Anyone with a mental illness will know what it’s like to feel alienated from the people around you. I used to have a lot of friends, not real friends you can count on but friends I’d socialize with and other crazy endeavours. So over time I have learned to get along without many people to count on, I’ve learned that my man and kids are the only ones that I really can rely on. I have a best friend who would be there for me if I needed her, but she is heavily pregnant at the moment and occupied by that so I have been giving her space to sort all of that out. Even though I have learned who I can count on and who I cannot, I still crave this unattainable relationship with my Mother. The smallest slight on her part and suddenly I feel like that ten year old again, completely out of control and hurting, rejected and abandoned. I can be completely fine, having a great day and feeling completely on top of my shit and BAM, my mum cancels or does something kind of crappy and I’m reduced to this emotional creature.

Will I ever stop wanting a Mother? Will I ever be ok with things the way they are?

My Mum was a single Mum, she lived with her parents and had support from them but she was only 20 when she had me and ill prepared to cope with looking after a baby. She married a man when I was 7, she left him abruptly when I was 9. Her first husband sexually abused me. We have never spoken about it but we both know it happened. She met another man when I was about 11, he had moved in with her within a few months and a few months after that they were expecting a child together. He was quite nice for the first little while but soon enough he showed his true colours. He is an alcoholic and when drunk he would physically emotionally and mentally abuse me. My Mother never stopped it so I moved in with my Grandparents to get away but they ran out of money and ended up moving in with my Grandparents too. So i couldn’t get away, the abuse continued in my Grandparents home. I ended up getting on the first bus leaving spencer st station just after I turned 18 and I never really stopped traveling til I moved back to Australia from England 6 years ago.

My Mother had three children to him in three years, my sister, the first to be born…the day she was born I came home from school and no one was there. They had forgotten about me. After a while I went a bit nuts and broke the back door down, it was basically a show of things to come. My Mother established this new family with this man and there wasn’t a place for me in it. I was edged out because I was difficult and didn’t fit into her new family.

Now, my Mother and I have been speaking again for just over a year. Before that, we hadn’t spoken in a bit over 3 years because the relationship was making me crazy and she kept cancelling on seeing my girls and disappointing them and so much passive aggression, I just couldn’t handle it anymore so i cut my family off. But now we are trying to work on a relationship and I keep thinking that it’s just not going to work out, it keeps making me feel so utterly terrible, I don’t think we can attain a relationship that’s healthy.

My Mother runs around after my half siblings, my sister is 21 middle brother is 19 and the youngest turns 18 in a few weeks. She will pick them up from work at 3am or run around to the other side of the city to get a school book or what have you, fairly normal parent behaviour right? Well when I see this, it makes me crazy that she wont do a damn thing for me, it makes me crazy that she was apparently able to be a proper parent to these three people but not to me, why doesn’t she want to be my Mum? I keep seeing her doing all of these things for them and I can’t even get her to do a few tutoring sessions for my kids even though she is accreddited as a tutor and that’s her frickin job! I’ve been asking her for months to do some tutoring for my girls, I even offered to pay her normal fee but she keeps arsing around like it’s too hard. And recently I’d loaned her some money and then I had to chase her up on the day she said she’d pay me back and she advised me she didn’t have time to get to a bank to pay me back as she was too busy watching my brother play netball.

It now seems that she’s even more of a mother to my insane cousin than she is to me. My cousin was another family member I cut off when I initially stopped talking to my Mother. She is three years older than me and we were both looked after by my Grandmother when we were growing up so there was more of a sibling bond for a while than a cousin one as we were both only children and got along fairly well. As an adult I do not care for my cousin one bit. We spent a lot of time together and she is just the most negative, self absorbed abomination of a person that I’ve ever known. She married the biggest douchebag I’ve ever met, the kind of guy who started making good money from selling crap on Ebay and then would brag to people about how much cash he had and how well off he was. Yuk. He is a bully and a creep, the daughter she had when they got together is treated like shit by him because he has ‘his own’ children with her now and he admits freely to not loving her as much and this is why he treats her poorly, and he gets away with it. He used to love picking fights with me too, he’s just a really unpleasant man with double standards for everyone else. In the time that I stopped talking to my cousin she has been on a campaign of talking shit about me to whoever she can, I hear random gossip from mutual parties and the girl is just a sad case, it makes her feel better to think my life is in shambles and judging from the gossip I hear, my life is just a mess! Haha, but yeah she is an alcoholic and just loves getting off on my misery apparently.

My Mother always does something for Melbourne Cup Day, it’s a big race here in Melbourne and many people have bbq’s and what have you. I kind of knew that my Mother had planned something at her place because she always does, so I decided to poke the bear. I’m regretting that I did it now because I feel like shit, but that’s what I get for playing games. So yeah, knowing that she was probably doing a big bbq for the “family” I sent her a text saying ‘Hi, what are you doing tomorrow?’ then I got back, oh i was thinking of doing a family bbq I’m just waiting to hear back from Aunty Jane. Then another text – you’re more than welcome to come if you want. Then another text a few hours later ‘we’ve decided to have a big family bbq, you’re welcome to come after 1230 if you want to. warning you that your cousin and her husband will be here though’. Now my Mother knows I dislike my cousin and her husband, she knows that I refuse to have my children around these people, but her version of a family bbq doesn’t seem to involve me. She wouldn’t have invited me if I hadn’t of prodded, I was being passive aggressive and just wanted to shine a light on the fact that she hadn’t even invited me because that’s all i wanted, i wanted to be thought of and liked i guess. Feeling that your own mother doesn’t like you, it makes you feel like the most defective person on the face of the earth. If she doesn’t like me then why would anyone else?

So yeah, that’s my crappy situation and I really don’t know what I will do. My heart aches for a Mother, I just want someone to love me and guide me and want to be there for me like a Mother is. But this woman who is my Mother, she doesn’t seem to want that with me. I don’t want to give up but I can’t keep trying and getting nowhere. I can’t keep my heart open to this woman who doesn’t take care of it. I just don’t want to feel like such a loser anymore.

Peace xo