Jealousy and spying

April 2, 1985
The trouble started when I got home. Mom drove by and saw that I didn’t get RIGHT HOME afterwards . Why the H-E-double hockey sticks is she so… so… overprotective. I’m fifteen now and she still treats me like I’m a baby or something. NOW she’s telling me to go see Missy (my cousin) . As if I want to. But what the heck is wrong with her?

2:08pm
Okay I spent enough time with Missy , back to my question. What IS wrong with my mom? Maybe she’s jealous of me. But what’s there to be jealous of? I still have a chance to a good education. I’m still young, I have a handsome boyfriend who cares for me, and I’m a lot smarter than she is. I don’t know what’s up her butt, but I do know she’s being very unfair and overprotective. And just when I thought she was setting me a tad bit free everyday. Well I can tell you this much. She WASN’T!! I wish I could get away from this place for awhile. I don’t know where but just away from this place (for awhile anyway).

June 1, 1985 (spare room)
I’m sitting in here because my room is a mess. The one weekend I really have to study and they kick me out of my own room. I’ll never understand grown ups. I got to go visit Dean at the station last night after graduation. I could’ve been with him while we were waiting for Dad’s order. But you know my mom. She treats me like a baby. Sometimes I hate her so much. She acts like such a bitch. And to top it off, she CALLS me her baby. Then they said I could stay for ten minutes and they gypped me three minutes.

July 12, 1985
My folks actually let me stay out til 11pm. Can you believe it? Dean and I had a marvelous time . When we were walking back to my house I saw that my folks were still waiting up for me.

Aug 4, 1985
Gee I wish my mom would let me grow up.

Aug 3, 1985
You’ll never guess what I did. I broke my collar bone. Great, huh? I ran into a fire hydrant with my bike.

Aug 9, 1985
I want to go bike riding or something. Mom won’t let me do anything! I asked if I could go for a walk and she said, “NO!”

Aug 23, 1985
Robert just stopped by and Mom was in the shower. Oh, great. Now she’s yelling at me for not coming to get her. And then if I HAD come to get her, she probably wouldn’t have believed me and yelled at me then, too. Either way I would’ve got it. She’s hard to please.
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Jealousy seemed to be a huge problem for her. She would often tell me how lucky I was to have a chance at an education, then she would lament about how she wished SHE could have continued on with school, but it just wasn’t meant to be because she had babies instead. She dropped out of 8th grade to have a baby at age 15. Then she would say how she didn’t like school anyway because she was too stupid and couldn’t get good grades.

Being kicked out of my own room so my parents could “clean” was a common occurrence. My mother never said as much, but I could tell her “cleaning” was a way to spy on me. Whenever they kicked me out, I would take my journals with me. They are all spiral bound notebooks, so they looked like regular school supplies.

I had one notebook that I had fashioned a locking system on. I came home one day to find the locking system broken. I approached my mother about it and, at first, she denied breaking it. Then she said she needed some blank notebook paper so she HAD to break it to get to the paper. I asked her how come she looked UNDER MY BED for blank notebook paper when there was a loose stack sitting on the shelf next to my bed. She started screaming at me about being a smart ass and to “just wait until your father gets home!”. Needless to say, I was grounded.

After that, I kept all my journals in my locker at school except for the current one, which I kept in my backpack with my school books. During summer break I would alternate hiding places; the shed out back (she wouldn’t go out there because it was dirty and had spiders), the front storage area (again, dirt and spiders), and the storage room just off the family room (I found the dirtiest, darkest corner).
These are all of my journals so far, from April 1984 to present (May 2016)

After I broke my collar bone, she took my crash personally, as if I did it on purpose, just to inconvenience her. Every time I tried to step foot out of the house for any reason other than school, she was at my throat, telling me “don’t get HURT!” or “be back in THIRTY MINUTES!”

For the first two weeks she refused to even let me go for a walk around the block.
She also refused to let me get my bike fixed for over a year. Even after I had earned the money to get a new front wheel, she absolutely REFUSED to let me fix it. My dad finally stepped in and told her enough was enough. He took me to get the wheel and showed me how to replace it.

Characteristics of a narcissistic mother
http://www.daughtersofnarcissisticmothers.com/characteristics-of-narcissistic-mothers.html

1. Everything she does is deniable.
2. She violates your boundaries.
7. She’s envious. 
8. She’s a liar in too many ways to count.
15. She’s infantile and petty.
20. She is never wrong about anything.
21. She seems to have no awareness that other people even have feelings.
22. She blames. 

Lies and abandonment

When my half sister Anita was about 15 years old, she lied to the high school counselor and claimed that my parents beat her, locked her in a closet and made her do all the housework herself.
The counselor contacted the authorities, the authorities came and got Anita to put her in a foster home… where she would lie and say they beat her, locked her in a closet and made her do all the chores. She ran away, was picked up and put in another home, where, surprise! She claimed they beat her, locked her in a closet and made her do all the chores.

In the meantime, I was loving the fact that “Sissy” wasn’t around to hurt me any more. From as far back as I can remember, Anita would intentionally hurt me. She would bite me, pull chunks of hair out of my head, scratch me, hit me, tickle my ribs until they bruised and I peed my pants… at which point I would get in trouble for wetting myself.

Anita’s favorite torture was called the “Titty Twister”. She would ask me, “What’s worse than a tornado?” and before I could get away, she would grab one of my nipples, pinch it as hard as she could, twist it and screech “A TITTY TWISTER!”. By today’s standards, that would be considered sexual abuse.

Through all the torture, I can remember my father physically stepping in and getting her off me. I don’t remember my mother ever coming to my rescue. I’m not saying she didn’t, just that I don’t remember it.

Eventually, the authorities that removed Anita from our home got wise to her lies and brought her back, telling her that if she caused any more trouble, she would be arrested and sit in jail until she turned 18. She got married on her 18th birthday and moved out. That was in 1977.
The abuse continued whenever she came for a visit… until I was about 16 (1986) and realized that I was strong enough to kick her ass. So I did. I told her to never touch me again. I didn’t speak to her again until 2013. But that’s another story for later.

Unfortunately, the whole foster home idea became a form of torture that my mother used on me. What better way to scare your kid into “behaving” than to threaten to send them away?
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Jan 7, 1985
Hi. Oh, boy, what a mess. Dad said he saw Dean and I walking to his house at lunch time today. It must have been David and Kathy because Dean wasn’t even at school today.
My mom even says I’m flunking school and that I’ve been late a lot. Actually, geography is the only class I’m having problems with and I haven’t been late for any of my classes since the beginning of the school year. I have the feeling that Mom and Dad don’t want me any more. They keep saying I do things when I don’t and they hurt me a lot (mentally).
But they don’t believe me when I tell them the truth. They said that if I wanted I could go live someplace else. But I don’t want to move away from my friends, family, home, etc. Dad said that if I do go to live in a foster home, it won’t be here in Othello. I’m beginning to wonder if I should move away. But if I do, there’s no coming back. And I don’t want that to happen. I want to stay here. If only they would believe me when I say that that wasn’t me walking with Dean to his house today. Like I said before, he wasn’t even in school today.

Jan 8, 1985
Oh, boy, what a MESS! I can’t go off the school grounds at lunchtime.
I wish Mom and Dad would believe me when I say that that wasn’t me walking to his house.

Jan 17, 1985
I don’t feel like going to school ’cause I have a sore throat but I’d do anything to get away from my mom. I’m getting the feeling that they don’t want me here any more. Sort of like an abandoned feeling. Two more months, I’ll be fifteen. Do you think my folks will let me have a little more space and freedom? Probably not.
Oh, today in choir, as usual, Dean and I sat by each other. And my mom can’t say I’m chasing after him ’cause he’s always the one who moves over next to me.

Feb 6, 1985
Hi. I didn’t get my history homework done. I tried to explain to my mom that there was to much to do and that he (Mr. Dickey) moved the due date up. Then, can you believe it, she actually accused ME of talking . How could I when I don’t have anyone in there to talk to?
Oh, sometimes I could just slug her a good one. She makes me so MAD!

Feb 7, 1985

I pulled my hand loose just before we caught sight of the car. I was afraid my mom would say something I would regret.

Feb 16, 1985
The sun’s shining. I want to go outside and skateboard or go bicycle riding. I’m finished cleaning my room, making my bed and my homework. I wish my mom would give me some space and freedom.
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Dean’s brother, David, had a girlfriend, Kathy, who had long blond hair that looked a lot like mine.  From a distance, Dean and David looked alike, and Kathy and I looked alike. I doubt it was my Dad who saw them, that it was actually my mother who spotted them, then reported it to my father.

What’s confusing to me is that which ever of my parents that spotted “us” didn’t think to look at the girl’s coat. My coat was bright blue and I wore a red scarf, hard to miss. I have no idea what Kathy was wearing, but I doubt it was anything like my coat. And I only had ONE COAT, so it wasn’t as if they didn’t know what I was wearing that day.

What I suspect happened is that my mother saw them walking, thought it was Dean and me, didn’t investigate further and got a bug up her butt to punish me. Sadly, Dad believed her.
See? From a distance we look similar.

    

These kinds of incidents were not uncommon. I would do something my mother would perceive as “bad”, or she would make something up, she’d scream at my father about what a horrid person I was and I would be punished somehow, usually grounded, sometimes slapped in the face. And the punishment never fit the “crime”:  “You stole something from me so you can’t go to the next speech tournament.” or “If you don’t get your homework done, I’ll cancel your orthodontist appointment!”
My mother didn’t approve of Dean because he is Hispanic. She didn’t approve of anyone that wasn’t “white”. She’s extremely prejudiced and bigoted. You should have heard her rant and rave about Willy, who was African American and Hai who was Vietnamese. Wow. I didn’t hear the end of it until I broke it off with them. But she wholeheartedly approved of my husband because he has blond hair, blue eyes and is “white”.

And the whole thing about sending me to live in a foster home… what the heck? My mother had my Dad so snowballed about me being a horrid teenager “just like Anita” that he was willing and ready to send me away! She tried SO HARD to drive a wedge between him and me.

Characteristics of a narcissistic mother
http://www.daughtersofnarcissisticmothers.com/characteristics-of-narcissistic-mothers.html

1. Everything she does is deniable.
2. She violates your boundaries.
4. She undermines.
5. She demeans, criticizes and denigrates.
6. She makes you look crazy.
8. She’s a liar in too many ways to count.
10. She manipulates your emotions in order to feed on your pain.
14. She terrorizes.
20. She is never wrong about anything.
22. She blames.

She makes you look crazy

*Language Warning*
I used a few choice swear words in the journal entries.
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July 24, 1984
I guess nobody likes me anymore ’cause I think my own dear mother is spreading rumors about me all over town. Ya know how I know? Cause people aren’t treating me nice. The kind of rumor that witch is spreading around is like this: “oh, that little brat just stole some money out of my purse!” There are other things she could say I did, too. Like threaten her with a knife or beat up the cat or just about anything but the worst thing she could do is accuse me of spreading rumors about her!
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She would tell people lies about me! She would say that I stole money, or that I was telling lies about her, or that I wouldn’t help with chores.

I COULDN’T help her with chores because she wouldn’t allow it. She would complain that no one would help her with laundry or washing the dishes. I would then offer and she would say something along the lines of, “I can do them faster and better. Go outside and help your father!”
So I would go out and help Dad with changing the oil in the cars and truck, paint the house, re-roof the house, maintain the riding lawn mower, mow the yards (including my grandmother’s) and various odd jobs.
Then, when I went back in the house, she would whine and cry that no one helps HER with HER work. (Sigh…)
Once, I washed the dishes when she wasn’t home. When she came in the kitchen, I said, “Surprise! I washed the dishes for you!”
She didn’t thank me. She went over to the dishes and started inspecting them, pulling them out one by one and re-stacking them on the counter, all the while saying things like, “You missed a spot! This is FILTHY! I bet you didn’t use scalding hot water, did you? Only scalding hot water will kill all the germs! Now I have to re-do them!”
I never did the dishes for her again.
Laundry was a similar story. She REFUSED to let me do my own laundry “because you won’t do it right!”, yet would whine and cry about how I never helped with ANYTHING! I couldn’t win!
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August 17, 1984 (11:45 am)
Well, looks like it’s vacation day. Can’t wait. I think. Well, better put the rest of my stuff in my suitcase.
(11:40 pm) Living room at Bob and Bev’s
Well, looks like we’re going camping after all. Yahh! How fun! I think!
 August 19, 1984 (9:07) Stairs at Bob’s
Well, we made it back. BOY! Mom was an asshole! She kept picking at me. “Heidi don’t do that! Heidi don’t do this! Heidi SETTLE DOWN!” And I wasn’t even doing anything! That shitass.
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We went “camping” in bob and Bev’s van. bob and Bev slept outside, but no WAY would my mother let me sleep outside. “You’ll get eaten alive by mosquitoes! Somebody could kidnap you! You might get attacked by a wild animal!” I had to be crammed in with my parents, my niece and nephew. It was NOT comfortable with 5 of us sleeping in a little van.

We wound up going to a Flintstones themed park in Canada. My niece and nephew enjoyed it, but it wasn’t a fabulous place for a 14 year old. I enjoyed it because the two little ones enjoyed it, but having a mother yelling at you constantly was no fun. No matter what I did, it was wrong.
The picture below shows me on the slide behind Angie. My mother kept yelling at me to “STOP PUSHING HER!” I wasn’t even touching Angie; I was waiting for her to slide down.

 

 

These two kids would fight and hurt each other on purpose. In hindsight, I wonder if maybe they were acting out how they saw bob treating Bev. In public court records, bob is a defendant and has a Superior court order for protection dated 12-24-1987. That’s roughly the time he and Bev split up.

 

I look pretty happy in the picture below, don’t I? But what you can’t see is my mother standing on the shore screaming, “DON’T TIP THE BOAT OVER! THAT WATER LOOKS FILTHY! DON’T FALL IN! YOU CAN’T SWIM!”

You couldn’t tip these boats over because they were attached so some sort of system that guided you around the “river”. I will admit that the water was pretty dirty. It wasn’t wonderful.

And yes, I COULD swim, despite never having lessons. When I was 12, Dad would take me to swim at the motel just up the street. He was friends with the manager and he said we could come any time to swim. Dad got me some goggles so I could face my fear of getting my face wet and deep water. I figured out how to float and then actually propel myself through water. When I was 13, my mother decided I needed “lessons” and found a teen who was a certified life guard. What I got wasn’t lessons though. It was more along the lines of an assessment to say, “She won’t drown in a body of water.”

At one point during the vacation we stopped at a park that had a lake. Kids were swimming in it, the water was warm, the beach was smooth and there was a dock you could swim to. Was I allowed to swim? OH NO! “You could drown! That water looks FILTHY! No telling what germs are in there!” (My mother is a germaphobe.)

Later on in the trip, we stopped at another park with another lake. This one was crystal clear and ice cold with sharp rocks on the beach. NO ONE was swimming there. Believe it or not, I was allowed to go in, but it was so cold, I couldn’t stand being in it for very long. When I mentioned that it would have been more fun to swim in the first lake, I got chewed out for being ungrateful.

I also remember how we had a guy pass us on the highway and bob got angry. So angry that he chased the guy down and made him pull over. Then bob got out of the van and SCREAMED at the guy. bob yelled that the guy had passed us in a no passing zone, when, if I remember correctly, it HAD been a passing zone. The broken yellow line was on our side of the road. bob INSISTED that meant it was a no passing zone for our side of the road. He wouldn’t listen to any one, just kept yelling about how the guy put us all at risk and his family was in the van and on and on. Narcissists don’t like to be proven wrong.

Overall, it wasn’t a wonderful “vacation”.

Characteristics of a narcissistic mother
http://www.daughtersofnarcissisticmothers.com/characteristics-of-narcissistic-mothers.html
6. She makes you look crazy.
8. She’s a liar in too many ways to count.
14. She terrorizes.

It's time to tell my story

It’s time to tell my story, start to present, about the narcissists in my life.

The major one is my mother. Some of the things she has done is subtle and most won’t believe she could have possibly done it out of spite. That’s the way narcissists work. They weave this subtle web of deceit and if you call them on their behavior, they turn around and tell you that YOU are the one to blame, that YOU are the one going crazy.

Another narcissist is my half-brother. He has created this image of me and portrays me as a horrid person, yet he has spent MAYBE 120 hours in my presence. He doesn’t know who I am, what I stand for, what I believe in. Yet he tells everyone that I have never worked a hard honest day in my life and that I expect everyone to hand me whatever I want on a silver platter. What’s so sad about this is that, according to two of the three women who had been married to him, that’s how HE is. He is projecting his faults on to me. Another trait of the narcissist.

There have been others in my life as well, people who have used me and abused me, treated me like crap. Eventually I may get to those stories, too, but for now, I need to focus on my mother, the one who has hurt me the worst and for the longest time.

Bear with me:

I knew what she was doing was mean.
I didn’t know what it was called. That it was a mental illness. I didn’t have a name for it.
Now I do.
Narcissistic Behavior Disorder.
Even if I’d had a name for it back then, there’s nothing I could have done about it. When you’re 14 years old, you don’t have a whole lot of power. I might have stood up for myself a bit more. And maybe my father would have stood up to her more, too. I think he suspected something was going on with her. But we are both laid back kind of people. Don’t rock the boat. He was so easy going; she trampled over him quite a bit. So when she got tired of our cats, I doubt he stood up to her.
He and I had befriended a stray cat. We named her Shadow. This loving kitty blessed us with two kittens, Puss and Boots. Puss gave us two more kittens, Tiny and Toby. Shadow then gave birth to four kittens, Big Foot, Butterball, Noisy and Speedy.
So then there were nine.
Yes, that was a lot of cats. They were outdoor cats, so it wasn’t as if they were climbing all over the house leaving fur balls everywhere. But what they WERE doing was taking our attention away from her.
She hatched a plan.
She sent me off to my half-sister’s for a week during the summer, then proceeded with her diabolical doings.
Following are my journal entries from that time period:

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July 12, 1984 (at Maxine’s)
Mom said a lady came by and asked if she could have Shadow, Puss, Tiny, Noisy, Speedy and Toby. I don’t mind the kittens going, but I’ll miss Shadow and Puss.
Butter is sick and Mom said they might have to put him to sleep. I don’t think so though, when you just have ring-worm.
July 13, 1984 (at Maxine’s)
Mom has ring-worm terribly and I couldn’t go home today. I have to stay here until Wednesday.
July 14, 1984 (at Maxine’s)
Last night when Marta was asleep I cried and cried and cried. I want to go HOME! I want my Butterball! I’m so homesick.
July 16, 1984 (at Maxine’s)
I’m so homesick it’s pathetic. I WANT TO GO HOME!
July 18, 1984 (at home)
Hi. Today I found out that I will never ever again see my Butterball because he had to be put to sleep. Mom said she called Maxine and told her to tell me but she didn’t. I miss him so SO much. I’ll never ever see him again. He’s dead. I wish I could just hold him one more time. Shadow, Big Foot, Tiny and Noisy are dead too. Puss and her babies are living somewhere else. I’ll probably never see them again either. Just Boots is left. I didn’t get to take a picture of them. Just Boots. And I bet he’s awfully lonely. I sure am. My kitten. BUTTER’S GONE!
July 20, 1984 (at home)
I still miss my Butter but at least I still have Boots.
August 3, 1984 (1:00am) (at home)
Boots has ring-worm. I think. I hope not. ‘Cause if he does have ring-worm he’ll have to go too. And if he does have to go, mom said that we can wait til spring and then we’ll see if I can get another pet.
I miss all my cats so much.
(10:40am) (at home)
Well, it looks like Boots is gonna have to go too. He’s got it right above the right eye. Maybe before dad takes him away, we could take a picture of him. I wish we could have taken a picture of Shadow, Puss, Speedy and Toby. I wish I had someone to talk this over with.
(4:50pm) (at home)
Well, Boots had to go too. So now I don’t even have one pet anymore.
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This is not Shadow, but this cat is similar to what she looked like.

 My memory is that my mother told me that the cats had untreatable ring worm but the ring worm my mother caught from them WAS treatable.
Doesn’t make much sense, does it?

In the end, six cats were killed and three supposedly given away. Why did she get rid of the cats? Because my dad and I loved them and paid attention to them, attention that we weren’t giving HER. So she had to eliminate the “enemy”.

Why did she send me off to my half sister, Maxine’s? To get me out of the picture because she knew I would protest. I’d like to think that my dad protested, too, but he wasn’t strong enough against her by himself.

She also sent me away to show my Dad that she could take me away from him as well and to impose on Maxine whenever she wanted.

If you were to ask her about this whole situation, she would go on and on about how bad the ring worm was on her (which was on her left breast, UNDER her shirt) and then go on to say that she didn’t come get me because she was afraid *I* would get it, too! My half-sister’s place was 53 miles from home. At age 14 I couldn’t exactly drive myself home or hitchhike. So she left me there under the guise of being caring and thoughtful.

Characteristics of a narcissistic mother
http://www.daughtersofnarcissisticmothers.com/characteristics-of-narcissistic-mothers.html
1. Everything she does is deniable.
9. She has to be the center of attention all the time.
10. She manipulates your emotions in order to feed on your pain.
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Just an FYI- ring worm in cats IS treatable:
http://pets.webmd.com/cats/ringworm-in-cats

Tell your stories…

Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a nasty mental illness. It’s bad when it’s your significant other. You may not think you can escape from your SO, but it IS doable. You can divorce them and if there are no small children involved, you can sever all ties.

When it’s a parent, though, it’s a little bit harder… especially if you’re the “caregiver” of that person.

I was the caregiver of my mother, who I suspect has NPD with a huge side dish of Paranoia.
I’m ready to tell my story. It’s long, drawn out and full of drama and just plain bull shit. But I’m ready.