CaraBoo 'Thanks' for your warm welcome. Maggar, hold off on the 'blame' – no one deserves being treated the way you are being.
CaraBoo is so right, it is like a bereavement and there is a process that this takes. Initially, it's shock, 'what the heck have I done to deserve this treatment?' Then we get angry, and I think this anger can help us get through. Eventually we start to see 'glimpses' of the bigger picture, we start connecting the dots! It becomes a revelation!
Like Cara, my daughter is older, she's 35 this year. Technically I too lost my daughter when she was 15! I can pin point the day. She had a friend who always argued with her mother, and this friend left home and lived in the YMCA for a year! All Mothers then became public enemy number 1! She surrounded herself with friends who had family issues. It was all negative stuff.
She went to college, but didn't take it seriously. She literally had 6 cars which all died of a million dents! Every time she went out, I imagined it was the last time I would see her alive! I couldn't stand the way she and her father ganged up on me, I couldn't do a thing right, my being colour-blind even became a tool for them to put me down. I tried to install some discipline but when there is no support it appeared 'I was always at fault' it's so hard.
In 22 years of marriage I had never seen any emotion in her father, the only emotion he ever showed was anger. (This is where Narcissism fits in so well). When she was 19 I couldn't stand it any more and so I left. I wasn't needed in the home, except to do their housekeeping, laundry etc.
When she was 23 I married a great guy!
Some of the last words we texted were last August. The argument was all done in text, she wouldn't meet up with me, I asked her what had I ever done for her to hate me so? She came came back so fast saying that I had left her when she was 17! (she was in fact 19 - almost 20!)
Fast-tracking, when she was about 23 she got in with a guy that had been in prison lots of times for violence (officially it's something like 29 times for 34 'offences against the person') – in all I think he served about 9 years! I had never experienced anyone like him and was way out of my depth. She had my granddaughter, Lisa, who I love to bits. This guy two timed her when she was pregnant... it was all too ugly for words.
This guy never support Lisa financially, when he did he would throw the money first on the floor so my daughter had to kneel before him to pick it up. She worried me sick saying that she would be found dead in a ditch one day! But she did have a wake up call when the baby was born, she got herself a degree in quantity surveying, landed a well paid job, and she managed (with help from us and Lisa's paternal grandparents) to get herself mortgage.
We supported her through lots of court cases to stop Lisa's father from threatening her.
My daughter met another man, who'd been married before. His first marriage broke up within a year as he didn't get on with his mother-in-law! His wife had an abortion during the marriage as the 'time wasn't right'!
My daughter got pregnant by him (she was 32 at that time!), they got married, had Jess, when Jess was 7 months old, she found she was pregnant again and so they decided to have an abortion! This hurt me so much... but I kept quiet and only offered my support.
Boy there are loads of issues with this guy!
Last year my husband was diagnosed with non-hogkins lymphoma, and had 6 sessions of chemo (fingers crossed, successfully), my brother died of throat cancer last June (she was the last operson to speak to him on the phone – he died half an hour after the call as he just couldn't breath – she made such a drama out of this, in fact turning herself into the 'focal point' of tragedy).
To top all this off, I was texted in August by her husband, never to darken their doorstep again, and I've never heard hide nor hair of them since. I was immediately and pathetically struck from being their facebook friends. Over the following months, Facebook was the only avenue for me to contact my granddaughter – this was discovered by them and I was deleted from being her facebook friend, just a couple days before Christmas.
What am I learning:
1. Above all - I am NOT a nasty person!
2. I definitely don't deserve the sentence of not being able to see my two grandchildren
3. My daughter is callous and hard
4. I was a victim when I lived with a controlling and 'narcissistic' man who blamed me for everything and because 'love is blind', I thought this was my fault.
5. Everything that is wrong in my daughter's life, is not my fault!
6. She has surrounded herself with others who have the same 'issues' as her, they support and reaffirm all the crap she wants to hear. She doesn't want to hear that maybe the problem is with her.
7. The only reason I am getting this grief is because they want to see me destroyed... what else could it be? So I'm determined they are not going to have this pleasure!
I'm not going to take any more crap from her, nor from her husband.
I've created a website for my granddaughter, using her name as the domain name, this is a beacon for when she wants or is able to contact me.
I did send my daughter a Christmas present (I couldn't send her nothing after 34 years) The present was a poem book called 'Point B' here is a Youtube of Sarah Kay reciting her poem:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0snNB1yS3IE Quote: “There is nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shore, no matter how many times it is sent away!” - gorgeous words!
No matter what - my door will always be open for her! I do hope she realises that!
I also hope she realises that I'm no door mat any more! I don't deserve to be treated like this! Neither does any parent deserve this sort of rubbish. As you say Cara, "Where is the Respect!"
It hurts like hell – at the moment I hate her for what she has done. John, my husband, is so very angry with her – he just wants to call her and ask her if she realises the hurt she is causing!
Like Pixie, I grieve everyday, it's the first thing that's on my mind when I wake up, and it's the last thing I remember when I go to sleep. If I wake up in the night, no matter what time it is, my brain starts over and over thinking of this situation.
There is some great advice in this thread! Thank you everyone for your support! Words cannot say how I feel to have discovered a place where others know and understand. Sadly, there are far, far too many suffering.
Hope I've not rambled too long, it is such good therapy to get it down on paper instead of it all swirling around my head!
