Toxic Is Toxic-

  I have been writing this blog post in my head for the past six months.  So much time has passed that there is now a new group of brand ambassadors. But it has taken that long to find the courage to put these thoughts on paper and make them real for others to see. 

    My mother is a narcissist.  I am the child of a narcissist. It is not something that is easy to say or that many people talk openly about. You hear the stories of people that have amazing relationships with their parents.  Or those typical families are messy and dysfunctional, but that they are family and will always be there. Not everyone has that. There are those who grew up knowing things were not good and then there are those of us that do not learn that until later in life. Not everyone deserves to be in your life. Sometimes the best thing for you is to cut that person/people out of your life…even if that person is family. 

  I am so tired of hearing “but they are your mother/father/sibling.”  Toxic is toxic. Period.

  This particular personality trait wasn’t something I grew up knowing about my mom, she hid it well and still does to so many.  I thought she was a great mom growing up.  It wasn’t until about two years ago that my sisters and I started comparing stories/experiences that the cracks began to show. I’m sure that many of the people that know her would argue and say that I can’t possibly be describing the same person that they know. But looking back on my childhood with this new filter exposes so many truths and explains so much more.  

  This hasn’t been something that I discovered over night. It has been years of pulling back layers of lies and stories. It was years of making excuses for how she acted and treated me, because she was my mother. And if I stopped making those excuses then I would lose that relationship.  When I moved to Chicago 15 years ago we would talk almost every day and I would go back to NY to visit a couple times a year.  Slowly the calls were fewer in between. I would still go back to visit my dad and siblings but there would be more last minute calls where she would need to cancel the part of the trip to see her.  These cancellations were always followed with an excuse of illness or that they had a friend visiting that just couldn’t be rescheduled, but I understood right. 

  Then I became a mother and the visits still became fewer and farther between. So much so that she has only seen my oldest daughter who is 11 twice and my son once, when he was 11 months old. He just turned 9 last month.  She has never met my youngest daughter who is 5.  There were some trips she cancelled as we were in the car driving on the way to her house, but I understood right.  The last time she cancelled was about 2.5 years ago.  I took the kids on a 2 week road trip through the Northeast. I wanted to show them where I grew up and to take them to the places I loved or never had a chance to go to.  After she left me a message on why she couldn’t see us this time I was done. I was done trying to make space for her in our lives.  It hurts to hear your mother, the one person that is always supposed to be by your side and support you come up with another excuse on why she doesn’t want to see you. I couldn’t keep putting myself in a situation where something or someone else was more important than me, it hurt too much. It brought up years of feelings of having felt abandoned by my dad.

  I grew up with divorced parents.  We only saw my dad what felt like a handful of times throughout the year.  We were supposed to see him every other weekend or something very similar to that. I remember my dad and step mom calling the morning of most of those weekends and having to cancel. Always feeling like we weren’t good enough or important enough for them to see us. Or watching my dad start and raise another family that was deserving of his time and affection.  These are feelings that my sister and I (one sister and I share the same parents, my youngest sister and I only have the same mom) have talked about and since then both have developed good relationships with him.  But every time my mother would cancel on us it felt like reliving every one of those last minute calls all over again. I couldn’t keep looking for something that she was not capable of giving me.  

  It was during one of those comparison stories with my sisters that we came to realize that most of those calls, cancelling on us last minute didn’t really happen.  He would come to pick us up and we weren’t at the house. She would have taken us somewhere else.  I can’t begin to talk about how much therapy I have through to work out those issues I had with my dad. Issues that were fabricated by her and intentionally kept us from having relationships with him growing up.  I grew up feeling like an outsider amongst my extended family because I saw them so irregularly, even though we only grew up in the next town over from some of them.  I remember her constantly belittling her own family members to us and why we wouldn’t be attending function after function. It was always something that another family member said or did. Always an excuse and always one that left her the victim. It is always someone else’s fault.

  I spent so many years saying that if I saw her described as a person on paper that we would have nothing in common. That is how far our values and beliefs differ.  For years we would talk about nothing more than the weather and what was going on with the kids. It was always, but she is my mom, end of story.  As I got older, the less I was able and willing to write off her hatred of so many people and her use of extreme, radical religious ideology as an excuse for her actions.  I was tired of indirectly hearing that I was a bad person for doing yoga, how I was harming my kids because of it. That I made the wrong choice to get divorced, even though she herself has been divorced multiple times (there was a reason for why hers were acceptable and mine was not).  I am looked down on for being too liberal and supportive of anything that has to do with socio-economic equality/gender identity/racial equality/body autonomy…anything that differs from her narrow scope on life. Basically I am one of the worst people. I heard stories that she has told my sisters while I was off at college, none that painted me in a flattering light. And I in return shared with them the stories that she told me about them. 

  She comes across as supportive on social media, by liking my posts. Just to turn around and complain to people about the content. When she does leave the occasional comment, it is usually an anecdote that somehow one ups my experience.  To the world she is nothing but supportive of her children. When in reality it is nearly the opposite.    

   In her mind she has down nothing wrong and that our lack of a relationship is all on me.  She wants control of the narrative and of all those involved in her story. I will never be able to change that. I will never be able to change her. All I can do is to remove her toxicity from my life and begin to heal. Heal to become a stronger, healthier, happier version of myself, not just for me but for my kids. By doing that I rob her of her control and that to her is the scariest thing. The thing she will fight tooth and nail against.

  I can’t change what has happened, but I get to decide every day going forth. I can choose who to let into my life and who gets to stay.  I will no longer make excuses for those that are harmful in any way. Biological family members do not get a free pass to be bad people.  My real family is made up of the people that have supported me and loved me unconditionally. They do not offer their love based on conditions that only serve them and make me prove I deserve it.  Toxic is toxic and you deserve more than that. Period.

From yours truly Becky Shanks AKP brand ambassador