I’m so lost and confused. I keep going back and forth between believing that my mom and golden child sister are narcissists, and maybe I’m just being too sensitive, or I’m acting like a spoiled baby.

I’m used to being the one to apologize to make things better between mom and I after a disagreement. I’m used to making sure she is happy, so I don’t suffer her wrath.

I may have mentioned this before, but at some point after my dad died, my mom began scapegoating me.
For example, she would say things about my brother’s fiance, telling me how wonderful she was that it was nothing for her to get all the kids ready and go downtown, and she doesn’t even have a car. Before, I would have felt badly about myself, but not this time. I was going through post partum depression, and grieving for the loss of my dad. My baby was premature and required frequent feedings, day and night. Nobody seemed to care or understand that I was sleep deprived on top of the ppd. I told her “that’s great if you like dragging your kids all over hell’s half acre, and spending all your time away from your own home”. Lol! She didn’t like that. She loves going downtown shopping, and she was trying to make me feel guilty enough to pull myself together and drag her and my toddler around downtown. She gets a lot of pleasure from spending money on clothes, even if she never wears them. My mom is also a hoarder.

So, just little low blows and jabs at me and my character to make me feel inadequate, or guilty, or whatever she wants at the moment.

I’m going to try and explain how this situation makes me feel. It feels like my mom and sister stopped loving me. It is like, at some point after dad died, they decided I wasn’t worthy of being in the “in crowd” anymore. I wasn’t together enough to be worthy of their love and affection. I feel so much rejection. Such loss. It’s hard to wrap my head around them not being capable of love, when I was so close to them and it felt like they love me.

I would think that if somebody I love is suffering, I would try to help them, not abandon them and try to make them feel worse. I don’t get it. It doesn’t feel normal. There could be only 2 possible explanations. I truly am going crazy like they say, or they are narcissists and are not capable of real love.

They are so concerned with their image, with “what the neighbors will think”, and they think I will make them look bad, so they made me into a scapegoat. After 46 years of thinking everything was normal, it took me speaking up and calling them on their bullshit to figure out that I grew up in a dysfunctional home.

As long as I was being treated like a “golden child” I wasn’t the wiser. As soon as I became the scapegoat, all the pieces began falling into place. My family is messed up! My mom is a narcissist, and my dad (as far as I can discern up to this point) was an enabler.

I plan on seeking psychotherapy for what I went through as a small child. I believe I dissociated a lot to escape the craziness, and as a result I’m realizing I don’t have very many childhood memories.

Please let me know if you can relate to what I am going through. Did you, as an adult, discover that your family wasn’t what you thought it was? Have you gone through being scapegoated after being a golden child for much of your life?

Please let me know how you are dealing with it. Not that I wish this on anyone else, but it really helps to find out that you are not alone, and somebody out there gets it, somebody out there gets what you are going through.

~ Poking Holes ~