I have been blogging now for a couple of years, off and on. I started attempting to put my thoughts to words. The written word has always been very difficult for me being dyslexic. I would do better with the spoken word. I felt that putting it down would help me understand what has happened to me. I also, felt it was a way of defending myself and setting the record straight with self awareness as a bonus.
The one person and issue that is outstanding is that of my mother. It is very difficult for me to understand her role and how I was impacted by her. I have always thought my mother was basically a decent person who had been damaged by her marriage to my father, a narcissist/psychopath, with one as a son also. That certainly has made sense to me. But I have never been able to get my head around the fact that she left my father (or they divorced) and there didn’t seem to be a place for me in her life. She went on with it and had a few boyfriends, then met her husband Dr. Bob Houston, in Victoria Canada. Dr. Bob had 4 children who were just adults when they married and her life revolved around all of them. She had no understanding of me or what I was going through. I always felt she was the kind of person who was just unable to see what was happening for someone else, but boy did she squeal when she was hurt. I decided at some point I would stay away from her life. She was doing okay without me. At no point did she attempt to contact me, ever. I believe now with what I do know is she stayed away from me, and tried to keep me away, so she didn’t have to see the face of a daughter damaged on her watch.
I tried on a couple of occasions to reconnect with her but she didn’t seem to want to, so I stayed away. But then in 2005 I wrote to her and we then slowly reconnected and I reentered her life in 2007.
After the death of her husband and a court case with his children, over my mother’s money, she came to Vancouver to live with me. I cared for her until the day she died. She had said to me about 6 months before she died that she wanted to die and would starve herself to death, she did. I was by her side the whole time. With the knowledge that her doctor and her lawyer were fully aware of her decision. We respected her right to self determination. She set the date and stuck to it. I fed her homemade vegetable soup, and she enjoyed it, but the next morning she had stopped eating and never ate again. She shriveled up to nothing and took 14 days to die.
She shared with me in those last few months her guilt over me and how she felt responsible for what her step-children did to me and how they degraded and humiliated me. This is the first I had ever heard her even suggest she was partly responsible. She had always felt she played no role whatsoever. This certainly was one of the reasons I stayed away. I was angry with her for having watched the abuse of my father and brother on me and swore up and down she did not know. She did know and did nothing.
The question I have for myself is, who was she. Was she a damaged woman like myself, was she too a narcissist? She watched her child be abused by my father my brother my cousin and the HOUSTON CLAN and she did nothing. It is all very well to cry and admit culpability when you are 92 years old……
