Life Story: The Curse Of A Bad Mother

I always thought my brother rude and disrespectful. But I guess he knew something that has taken me decades to figure out; the more you back down for a narcissist, the worse they get.

I don’t do chaos well, I like peace and quiet. Where there is joy and harmony, I thrive. Unlike my big brother, I was unable to feel my way through the chaos and abuse. Anytime our mother began her verbal tirade of comparisons and insults, I shrunk and went quiet. On the rare occasions I tried to explain or talk back, she got physical and beat me mercilessly. My brother has always called me weak, but I am an empath and I believe with all my heart that my mother is a narcissist. And the match between a child empath and a narcissist parent is hell; red, hot, raging hell. 

My mother fed on my soul, to satisfy her unending need for validation. When I made good grades in school, she would gleefully recount how she did better than me when she was my age. If I scored a B in a subject, she would tell me how she only scored A in school.

She would comment on my looks and tell me how I didn’t look like her one bit.

“Look at my long thick lashes, and look at yours, as if I dug you from the ground. Whose daughter are you? See your big buttocks, your knees will punish you for them in your old age. Look at me, I’m slim and healthy. You’re too dark, I am light brown. Your teeth are too big, see my small teeth and beautiful gap. See your small legs and big butt, see my big legs and small waist,” and on and on she would go. Everyday.

I didn’t mind the comparison as much as I did the criticism, everything I did, everything! If I stayed in my room by myself, she would call me anti-social. When I played with other children, I was irresponsible. If I laughed out loud, I was crude; if I didn’t, I was rude. If I dressed down, I was unpolished and an embarrassment, if I dressed up, I was an attention seeker. And being a child and clueless, I didn’t have the sense to stop caring about her constant criticism. So I tried, tried to please her, again and again. It never worked.

I believe confidence is like an iceberg, when it’s put together well, it is formidable. But when you chip at it, little by little, the chippings melt and the iceberg begins to shrink. That is what my mother did to my self-confidence. She chipped at it with words and fists, till I shut down, retreated into myself.

The sad thing is, after she beat me down and tore my self esteem into shreds, she then turned around to calm “slow and timid.” When it came to me, my bad mother’s behavior bordered on unhinged.

I am sure I would have committed suicide save for my father. Between my parents, my mother is the most educated. She was a nurse and my father a carpenter. Even though he wasn’t as formally educated as my mother, he loved to read and educate himself. He observed the ill treatment and tried to talk my mother out of it. I witnessed many times my father tried to correct my mother concerning me and she turned it into a fight.

My father got closer to me, and began to pay more attention to me. When I was in primary six, he asked that whenever I closed from school, I go to his carpentry shop to do my homework and wait till he closed to go home with me. When my mother served dinner, he would ask to see my portion, and that of my siblings, then he would take meat or fish from his food and add it to mine.

I remember him constantly telling my siblings and I not to allow our mother create discord between us. And he would chastise my brother and sister if they tried to bully me. I felt safe when my father was around, when he had to leave the house, my heart always dropped.

The closer I got to my father, the angrier my mother became. I noticed they fought more. And then one day my mother insinuated my father was sleeping with me, or wanted to. I really don’t remember which one. My father gathered us three children and took us to live with our grandmother, and then threatened do divorce my mother. I was then in JSS 1. The months we spent in my grandmother’s house make some of my most happy memories of childhood. I was really looking forward to never going back, but they reconciled and we went back to being a ‘family’.

The verbal and physical abuse stopped. But another took its place; silence. My mother only talked to me when it was absolutely necessary. That mental abuse was even worse. I was like a stranger in my ownhome, my mother was at loggerheads with me.

It was my father who talked to me about menstruation, sex and the female body. He taught me about relationships and how to conduct myself as a lady. I remember the day he gave me a book about adolescence and puberty, and then said, “take that big mirror in my bedroom to your room, open your legs, look at your vagina, observe it and decide to give it all the respect you can in this life.”

One of my father’s favorite line to me was, “Go where you’re celebrated, not tolerated.”

I guess he was trying to tell me to stop vying for my mothers’s love,but i never understood him at the time.

I was so embarrassed, I began to cry. He clenched his jaw and walked away. I think he was embarrassed too, but he had to do it, I had no one. My academics took a nosedive. I had to re-sit the high school final exams thrice before I made it to the University. It was on campus, away from home, from my mother, that I began to find myself again.

When I graduated, I hardly spent a week at home. My father rented a single room apartment in Accra, miles away from home and helped me settle in, then he had an old friend of his find me a job in Barclays bank. Then he said, “make me proud.”

And I hope I have.

When I was about to get married, my husband tried to play the peacemaker, he went to see my mother to convince her to take an active part in our wedding. He came back from that encounter shocked to the bone. My mother sat him down and advised him to gird his loins, because she felt he wasn’t mature enough for me. She told my husband-to-be, that I was experienced with matured men. It was a lie, my husband was and has been the only man I’ve ever known.

My mother came to my wedding dressed in lace whiter than my wedding dress, and proceeded to loudly announce at my wedding reception how brighter than me everyone thought she was. I finally caught on and accepted my mother would be happier without me. So I treat her with respect and kindness, but mostly I treat her with silence. I finally wised up and give as good as I get. 

I’m a mother of three daughters now. I make sure I am their best friend and confidante. And my mother-in-law is my best friend now, only second to my father.

My mother did begin to try to bond, when I was in my early thirties, but the bonding glue dried out when I was nineteen. It is too late. I am not interested. My father says her and my kid sister have become like cats and dogs, constantly fighting. I am not surprised at all, my mom raised my little sister to be just like her.

Now don’t go feeling sorry for me, my mother let me down, but my father, he loved up!