Dear Reader:

This post will be about my mother’s lies- lies I grew up with, lies that created a twisted understanding in my mind, a twisted understanding of people and life.  Before I go back in time to her lies, told before the internet existed, I want to mention what is widely known:  that we currently live in an era of lies, aka disinformation, spread massively through the internet. Old fashioned journalism where facts were reported objectively, without opinion, is almost a thing of the past, and what exists now is non-journalism with a narrative, or a Story, reporting only the facts that support their Story, and adding claims and suspicions that are not supported by facts, so to support .. a Story, non-journalists promoting the Story that their audience wants to hear, for financial profit.

Similarly, my mother infected my poor, assaulted brain with massive (pre-internet) disinformation aimed at promoting a Story, her Story. The theme of her Story was that she was GOOD and everyone else was BAD, including me. She then .. reported to me only the facts that supported her Story, including claims and suspicions not supported by facts. Some of her claims were lies (untruths told intentionally, aka disinformation), others were her mistaken beliefs (untruths told unintentionally, aka misinformation). To promote herself being GOOD she promoted others being BAD, the idea being that the more other people are bad, the more .. good she is. (I see this practice in these forums, from time to time, when more often it is a woman who lies/ exaggerates the claimed badness of an ex romantic partner, so to promote her goodness). As a result of my mother practicing the demonization of everyone else, at length and repeatedly, I believed that she was indeed the only good person in the world and that everyone else was bad, including me.

This belief led to my extreme loneliness and isolation as a child, a teenager and an adult because on one hand, I was not at all close with my mother, I was most distanced from her, and on the other hand I didn’t trust anyone else.. so no closeness with her, no closeness with anyone else. Closeness was not possible with my mother because she claimed that I was bad, so I was filled with ongoing, chronic shame and guilt.. and anger, a tormenting combination of emotions that do not allow closeness.  In my mind, buying into her Story, my only chance to be free from Guilt (for being BAD), was to one day give her enough money/ luxurious life so to compensate her for my Badness: that became my life-goal. I remember crying in the bathroom following one of her you-are-bad dramatic displays, saying to myself convincingly: I am so bad. I must not live for me. I must live only for her until such time that I compensate her financially for my badness. Only then will I be free to live my life for me. I was imprisoned in Guilt for decades, and no matter how much money I saved so to pay her back, it was never enough, never buying me freedom from guilt. It is only recently, in the last few years, that I progressively experienced the freedom I longed for, freedom from guilt. But am not entirely free: this is why I am posting this, wanting MORE freedom from guilt, and more freedom from her Lies.

Her I am Good, you are Bad theme of lies included the following repeated claims: (1) that in her mind and heart, I was the focus of her life, that all that she did, she did for me, that I was the reason she was alive (that otherwise, she’d kill herself), that all her hard physical work every day- was done to benefit me. Here is a startling part of this claim: when I was 6-years-old, she brought my newborn sister to me, in her arms, and told me: this is a gift for you, I made her for you. I remember thinking to myself: this baby’s skin is so wrinkled.. what a strange, wrinkly gift.

The truth, supported by facts: I was far from being the focus of her life. As a matter of fact, her siblings, her nieces and nephews, neighbors, neighbor’s children, and strangers were her focus, while I was last. Whenever in the company of others, her focus was on them while insisting that I was to be nice and quiet, accommodate the others in every way. I remember once, visiting a girl from school, as a teenager: the girl’s mother answered the door (at the time, people did not call before visits) and told me that her daughter cannot visit with me because she was busy. I was SHOCKED: I didn’t know it was an option, for a mother to put her daughter first, before a visitor. I am still feeling the shock of it. Another memory that stuck to my mind: in a visit to an uncle, I was a preteen, I think,  he asked me questions about what I thought about this or that, asked with a smile and an attitude of respect and curiosity. I was shocked, I was never asked that with such an attitude, I didn’t know it was an option. Fascinated and feeling alive by the question, I wanted so much to to try and answer, but my mother was sitting to his left, giving me a threatening,  uneasy look.  In summary: I was not her focus, nor was she curious about me as a person, and I was the last on her priority list. She claimed she worked and earned money for me, but she kept spending her hard earned money on her siblings, their children, neighbors and strangers and their children, buying them expensive gifts and feeding them often with the most expensive foods. She wasn’t saving her money for me.. she spent it on others, on people she was focused on. To those others, including strangers, she talked oh so lovingly, oh so respectfully, flattering them, going on and on about how great they are. She didn’t talk like this to me!

There were many lies, many re-arrangements of facts and fiction so to promote the theme of her Story. I need to continue to take apart her Story so to free myself of it more. Maybe I will post more about it later.

anita