I was reading raised by narcissists on Reddit and saw someone had posted a like experience, where their NM would run out of the house and leave for hours, supposedly for their "misbehavior".
I hadn't thought about this in years and years, but my mother did this all the time when we were school-aged. She would get angry and pissed off, yelling at my brother or me for something related to housework or some other dispute and tell us she was leaving. She would scream, "I am sick of you kids!" My father usually was not home during these times. She would then go upstairs pack a bag, and get into the car and drive off sometimes for 2 or 3 hours leaving us alone.
We would be crying for hours, and I was scared crapless of my father coming home and finding out we had driven away his wife, and then beating us for it. My brother and sister would be crying and whoever instigated the fight when she left [always me or my brother] would be yelled at by the other two. "Look what you did!"
Talk about forming abandonment issues in your kids. I think of related events how I would not be picked up from school once having to walk 13 miles home from my high school and there is always that nervous pit in my stomach even as an adult waiting for rides from people that I will be forgotten or left. This definitely has to be rooted in childhood.
Secretly even as my brother and sister cried, there was a few times in my mind where I wished she did not come back. I felt guilty over this but it's true. I didn't want her to come back. I imagined her driving to her freedom and maybe becoming a happier person. Maybe she'd smile once in a while. At the age of ten years old, thoughts like, "Why did my mother ever have children?" came up to my mind. There is part of me that never wanted children, my parents complained about it so much.
She would come back silent and sullen and making dinner. No one would say a word and we'd stay far away from her. I would be thinking, "I wish she had run away for good this time." I was one of those kids who wished my parents WOULD divorce, dealing with tag-teaming narcissists was harder then one at a time. I had years of guilt being told I should love people who did not love me.
I had forgotten about this. When I was very little my mother used to do it. She would take me along though and we were gone for days or weeks (can't remember exactly how long). We would go to the city where we would stay with her mother. She took me because I was so little perhaps or that she needed the supply. I remember being so young that my grandmother got me a potty. So that's young.
ReplyDeleteShe would leave the 3 older kids alone with dad. Dad worked full-time, so I don't know exactly how that worked. But when I grew up and on my own an old family friend told me there were times there was no food and that she would have to help out with the cooking or what-not. It seems that there were regular times when my siblings were out of my life. That is a blank space in my head.
I remember one time we came back home and mother started to cry. Mother doesn't cry and it came out like a screech or a howl, it was horrible and I was so scared. Apparently, dad killed her dog to get even.
That must have been terrible to worry about your father coming home. I imagine you felt blamed for her leaving or making her leave. That's not true, however, that is how we feel don't we. That feeling is indescribable. To try to control something that is out of your control. To grow up before your ready. Abandonment issues is very hard. In relationships its like I'm going to die. I have to place things in a logical way in my head, and that is not easy.
Would you like me to list the times my mother did this in alphabetical order of reasons she gave (lies) or in duration or time spent away from the house? After a while we were so glad to see her go that I think we actually drove her away on purpose.
ReplyDeleteThinking back to around the time my mother pulled the disappearing acts, I remember my sister being the most sensitive to it. My sister was the most sensitive to everything. We could look to my older sister on how to proceed with mother, if it was ok to approach her at any given time. And how everyone tried to placate mother.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how we would have all turned out if we had a good mother. If mother didn't pull her crap and just stayed home and baked cookies while father was at work. We poor kids.