Narcissist parent

My childhood and teenage years weren't exactly easy and I know that what I went through over this time significantly contributed to my low self esteem as well as the development of my anorexia. At the time I had no idea why my mum was treating me the way she was but now I know that she was treating me differently from my siblings because she was in capable of feeling maternal love towards me. I remember balling my eyes out and asking her why she hated me so much and eventually she stopped denying that she hated me and just admitted that she didnt know why she couldnt love me like she did my siblings. Accepting this was hard and to begin with I tortured myself for year's trying to win her love. All I got from her however was more emotional abuse and neglect.

In the early stages of my eating disorder when I had just started making myself vomit after eating sometimes I remember breaking down and telling my mum what I had been doing. I expected her to take me to the doctor or atleast try to help me through it. All she did however was tell me that "you should stop that"andInever heard another word about it again until I was hospitalised about 4 months later. She hever once asked me if I was ok or if I was still practicing that dangerous behaviour. I asked her later about why she didnt do anything when I told her what I had been doing and she told me she was too busy dealing with my little sister to worry about me too. Also, when I was first hospitalised I remember laying in my hospital bed hooked up to heart monitors and unable to even walk to the toilet and having my mum call me and growl at me for not taking my text books to hospital with me as I would miss out on studying. She wasnt concerned about the fact that my heart was failing or that I was very sick, all she cared bout was me missing out on school.

These are just a few of the signs that my mum didnt have normal maternal feelings towards me. She was also very jealous of the relationship I had with my dad and she felt incredibly threatened if ever my younger sister looked up to me as a mother figure also. Mum was an alcoholic so whenever she got drunk, her true loathing for me really came out. Atleast while she was sober she could try and hide the fact that she didnt care about me the way she did about my 2 brothers and sister.

The reason I am writing this post today is to reach out to anyone else who my have a narcissistic parent. In order for me to recover, I had to cut myself off from my mother all together and had to stop trying to get her to love me the way I always wanted her too. I highly recommend you try to cut your parent off too, if they are a narcissist, or atleast stop trying to win their love. The truth is, your narcissistic parent can not love you unless you are their 'golden child' and as long as you try to get them to, you are only torturing yourself. I have accepted I will never have a mum and that is completely ok. I have so many other wonderful people in my life so I really dont need her, one little bit! And oneday I hope to have a daughter so I can have the mother daughter relationship with her that I never got to have with my own mum.

21 Signs of a Narcissistic Mother (Be Concerned if She Has Many of Them)

http://thenarcissisticlife.com/do-i-have-a-narcissistic-mother-21-signs-of-a-narcissistic-mother/

• 1. She has to be the center of attention all the time. This is a defining feature of narcissism. She will steal the spotlight or spoil any occasion if someone else is the center of attention.

• 2. She demeans, criticizes and makes derogatory remarks to you. She always lets you know that she thinks less of you than your siblings or other people.

• 3. She violates your boundaries. You feel like an extension of her. There is no privacy in your bathroom or bedroom; she regularly goes through your things to find information she then uses against you.
• 4. She ‘favoritizes’. Narcissistic mothers often have one child who is “the golden child” and another who is the scapegoat.
• 5. She undermines She will pick a fight with you or be especially critical and unpleasant just before you have to make a major effort.
• 6. Everything she does is ‘deniable’. Cruelties are couched in loving terms; aggressive acts are paraded as thoughtfulness.
• 7. She makes YOU look crazy. When you confront her with something she’s done, she’ll tell you that you have “a very vivid imagination” (common phrase that abusers use to invalidate your experience of their abuse) or that she has “no idea what you are talking about”.
• 8. She’s jealous. If you get something nice, she’ll take it from you, spoil it for you or get something the same or better for herself.
• 9. She’s a continuous liar. To you, she lies blatantly. To outsiders, she lies thoughtfully and in ways that can always be covered up.
• 10. She manipulates your emotions in order to “feed on your pain”. This behavior is so common among narcissistic mothers that they are often referred to as “emotional vampires”.
• 11. She is selfish and willful. She makes sure SHE has the best of everything and always has to have her way.
• 12. She is self-absorbed. Her feelings, needs and wants are Very Important and yours are irrelevant or insignificant.
• 13. She is almost absurdly defensive and extremely sensitive to criticism.
• 14. She terrorized you. Narcissists teach you to beware of their wrath. If you give her everything she wants, you might be spared; but if you don’t-the punishments WILL come.
• 15. She’s childish and petty; “getting even” with you is important to her.
• 16. She is aggressive and shameless. She doesn’t ask, she demands. She won’t take no for an answer-she will push, arm-twist, or otherwise manipulate or abuse you until you give in.
• 17. She “parentifies”. She sheds her parental responsibilities to the child as soon as she is able.
• 18. She is exploitive. She will go to any length to get things from others for nothing (work, money, objects)- including taking money out of her children’s account or even stealing their identities.
• 19. She projects. She will put her own poor behavior or character onto you so she can punish you. For example, you refuse an especially outlandish request of hers, she becomes enraged and furious at your refusal, then screams at you, “we’ll talk about it after you’ve calmed down and aren’t hysterical”.
• 20. She is never wrong about anything. She will never, ever genuinely apologize for anything she has done or said.
• 21. She is not aware that other people have feelings. She will occasionally slip up in public, and because of her lack of sympathy, will say something so callous it causes disbelief in people. The absence of empathy is another defining trait of narcissism and underlies most of the other signs that are on this list.

Swimming

As a child, I was always a 'water baby.' I loved swimming and felt most relaxed when I was in the water. Since it is so cold in Tasmania, there are probably only 4 months of the year it is actually warm enough to swim, unless you have access to an indoor pool which I rarely ever did. I didn't mind swimming at the beach, but I didnt feel as comfortable swimming at the beach as I did in a pool. Luckily our family had a swimming pool in our backyard. It wasnt a huge pool but throughout the summer I would spend hour after hour swimming. I loved the feel of the water flowing around my body and would sometimes just hold my breath and lay at the bottom of the pool. Being underwater was the most serene feeling for me and I honestly think that if I was an animal in a past life, it would have been a dolphin or turtle or something like that.

I suppose it was only natural that I became a good swimmer. Swimming was the one sport I was good at. I was never very good at running or athletics or any team sports for that matter. I think the reason I liked individual sports more is because of my controlling perfectionist nature. When you were playing as part of a team, you can not make your teammates try there best or put in 100% effort. No matter how hard you try yourself, you can not control how your teammates perform. When you are competing alone however, you can ensure you are trying your best and have more control over how you perform. All of my friends played netball for clubs on the weekends but I never did, I just swam.

While our pool wasnt very big, it was still big enough to do 'laps' in to train once I started swimming more competitively. I also did swimming squad training 3 or 4 times a week throughout the week where we would go and swim for atleast an hour straight.  I dont remember exactely how far we would swim but I do remember my coach telling me to jump in and do a 1 km warm up on arriving at the pool each day it was a 25m swimming pool so that was 40 laps! I think I surprised many people when they saw me swim as I was not typically a sporty child. Swimming made me feel powerful and strong and was the only sport I truly loved, which is why it hurt so much when I had to give it up.

In the summer of 2011, my collar bone started popping out all the time. Even now, every time I raise my arm above my head, my collar bone will pop out. While it can be a little painful, it doesnt really hurt that much unless it repeatedly pops out many times in one day, which is exactly what was happening when I swam. I went to see a doctor that they told me my collarbone was actually dislocating every single time I lifted my arm above my head. This confused me as it didnt feel like a dislocation while it was happening, in fact while my collar bone was actually popping out, it wasnt really painful at all.

My doctors had never seen anything like it before and neither had any of the specialists I went to. I was diagnosed with ligamentous laxity which means that my ligaments are heaps stretchier then they should be and therefore don't hold my joints together as they are supposed to. This explained why I had always been so flexible as a kid and had been able to do lots of tricks like putting my legs behind my head and hyper extending my elbows.

Even in tight skinny jeans I can still put my leg behind my head 

My freaky elbow :o

Not only does my collar bone disslocate regularly but so do my hips, ankles and wrists. As I said, it usually isnt too painfull when it actually happens and this is because my ligaments do not tear when the joints move as they would in a normal person, they just stretch. It is still a problem however as while my joints are so unstable, my bones are constantly grinding on one another and causing permanent bone and nerve damage. I will probably have osteoarthritis in the future, if I do not allready have it now and it also causes muscle problems as the muscles try to compensate for the lack of ligaments and have a lot more pressure placed on them then they are designed to have.

As you can see in this image, there are lots of ligamets aroud the collar bone which are supposed to hold it firmly in place however my ligaments dont work.

So swimming became far to painful and I had to give it up forever. Going from swimming everyday to never being able to swim another lap in my life was very hard for me. I could no longer do any sports I enjoyed and therefore lost heart in doing any physIcal activity at all. I became much less active but still continued to eat the same amount as I always had which meant I gained weight. I think I started to become unhappy with my body at this time as I was also developing a more womenly figure at the time. 

I honestly do think that being forced to give up swimming contributed to me developing my eating disorder. My ligamentous laxity felt like just another thing in my life that I had no control of and this really frustrated me. I was also frustrated that my body was changing and that I was gaining weight due to not being as active as I had always been. I decided I wanted to lose weight at the start of 2012, just one year after I had to give up swimming and my anorexia continued to develop from then on.

Thank god i'm a country girl

While my life hasn't always been easy, I still loved my childhood. I have lived on farms my whole life and the country will always be a huge part of me, no matter where I end up. When you grow up on a farm your family is your everything. You dont have neighbours or friends to hang around with, you only have one another to rely on for company. I would spend hours and hours playing with my brothers and getting to do lots of wonderful things that city kids simply wouldn't be able to experience.

We would spends hours and hours playing hide and seek in the huge hay shed, fishing in the creek and riding our bikes. As we got older we began riding motorbikes as well as driving the ute which was good fun as well. We always had amazing animals and pets like lots of orphan lambs and calves, dogs, joey kangeroos, rabbits, goats, horses, birds, chooks and more. It was impossible to get bored and our childhood was literally just one huge adventure.

When you live on a farm you need to be responsible even as a young child. Something as simple as leaving a gate open could reslult in something terrible and you always need to be aware of all the dangers on a farm. We knew better then to go in the Bulls paddock or to walk through long grass on a hot day incase there were snakes. Even something like walking too close to a mob of sheep with newborn lambs could result in separating lambs from their mothers and the lambs dying.

As kids we loved nothing more then riding on the back of the ute through the bumpy paddocks. Even now Inztill think that nothing beats the feeling of the wind in your face as you look over the beautiful land you love so much.

This is me as a very young girl feeding one of our orphan lambs. Usually we would bottle feed lambs if their mothers had abandoned them.

Me and my brothers playing on dads four wheeler motorbike. We were very close as kids as we relied on one another for company. We obviously werent old enough to drive it ourselves in this picture but dad often took us for trips out on the farm

This is JoJo the baby Pademelon wallaby my brother bought home for me. I spent every minute of everyday with this little guy while I was at my sickest and sometimes I think he is the only thing that kept me going. It broke my heart when he got too big and I had to release him.

This is me with my horse Lucy. She was a gorgeous old horse but sadly she died only about 6 months after I got her.

This is me and Tess at our favourite swimming hole.

This photo was taken after an early morning fishing out in the bay. I am holding a crayfish and a flathead.

Luckily all of the farms I have lived on have been really close to the beach so we have always been able to enjoy being on the beach and the land. 

While I have no idea where I could end up in the world, my heart will always be in the country. I enjoy listening to country music as I can relate to what is behind the songs. Lee Kernaghan is an Australian country music artist who I love listening to as he is able to explain the special bond with the land that country people have better then anyone else I know. The chorus of one of his songs 'The way it is' goes like this;

its the way it is, its the way it goes

when my wheels hit the gravel road it feels like home

its the way of life, its the life i live

and im right where i want to be

Thats the way it is