Escape to the island of misfit toys or a glimpse into the life of an unloved child - @bycoleman $45 SBD Steemit Writing Contest

It was not always like this, she was not always like this. When I was very young she was a good mother, although as an adult I came to understand that even then she never loved me but the idea of me. It is not easy having no real parents and it is even harder when one of them is a clinical narcissist.

One would think that as an adult one could just snap out of one's childhood traumas, especially if one can dissect the whys and hows as good as I can; but she broke parts of me and there are fragments of my personality that still try to please her, who still want to be seen, even now at 2 month shy of 50 I sometimes just want my momma eventhough she is a poison and every interaction that goes beyond 5 sentences of an email has me reeling in a life threatening emotional anaphylactic shock.

So why bring her up now in such a public forum, because she wants back into my life after 5 years of almost complete banishment. My mother does not know my address I literally put a whole ocean between us to feel safe, how sad is that.

And yet there were good memories too, they are the betrayers the little Judas saws that work away at my resolve telling me that if I just find the right approach the good mother, the loving mother of my very first years would come back for me and take away this impostor. When I was young she was my friend my protector. I was a weird child very open and naive in some ways and old beyond my years in others. I had many very grown up interest and ideas also read books that were way above my official school level and that just did not sit well with other kids. Nor did the fact that I openly told people that my grandmother was a princess, a fact that was true but also seemed absurd to the average American kids who believed princess lived in castles and talked to animals. They hated me and I was brutally bullied because I would also refuse to surrender when they beat me and said they would stop if I only admitted the things I said were not true. Already at that age I had a large aversion to lies of any sort and refused to do so even if it meant one curly pigtail less pulled and one rib less bruised.

Riding the school bus was a nightmare. Every morning they would wait for me and spray some condiment over me, be it ketchup or mustard. For some reason I kept my unhappiness and my ordeal a secret for a quite a while but eventually I told my mother. She, my hero, filled brown paper bags with a concoction of mustard ketchup and mayo and the next day she walked me to the bus stop with them. There she went up to every single one of my tormentors and dumped one of the bags over their heads. She then took my hand and walked me back home. It was the last time I ever rode the school bus- I felt safe.

Shortly after that we moved back to Europe. Her divorce to husband number 3 and my step father number 1 was finalised she had a nice alimony and had become bored of the U.S. I knew even with my 6 years that things were going to change but I cold have never anticipated just how much.

We moved to Munich Germany. We lived in a penthouse right above a monastery. I made friends with one of the monks but that is a story for another time. My mother had a string of suitors who would visit, some interesting, some slimy, some boring. Then came the event that my mother says was the reason she realised I was not worth the effort she put into me. My father who I had not seen since I was 7 months old, and obviously did not remember, came to visit.

What can I say about Michael he was charming then, good looking stunning blue eyes musically talented and a professional con man, which I found out years later. He took my breath away the minute he walked into that door and twirled me around. I worshipped him and she hated it. It was not until years later in an argument that I found out how much. He stayed for a week and at the end of that week I asked my mother if I could live with him for a while just to spend some more time with him. She saw it as betrayal and years later she said that she realised right then and there that she had wasted 7 years on me for nothing.

In the end there was a visit at his home, with his new wife and my baby brother. It did not go well, as he had sort of forgotten to tell her he had been married before. It was the only visit. He had promised to come and visit for Christmas the same year, I spent all my pocket money I had saved up on presents. On the day they were supposed to show they were late. First 2 hours then 5. There I sat sad little me, in one of my mother's boyfriends apartments we were staying at for the time, clutching the presents in my little hands staring at the giant flokati rug of this 1970’s bachelors pad. Eventually my father called and said they were not coming and started yelling at me when I started crying. I told him never to call me again, and I meant it. I did not talk to him again until I was 13 when we discussed the possibility of my newest stepfather adopting me. I wanted him so much to fight for me tell me he wanted me, but he didn’t. I ended up deciding not to be adopted as things had already started to go sour between my step dad and myself . My birth father and I once again held radio silence until I was 23 where he failed me again and I finally totally gave up on him.

As for my mother, a few weeks after Christmas she dumped me at a boarding school in the south of France and went on an extended world tour with her then boyfriend. She literally walked in there with me in tow and did not even tell me she was leaving. She talked to the head mistress handed over a bag. She talked with the woman a few minutes, I did not speak the language I had no idea what was going on, then turned around kissed me without a word and went back into her car without me. And right there in that minute in the pouring rain when I watched the tail lights of her chocolate brown Mercedes Benz SL drive down that driveway without me I realised I was never going to be safe again and that I literally meant nothing to anyone …

After that life became lonely but was not horrible. My mothers twin sister moved me to a new boarding school in Paris where she could take me on the weekends and eventually, a year later, moved with me back to Germany into a hotel called the Arabella (famous for all the celebrities who lived there and also the people who jumped off it’s roof and killed themselves). Life was ok mostly then. I was not unhappy. My Aunt loved me and my mother showed up from time to time.

Then everything changed again. We moved to Italy then Mexico my mother, I and her longtime boyfriend. I missed my aunt but also had become used to people just coming and going out of my life at random. Mexico was fun but things were about to drastically change yet again, as he did not want to marry her or give her anymore children; something she wanted desperately but in retrospect should have never been allowed to do. My mother was getting progressively more neurotic but it did not really register with me how much until later as adult. I looked back at some of the things today that happened during that time and it becomes clear that she was already spiralling into her own brand of madness years before i realised that there was something wrong with her. I just was not the target at the time her poor boyfriend was.

My mother met my last stepfather and her still husband of today during that time in Mexico. My life was about to change more dramatically than ever before. I was 9 when they met, 10 when they married and 11 when my life turned into a living hell that did not stop until I moved out at 16. If you know "who is afraid of Virginia Woolf " you have the volatility level of their marriage and the drama, if you know "the war of the Rosen’s" you know how bad some of their fights cold get. Once every few months she would act like she was packing to leave and then make me call the police or walk up a mountain in the middle of the night to get help and a taxi.By the time I would get back with "the help"they would have had made up and then told people that I overreacted and that she never asked me to do these things. Refusing to go however was not an option either or I would be punished as traitor for days.

If this was not stressful enough she became incredibly abusive toward me and there was literally no place to hide from her and no time or place that was to sacred for a round of abuse if she was up to it. She would rip you by your hair out of bed at night if she was in a mood, it took me years to feel safe sleeping. If you have ever seen the movie mommy dearest it will give you a good idea of the level of crazy and abuse I dealt with from the age of 10 onward. The only thing she did not emulate Joan Crawford in was that I got to keep the presents. In fact my mother can be obscenely generous when it comes to the material, but in truth her gifts and help are chains she tries to snare you in, She immobilises you with the guilt of “not being thankful” and then goes in for the kill.

I could fill this post with a million stories of the horrible things she has done to derail my life. To tap on a few they range from from getting me fired, from abusing me because of my sexuality, kicking me down 3 flights of stairs and walking on me with high heel shoes because she did not like my political affiliation; to having my friends house raided because she did not like their political views either; to forcing me to lie and tell my teachers I made up that she abused me to get attention, when I had let something slip out of fear, and forcing me to read a public apologies for my ”lies” about her in front of my entire class (you can imagine how school was like forme after that ); to abducting my cat and rabbits who I never saw again; to wiretapping my phones and having me surveilled by private detectives (until they made financial losses and lost a great part of their wealth and she could not afford it anymore). All this is just the tip of the iceberg and how I survived this without becoming a serial killer is something even my shrink once said he was wondering about.

The thing is did I survive it- yes, but there was a cost. Even though I excel at work and many other things I suck at intimate relationships. They all go all shades of wrong and I tend to date my mother all over again in the people I choose. Second I have severe memory loss, years of my childhood are completely erased. This happened later in life when I acquired PTSD from an abusive relationship that wiped almost all my memory of said relationship and then some. My doctors said that my brain basically went to town and took my childhood memories too as they mirrored the same kind of experience. Still I make the best of it all and my life outside of my family was not a bad one, in most parts, and is most days not unhappy.

So why am I bringing all this up?- because she is flying to the U.S this spring and wants to see me. The last time we saw each other face to face was a disaster and led to me cutting her out of my life for 3 years with no contact whatsoever because she behaved so abominably at her visit. Her behaviour destabilised me so badly it took me 3 months to recover. We semi reconnected via email, since then but I retreat often. I have not seen my mother face to face for 5 years, I don’t know if I want to. The way she acts in emails shows that she has not evolved one iota. Yet she has been asking for a year straight now in every email if I want to see her and why I am hiding from her. I don’t know what she wants, if it is just that she cannot leave this planet without trying to destroy me completely, or if she genuinely misses me but just can’t help being the scorpion that she is. Her other children are all twisted robots sometimes I think it irks her that despite my damages she never could break me down into submission. My mother will be 76 this year, she is not going to live forever. This might be the last time I get to see her. My rational self says “so what”, it will just be the same old horrible experience and to walk away; but in the hidden realms a sad and somber girl stands at the shore of the island of misfits toys waiting for the good mother to come home…