Sometimes I break my own heart. Then again, don't we all break our own hearts?
For the most part, I am a pretty emotionally healthy person. I have no obvious scars - I am not a hooker, drug addict, raging drunk. I work hard, I have a good child, I have a good job. My social skills are, more or less, adequite to get by on.
Yet the legacy of my childhood shows up in the most difficult ways, in the most difficult places.
Mamma defined the words "narcissitic", "self-absorbed", "selfish" - especially when it came to me. I existed ONLY as a reflection of her. When I was very little, she dressed me to match her. My hair went through an endless series of Lilt Home Permanants, in an attempt I suppose to make me resemble Shirley Temple. I was sexualized into being a mini-me, encouraged to do strip shows with scarves (I think it was my own idea - but where does a 4 years old get an idea like this?). I even owned, at the age of 6, a garter belt and fishnet stockings, which were purchased to go with a vinyl miniskirt and go go boots - to be worn under my angel costume for my first Christmas Pageant!
However, Mamma seemed to lose interest in me when I was the age that my sister was when she died. Perhaps there is no correlation there - because this was also the time when I started to act on my own, to have my own notions of who and what I wanted to be, when I started to assert my individuality.
But the thing was, from my earliest memories, I knew that I was somehow a dissapointment. Now, I am sure, if Mamma was alive she would protest this - would insist that she loved me, and was proud of me... and maybe, to some extent, that was true. But the reality of this pride was overtaken, I think, by a nearly rabid jealousy. It felt to me, and feels to me now, that my mother spent most of the time hating me. And all I wanted, all I wanted, was her love. I wanted her to be proud of me. I had no understanding that each of my achievments, any light on me at all, made her feel like she was in shadow - made her feel as if I was stealing something from her. How could I have known?
Nearly everything I did was an effort to gain her love and her attention. I was so desperate for her to see me. To love me. To be proud of me, and to stop acting as if i were a dissapointment. Because of this, I became the worlds littlest overachiever.
I was in every school play. She never came. I learned music and singing, enough to be in the band and the choir. She never came. I competed in 4-H, in Forensics, I lettered 4 times. She never came. I was a class officer, a cheerleader, on the school paper, choir president. She never came.
Once, when I was in 4th grade, I won the county championship in Speech, and was invited to the State Championships to compete with my speech. It would have been on the radio! She inspected my bedroom the night before the competition - and grounded me, forbidding me from going.
I was Miss Teen Kenosha. Not only didn't she come that night, but neither did my family, because that night, my mother chose to attempt suicide. So, there I was, on this big stage in a leftover-from-a-wedding bridesmaids outfit - competing against all these girls in new gowns - each would walk on to the stage, and thier families would cheer them. I walk out, and introduce myself - and nothing. No applause. No one was there. I ran backstage in tears, found a payphone, and called - "Mom is at the hospital, don't worry - she cut her wrists, but she'll be fine". All things considered, I think I carried off the rest of the evening rather well.
I think the saddest thing of all was that I was doing this all for her, to try and make her love me. I never understood that each small achievment was, in her sick mind, an insult to her, asign that she was getting old and dying, and that I was stealing her rightful place in life.
Now, though this still hurts - this litany of pain - I have come to terms with it. I understand the pathology. I know that none of this had anything to do with me, and that any other mother would have been happy and proud, and would have been there cheering me on. I just got unlucky.
But, regardless of my understanding, there is a legacy that goes with this... one I do not know how to break. Something I do not know how to change. Because my mother could not freely love me, I do not know how to find love freely given. Time after time, I choose the narcissist, the person who cannot see me, the person who will not love me - and for whom I will strive, fight, even debase myself in order to win.
I know.... I KNOW, in my soul, that a narcissist cannot love... and that if they do love you, it is only the reflection of themselves in your eyes. And, even if they do not love you, as long as you admire and love them, they will keep you around because they LIKE that look of adoration coming back at them. But, they cannot see you.
And in my own dysfunction, I repeat the pattern, over and over.... loving only those who cannot see me, who do not get me, who cannot love me. And I remake myself - into a scholar, a beauty queen, a mother, a sex goddess, a madonna, a whore, a shrink, a friend, a counselor, anything.... anything at all to see if I can make it all come out different in the end.
