The Mother of All Resentment

Sometimes it isn’t even worth it to hang out with my mother. She takes everything to the extreme. We spent most of my day off arguing because she likes to imagine that she is a victim. Everything that goes wrong in her life is always someone else’s fault. Somehow nothing is her fault despite her terrible attitude or her deteriorating interpersonal relationships with her family.

Grasping at straws or holding a grudge?

An argument recently went so far that she actually said that the reason that I was a difficult person to raise was that when I was seven I wanted her to buy something she could not afford. She is holding a grudge because when I was a child I made material demands? This is her complaint!

If that isn’t a narcissistic comment, I don’t know what is.

I wish I had been recording our conversation that day so I could go back and listen to it again, but it all boils down to this. She holds the fact that I was able to grow up and have a somewhat normal childhood, against me.

Classic signs of a narcissist

She resents me and my brother because we didn’t have to suffer the way she did when she was younger. Her mother died when she was young and she had to work to help raise her younger siblings because her father basically checked out, so she no longer had a childhood. She had to grow up real fast. Her actions reflect what she will never admit. She resents her children because we had a childhood.

When I was still in middle school, I remember having arguments with her where I demanded she grow up and act like my mother, and her response was that it wasn’t fair that she didn’t get to have a childhood, so she was entitled to do childish things. This excuse persisted throughout high school, where she acted out then because she never had the chance to do anything fun.

She harbors that same resentment against her sisters, all of whom were younger than her, and admittedly took advantage of her servitude to her siblings.

However, much of that was self-inflicted because my mother was a bit of a doormat for most of her life. It was one of the things I liked least about my mother growing up because she would let people walk all over her. She only complained about it after the fact. What the hell was I supposed to do about it?

And she wonders why I don’t trust her

How can you trust someone that you know on a core level, envies you, and therefore every judgment call they make for you is weighed against this foundation of resentment?

I remember when I was a child I understood that there was something not right about how my mother acted with me and my brother. That her decisions weren’t for my best interest, but almost entirely for hers. The seeds of mistrust were planted early.

Wine don’t you tell me how you really feel?

This back and forth on my day off continued sporadically most of the afternoon. Fueled by the wine she drank when we were out for lunch. Alcohol frees her tongue, acts as a bit of truth serum. She says things out loud that she really thinks, even if she denies ever having said those things later on.

The wine was responsible for the whole conversation that started with her reminiscing about some person she ran into on her last trip to Guatemala. Someone from her past that she encouraged on their path. These memories are her favorite to repeat, always a tale of how someone else proved to her family that she was important. When someone gives testimony to some accomplishment that she feels she needs to prove herself to her sisters.

Part of the reason she kept going on about this person was that she was trying to decide what would make an appropriate gift to bring them the next time she saw them in Guatemala. I do not understand why this is so important to her.

I mostly tuned my mother out as she went on and on retelling how this person was so effusive and what a big deal my mother encouraging her to stay in school and finish her degree was to her. In the end, my mother’s point was my mother claimed responsibility for how this lady’s life had turned out. My mother literally said, “She wouldn’t have all that she has if it wasn’t for me”.

For someone who claims to be so humble, my mother has an ego to rival most televangelists. She has this overinflated sense of self that is incomprehensible to me.

As we left the restaurant where we had lunch, her story progressed from how she met this woman back when she had gone to get her certificate for something or other, to how her sisters refused to believe that my mother herself had received any education, much less been valedictorian for her graduating class. I know it happened, I have seen the photos.

My aunts and uncles are no better than my mother is. That whole side of the family is crazy. The problem is that no one in that family thinks they are the problem, they just point fingers and stab each other in the back.

My mother would benefit greatly from extensive therapy — if she believed in therapy. She says the word like I was suggesting she start smoking crack, or using meth. Like it is literally inconceivable that she could have mental health issues. She believes that it is quackery and not real science.

And because of this, she has paranoid delusions that therapy is a tool to prove that she is crazy and therefore should be put in a home, which is her greatest fear. Therefore, she will never get her issues addressed. The specter of bigger mental health issues that I know affect her side of her family, will continue to linger until the problem gets so big that it can’t be ignored.