my conception.

But that's what happened, and I am here, and I long ago accepted the literal facts of my biological life.

I wish everyone else involved could have done the same.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/17/2022 09:57PM by Tevai.

Love doesn't have to have social acceptance. I love this fact. It seems you didn't get raised in a vacuum devoid of love. I'm glad you got some emotional support.

Mothers are the natural affection people but I believe other humans could take their place given our long maturation. I wish I hadn't been raised in a Mormon vacuum.

Not even her own siblings could stand her.

I truly believe that my sweet, uncritical, adoring father was the ONLY person on the planet who truly loved my mother. And she loved him. (And only him.)

I think my mother hated me from the minute I was born, first, because her pregnancy with me nearly killed her (like that was my fault, right??) But from my earliest memories, all I got from her was physical and verbal abuse: slaps across the mouth for back-talk, spankings or the hated yardstick across the legs for anything she considered misbehavior, stuff like that. I wasn't supposed to do ANYTHING without asking permission, but because she said "no" every time I asked, I decided that there wasn't anything in that arrangement for me, and went ahead and did stuff and took my lumps later IF I got caught (and I often didn't.)

I did very well in school in everything but math. Did she ever appreciate the things I did well? She did not. She harped about my math, literally every day. She was so very critical about every aspect of my life. She didn't like my friends, the fact that I was a tomboy, the fact that I dared to refuse to eat gaggy vegetables - so many aspects of my personality.

We fought about everything, so much so that I eventually took to physically avoiding her as much as I could. In my last few years at home, I found a place way up high in the garage - on a storage shelf Dad had built, behind big cardboard boxes - where I could nestle comfortably and read for as long as I wanted, without being visible. (She went into a frenzy if she ever caught me reading.) She would go to the door and holler for me for hours, and I would just smile to myself, and not answer, while continuing to enjoy my book.

To her dying day, she never knew where I disappeared to.

She has been dead for more than thirty years, and I have never shed a single tear over her death. She was nothing but a migraine in human form.

I'm sorry, catnip. Home Sweet Home is, for so many children, a quiet hell. It's remarkable that you emerged from such a place in good shape.

--LW

It took me awhile to gather my thoughts, but it has taken much time to acknowledge that my Mom who would do things, really wasn't interested in my feelings.

I have a lot of trauma to chose from and I will share this one.

On a family vacation, I stood too close to a precipice for a family photo and lost my balance. I teetered over the edge and skidded to a stop on shale rock. I had multiple bruises and cuts. One cut was very bad, squirting out of my wrist at the same rate of my heart. It was a deep cut in need of stitches.

I slowed the bleeding by removing my shirt. Dad came halfway down to help me back up. He told Mom- Messy is bleeding pretty bad, I think we better get him to a hospital for stitches.

Mom just stood there.

-How's your mouth? I hope your fall didn't loosen your braces. Dr. Roper said that if you eat hard candy it may loosen the brackets. -I'm not paying an additional charge for loosened braces. Mom worked in Dr. Roper's dental office.

Dad drove back to town, but we stopped along the way so Mom could look more closely at a waterfall. I passed out in the car. When I woke up, Mom was yelling- You better apply more pressure. It's not stopping. Didn't you learn anything from Scouting?

We stopped at a Safeway and Mom got off to buy me some bandages. One box of gauze pads.-This box cost me 5.75 that's outrageous! You better use them well. If you run out, then you'll have to use another one of your shirts.

I never saw a doctor, a scab formed the next day.

She still was more concerned about my braces than my wound. She went back to work and blabbed to the dentist that I was munching on popcorn so I was scolded about not following his directions when I came in for an adjustment (they give a strict set of do's and don'ts when undergoing treatment).

Yep. I know the feeling. I have a couple of those stories. I'm sorry we had to go through that with someone we were born from and told was a real life angel in our lives. :(

Thanks for sharing.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/2022 02:51PM by Elder Berry.

When I looked at icky-gooey-sweet Mother's Day cards in stores, I understood that they were just WRONG.

But what to do when forced to make a card in school? One year I made two cards, one for each of my grandmothers (who, without question, were far more nurturing to me than Mother could even imagine.) My teacher was not happy, but I stuck to my guns on that one.

Dear Mom: I love every day that you hit me; it's just not the same when you don't. I live for the day that I leave you. Don't even think that I won't.

That would have been close to the sentiment I felt toward her. I think I would have been referred to the guidance counselor if I had dared to actually put this on paper. But it was true.

You may remember me complaining about my “kooky mo-mom” here, for years. Last year was the worst year of my life, getting her into assisted living, because dementia. Surprise, lol. And now that her filters have stopped working, it’s beyond obvious she never even liked me, much less loved me. Duh.

Also, interestingly, she has little to no interest in the Mormon church.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/21/2022 02:04PM by munchybotazv2.

Howdya think got the name "No"? ;-)

Mom was a high-performance thoroughbred kept locked in a cold dark stall her entire life by an intrusive authoritarian 'religion' so I blame her for nothing in my turning out bad to the bone

Might be interested in Steven Pinker's fascinating book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
One of the chapters involved studies of fraternal/identical twins & regular sibs raised together/apart to try and suss out impacts of genetics, home & parents, environment, etc.
Turns out from the studies cited parental impact is estimated somewhere between negligible to ~5%, which kinda shocked me.
Genetics estimated ~40-50% and some other factor(s) (peer group?) the remainder -- but not parent and home environment.
Pinker reasons it out so even i could get the drift.

Anyway further debunks old medical theories of the double-bind "schizophenogenic mother" and cold-aloof "autism-genic" mother as etiologies for these phenomenon, good deal because moms would blame themselves unnecessarily for how their kids turned out. Illuminating read

I've read this twice and don't understand. Usually you are very articulate. Is this this just a yes my mother was emotionally not there for me?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/25/2022 04:47AM by Kathleen.