My mother and I

So a lot of you will have picked up and the 'strained' relationship between my mother and I , maybe it is time to explain why. Please don't think that I consider myself hard done by, I have a wonderful Dad and siblings, yes I am going to moan about my mother and yes I am lucky to have a mother, I am just explaining the reasons why the relationship between the two of us was so strained and the affect it had and continues to have on me.

My mother suffers from mental health problems herself, she was the victim of sexual abuse as a child, she was made to look after her younger siblings from a young age whilst her mother worked to provide for the family as a single mother. My Mum didn't really have a childhood, this has had a huge impact on her. She suffered from postnatal depression after 2 out of 5 of her pregnancies, one of them being me. When I was born my parents had just put every penny they had into buying their first house, the house I grew up in, the house my parents and siblings still live in today. My Dad was a train driver and would often work 36 hours straight, when he was home he would be sleeping due to his shift patterns. My elder brother was 2 years old, I came along, my parents had no money, they struggled, my Mother struggled. Depression set in very early on after my birth, my Mother to this day says I never liked her from birth, I hated her, I was out to annoy her, I was a evil baby. She never got any treatment for the postnatal depression, so it went on and on, we NEVER bonded. Just under 3 years later she gave birth to my sister, my Mother adored my sister, she wasn't an evil baby who liked to 'get at' her like I was. My sister became toilet trained before I was able to go a day without wetting myself, my sister was dry through the night before I had ever had my first dry night. I was already showing significant signs of stress, I was painfully anxious as a child, but I was punished for it. The more I tried not to have accidents of wetting myself the more it happened. When I started school at the age of 4 I wasn't ready. I couldn't cope, I strongly believe that some children are just not ready for school at that age, I used to have to have afternoon naps in the quiet corner as I couldn't go through the whole day. At least 2 times a week for the first year of primary school I would be sent home as 'I didn't feel well' really I just wasn't coping. This angered my mother more, by this point she was pregnant with her 4th child, the last thing she wanted was the annoying little thing at home again. I was still wetting myself several times through the day, I was having to be woken up and taken to the toilet several times through out the night and still managing to wet the bed. Of course this was as far as my mother was concerned me trying to get at her. She now will openly say that she hated me at this point. She was trying to bring up the others, the ones she loved, the nice ones,  I was doing these things to 'get at her' still.

When I moved into the second year of school I remember my Mother taking me in to see my new teacher. My mother told her about all of the things I did, being sent home all the time, the wetting myself. I can remember the teacher saying "she wont get away with these things her" "we wont have things like that in this class". But what everybody failed to realise was that I was trying so hard not to do these things, I wanted more than anything to go through the day with dry knickers, to go through the night with a dry bed. I wanted to make my Mother love me. But I couldn't, I was a child struggling to cope. I felt taunted by this teacher, the grin she had on her face when she would stand up in the middle of the class and in front of all of my class mates and tell me I needed to go to the toilet, she would have a grin and so would my class mates.

My Dad continued to work extremely long hours, we would hardly see him, but when we did I would cling to him and not want him to go. It was a family joke and still is to this day that I would follow him around like there was a piece of string attaching us together, I couldn't bare to be apart from him.

By the time my sister had started school I had fallen extremely behind. Throughout school I was a year behind with the level of work I was doing. My older brother and my sister are very intelligent, I am not. When I left primary school at the age of 10 my sister was doing a higher level of work than me as I had moved behind and she had been moved to the year ahead. Already I was failing. I was considered lazy by my mother, I didn't try like the others, I was not a succeeder in life.

When I was about 7 my Mother took me to see a behaviour lady, I am to this day not sure what her job tittle was. I was taken to see her as I was still yet to have any more than the occasional dry day or night. I remember playing in the waiting room with some blocks while my Mother went in and spoke to the lady, then after a while I joined them in the room. I remember the lady telling me that I needed to be a big girl now and that I surely don't want to be wearing nappies like my little brother. It was decided that I was jealous of my younger brother and that was why I was displaying this 'challenging' behaviour. We made a chart, every day I had to draw a sun if I was dry, a cloud if I was a little bit damp and a cloud with rain and lightening if I was wet. I can remember the unbearable sense of failure at the end of every day when I would have to draw the cloud with rain and lightening. I can remember my Mother taunting me and telling me how stupid, awkward and horrible I was. I remember her telling me that she new I was doing it to get at her. I remember when she put me in a traditional terry towling nappy, I remember when she made me sleep on the bare rubber mattress protector as she was fed up with washing sheets, I remember when she dug a hole in the garden and told me that I was no longer allowed to use the toilet as I was disgusting.

One of the strongest memories I have is when I was in the garden playing with my siblings, I believe I was about 9, I had a denim skirt on. I wet myself, my Mother was in the lounge sat to the table chatting to her friend. I needed to get past them to get to the hallway and up the stairs so that I could get changed. I crept in through the kitchen, I tried to go through the lounge with my back against the wall, so they wouldn't see the wet patch on my skirt. I got almost to the hallway door, I almost got away with it, then my Mother noticed me, she asked what I was doing, I tired to say nothing, but she new, I jumped back as she charged towards me, she grabbed my arm and spun me around, they laughed, they kept laughing, they told me how dirty I was, how pathetic I was. I just wanted to hide.

My Mother was still convinced that I was put on this earth to get at her, so any thing I did was for that reason. If I was ill, obviously I had made myself ill to annoy her. If I fell over and grazed my knee it was to ruin whatever it was she was doing. She dismissed me, she wanted me out of the way.

Our next door neighbours were foster parents, they fostered 'naughty' teens, teens that could not live at home any more due to their behaviour. My Mum used this as a threat to me, she would constantly tell me that I would be sent to live next door. I was terrified.

Two days after my 11th birthday my youngest brother was born, baby number 5. I fell in love, my Mother didn't, her second bout of postnatal depression kicked in. My Mother didn't cope, but I did. I was in my element, I became his second mum, his cot was in my bedroom, I changed him, dressed him, fed him, I did everything for him. My mother got over this period of postnatal depression a lot quicker, she got treatment early on and recovered. I was on a roll though, I had found something I was good at. When I started secondary school that September I could not wait to come home from school each day, get my brother in his pram and go back into town and meet my friends, my little brother in tow. On Sundays I used to take my baby brother, my 4 year old brother and my sister across to the other side of town to rent a video from the rentals shop. I loved the responsibly, I was never good at school, I was very behind intellectually, but I was great at being a mummy. But I was still very young, I made mistakes, which were pounced on. My Mother asked me to get some sugar from the shop once on one of my trips to the video shop with my siblings, I was 12. I got home with the sugar, only to find I had picked up a bag with a hole in it, we had been leaking sugar all of the way home. My Mother was angry, how could I have been so stupid, surely I had noticed the bag was leaking? I was punished.

The last time I wet myself during the day was on my first day at secondary school at the age of 11, the bed wetting cut down a lot, although I would have the odd accident up until my late teens. I was still very anxious, painfully shy and very exhausted throughout my early secondary school years. I was still an underachiever at school, but I was still in love with the idea of being my youngest brothers mummy.

My Mother still considered me to be evil, horrible, useless. I was still regularly threatened with being sent around to my neighbours to live as a form of punishment. So on my Mothers birthday when I was 13 my Mother sent me around there as I was annoying her and of course she shouldn't have to put up with me annoying her on her birthday. I finally found out the true extent of how much my Mother hated me. I was raped. Being young, scared, confused, alone, I believed that this was my punishment, I believed that my Mother had arranged this. When it happened again and again, I new my mother wanted it to happen, I deserved it, I was evil and my mother was punishing me. She was punishing me in the most horrible of ways.

From that day on I switched myself off from my Mother, I started punishing myself, the way a dirty, evil, horrible girl deserved to be punished. Self harm became my way of escaping my Mother, if I punished myself then it didn't matter how much my Mother punished me. Also it was the start of years and years of eating disordered behaviour. Obviously now as an adult I no that my Mother never arranged it, she never new what was truly happening around there, but as a child I believed it and never questioned that it could not have been arranged by her.

My Mother still believes I am constantly trying to get at her, every overdose, every operation I have needed due to self harm, every time I have been sectioned. She wants to no why I love my Dad more than her. In my appointment the other day she cried as I have never loved her.

So over the next few weeks my Mother and I are going to be having therapy together. Will it help? I have no idea.