Journals of a Teenage Cinderella Scapegoat

The other day while going through some old papers and cleaning out a closet, I found this old journal I had to write for an English class. All of these below journals appear in the same booklet for the same high school class.  I wrote this stuff as sophomore at 15 years old.

I remember thinking I wish I could tell these teachers more. I could have told them how I got hit,  but being repressed especially in high school, I didn't want to get into the nitty-gritty of my daily life with my wicked parents. I was too scared to reveal more and remember being afraid that I was pushing the envelope on these journal entries.

 I had been warned by then the dire results if I complained to any adults about any of my abuse and was well-trained but here, as you can tell I was showing some of my hand. I hadn't read this journal in years and with of several years of no contact and learning about narcissism, I definitely saw all of this in a new light! 

The above says:

"Parents: First I will talk bout my mother. The only thing me and her discuss is housework mostly she does most of the discussing. I always wish she did not argue about this. My mother always complains about my looks always saying "Comb the back of your hair." Now I will talk about my Dad. One thing he likes to do is treat me like a "gofer". Go fer this, Go fer that. Last night I had to fetch him 2 glasses of soda, a box of rubber bands, tape, a pen and a piece of cake and some others I can't remember. I asked him "Am I your 'gofer' or something?" He said "Yup".

The disrespect of the scapegoat can be so deep that while we will talk about the big stuff, getting hit, and lied to or locked in your room, there's also the more mundane grind that occurs over days and years that takes a toll on us.

The lack of any real relationship with my mother was decades in duration. Notice how I write at such a young age, that the only thing I discuss with my mother is housework.   I am not exaggerating. As a middle aged woman this makes me disgusted and sad any girl would be treated this way by anyone at all. The fact a mother did this to a would be daughter is even worse.

There was some times during my last years of no contact where I tried to think back and remember one positive conversation I had with my mother and I could not think of any.  Besides the missing hugs, the missing conversations were extreme.

Sometimes she would brag about purchases to me as a child and as an adult and I would compliment her on her good taste, etc, but those were one-sided. I never was complimented. I forgot after so many years, all the housework I was made to do, at least three hours a day of the stuff on a weekend day with cooking dinner dishes, dusting and vacuuming.  A lot of my "housework" was basically serving as my father's slave, where I was seen as just someone he could send scurrying around to get whatever he wanted so he didn't have to get up from his chair.

These journals bought back the memories of how he demeaned me this way and he never let up. I could be visiting with relatives or family friends and he would boss me around and tell me to go get things in front of others and it was embarrassing. Sometimes I would rebel and say "No" and I definitely would be backhanded hard across the face or otherwise threatened.  Once I stood up to him and I was around 12 at my grandmother's house because I wanted to play with my cousins and every adult in the room watched silently as he bellowed and screamed at me. Then I had already fetched him 2 glasses, and several plates of food.

 Many family members would watch this charade and never defend me. I admitted this here before but this was not agreeable "gofer" work, where you hand the guy a drink and he thanks you. There was always complaints where you were told there was not enough ice cubes, he can't find the end of the tape, the piece of cake isn't big enough, and you gave him the wrong fork. The me of today knows as a child I was taken for a ride by a narcissist who enjoyed causing me distress and seeing me run around more then a butler on crack.

This one says

Me and my sister: My sister is bossy. Yesterday she was bossing me around so bad we got into a fight. I yelled "quit acting like my mother". She was. I have other things to think about other than housework but it seems she doesn't. When my mom isn't home. She acts like my mother even though she's younger. She thinks she can boss me around. I do the housework but she wanted it done in her order. 

This one is rather self explanatory. This is your typical GC sibling turning into a narcissist taking the authoritarian role, emulating the narcissistic parent. This can happen even to older siblings if they are scapegoated. I realized in the years after I went no contact, that my sister never treated me well, even in the years I considered "better", there were times in our high school halls she would pretend not to know me or would treat me different when other people were around.  This journal reminded me, that things weren't so great before the time I believed my mother turned my sister against me.  She did basically became my mother and she followed the lead on all the abuse and demands for housework.

This is from the time I lost my driver's license, it probably was my learner's permit around this age which one can obtain at 15 in my state. It only occurred to me YEARS later, she lied about hiding it and it was not "lost". Funny how the fog fills our heads back then to avoid the obvious or maybe this was some Aspie blind-spots on my part.  Any teen eager to drive is going to remember what their learner's permit or driver's license looked like.

The above reads: and my mother yells at my dad and me. He brought me home. "Where is your license?" She says she gave it to me and [I] lost it. I am positively sure she never gave it to me and of course I stick by [my] story and of course she does too even though it's wrong. Also my sister goes on her side. I am also mad at her. I can't believe this. My mother says "Why did you lose it, you can't keep track of anything". I yell "how can I lose something I never had." She makes me mad. Even my dad said, You put it in your desk, you didn't give it to her then. She says, I gave it to her later.  I'm going, [I'm ] sure I never saw it".

This one says: then my sister gets mad at me for making everyone yell. So today I am going to go get a temporary license so I'll probably make my brother late for work and he'll be mad at me too. This is really great my whole family is mad at me and I didn't even do anything. Oh well I know the slightest little thing can make them mad anyway. I'm going to laugh when my Mom finds my license in one weird place that she put it. I really hate it when people blame me for things I didn't do. I'm about as mad as I can get and right before leaving for school my sister and brother fight over the recorder [VCR--this is the 1980s] Oh boy what fun. I don't care if school takes forever today.

It makes me sad even years later reading how I hope the license is found and at 15, being so autistic, I am clueless that even if my mother found the license, there's no way she'd ever admit it.  I believe my Aspergers worsened my narcissist abuse, because my failure to pick up on social cues did double my trouble.

The license never did pop up, even years later. I'm sure it found it's way ripped up into a trash can. This was a more minor matter in the scheme of things, I wasn't going to write about my drunk and high aunt who was visiting us back then or my brother getting punched in the hallway to my high school teachers but it's sad when I write how I am tired of being blamed for things. Well being a scapegoat means you are put in that role of being blamed.

This says:

Trying to be a neat person: I am sick of my mother yelling at me to quit being so messy. I don't get totally upset when a splash of water hits the kitchen floor like she does. I do believe in cleanliness not tidiness. But I do keep my room clean. I also don't dress up much as I used to but now I don't think it's worth the trouble. I hate wearing skirts, I like to wear jewelry  but I always fight to put it on. I am sure me and my mother would get along better if I had time to pick the icecube off the kitchen floor and wipe the sugar off the cupboard, but sometimes I doubt it. 

I liked wearing skirts but wrote I hated it here because she made me wear these nylons that never fit right with skirts and dresses, by then I had been dressed like a lumberjack for years outside of my Catholic school dress uniforms and probably was used to it. It only has occurred to me as an adult, her focus on cleanliness was excessive. It was an easy vehicle to use to abuse someone. Back then thin gold necklaces that were hard to work the clasp on were in fashion. Today one can just throw the long beads or cord over their neck but the 1980s were different well at least for those stuck in the American preppy suburban world. The commands regarding housework were constant. I hate housework today, and am bad at it but I know one reason I kind of let it go, is I want to live my life and not just be a cleaning drudge every second of the day like I was as a teen.

This following conservation is interesting. It occurs to me now reading this so many years later, I am the one making everyone's lunch and that's how it was every morning. My brother and sister never made me my lunch. I was treated like a Cinderella, go for this, go for that!

 Even when I got my restaurant job, the household duties never let up.  I think of the small nits, they lived their lives for. I doubt today is much different and this is how all their households are still run. Being criticized for the quality and dryness of the lettuce on my sister's sandwich, that she should have been making for herself, was a bit much. Remember my sister was only 1 year younger then me. Narcissists will of course come up with complaints just to come up with them deriving power and control from criticisms. If the lettuce had been absolutely perfect she would have commented on the mayonnaise being too thick, or too thin. Also know that two major red flags of narcissists around you is the constant criticism on nits and nothing ever being good enough.

This one says:

My family: My mother and sister both are fussbudgets but my mother likes to complain about the littlest things, here's an example of a conversation between both of us

Mother: "Get the lunches made!"
-So I get out the lunch makings
Mother: "Why don't you have two paper towels"
Me: Because I don't-so I get another one.
Mother: "Don't put the papertowel in the slop!"
--"in the slop" is a favorite expression of hers {there was not any} {it means water}
Me: "What slop?"
Mother: "Be sure to put green enough lettuce on your sister's sandwich!"
Me: "Ok --being rather aggreeble"
Mother: "That lettuce is too wet, dry it off. Did you pat it dry? Do you know what these sandwiches would have been like? Soggy! Soggy!
--Meanwhile my sister is yelling "I have no clothes"
Me: "God, what a fussbudget!"
Father: [to me] "Get my coffee!"

This says:

Meanwhile.....

My lucky brother is still in the shower. I go to get his coffee.
My sister: "I don't like that sort of bolonie [bologna] sandwich!"
Mother: "I'll make you some sandwich spread sandwiches" [this was this chopped ham spread]
Me: "Why? I made her a perfectly good bolonie [bologna] sandwich {that's how it's said in this family}
My sister: "I hate this shirt"
Dad: "Where's my coffee?"
Me: "I'm going upstairs, I have things to do after I get Dad's coffee."
so I do---I hear them talking
Dad: "Call her back. She's trying to get out of work, she'll probably just sit around up thre.
So I think  I was getting out of something else--another fun morning in the Queen Spider house ends til the fun afternoon. Note: This is as accurate as a picture as I could make of this morning.

During this instance, my GC sister deems her sandwich "not good enough" and like a customer at a restaurant demands another. My mother as I have written about before, would run around fetching her clothes and making sure her food was "perfect". I have thought about my years as a teen when I was living at home, and how I had no time to ever rest, or sit down, think or relax.

Reading this old journal, while it was muted and very censored for teachers, in that I wrote only about the mundane in a very removed attitude from it all, it still shows enough about what life was like for me. Probably a teacher reading a journal like this in these more enlightened times would be taking a student aside to try and ask how life was at home but back in the 1980s teachers really didn't get involved in that sort of thing.

In high school I was VERY CLOSED down. If I was slumbering away in my adult years before no contact, I was in a comatose state during my teenage years. Even my own writing at that time appears dead like whatever fire inside me had been put out. A few years later as I escaped down art highway, passion for life came back but that was still some time off.  

 I wasn't even barely an artist yet, though in junior year I was doing a few cartoons and started to take some art classes. I saw all this as "normal". I knew I was not loved and was seen as a burden, and I was only worth as "much as I did for others". I was not seen as a worthy person. Sure the complaints about housework, and being bossed around a bit to her high school English teacher may seem like a petulant teen but if you read below the lines, you realize this is not a loved teen, this is not a teen that feels at home and is not one who is accepted. She is a victim of narcissists and sadly it would take 3 more decades to fully break completely free.

I worked with teens later in life, and I have noticed how many teens are treated this same way. Almost like they are not people in their own right, just there to be told to run errands and make themselves useful and with no love or affection. Life long consequences in health and well-being are formed in those years. Anyone who treats a young woman or man this way squelching their potential is a wicked person. It makes me sick to watch narcissistic parents interact with teens, I believe in some ways the damage they do during those years can even have far more repercussions then the earlier ones.