THE EARLY YEARS

 

I decided to start this blog to relate my story and experiences of being raised by a narcissistic mother in order to try and heal, perhaps my stories and experiences can assist other women and men around the world in finding healing as well.

Let me introduce myself first.

My name is Karen. I live in South Africa. I'm 56 years old. I'm divorced with one daughter (aged 30) , who is now married and lives in a city about 3 hours drive from me.

My dad passed away about 20 years ago. My mother who is still alive (aged 85) lives in a retirement village in the same city as myself. I have two older brothers. My two brothers left home at relatively young ages, but nonetheless are still affected by our mother's narcissistic behavior.

It never occurred to me that she was manipulating and attempting to control me until I was in my early teens. My mother would covertly ingrain herself into each and every aspect of my dating life and managed to break up every relationship that I ever had!

At the time, I still never really resented her for it, she is my mother after all and I loved her. As I fell in love for the first time at the age of 14 with my high school sweetheart, everything was going great in the beginning, as they always did with my mother, until she decided otherwise.

She even used to invite his folks over to our home, but as I say, things are all rosy in the beginning until she would find an imagined fatal flaw.

My boyfriend's parents were from Australia and whilst we were going out, his grandfather passed away in Australia. This meant his parents were obliged to return home to take over the family business.  Naturally, my pubescent heart was broken, but hey I was just a teen, who cares?

But leading up to the weeks before he and his family left, my mom managed to break us up.  I found out years later that she even went to the school and told the headmaster that my boyfriend had tried to rape me and that he should be expelled.

Let me just say he NEVER tried to rape me.

One day stands out sharply in my mind.  I got home from school and she had thrown all the items he had ever bought me in the trash.  There had been one Christmas that he had bought me a huge Pink Panther, I loved it and she knew it.  With not even a second thought she took that gift and gave it to my cousin. To this day, I am still resentful of my cousin because of this - I know this may perhaps sound silly.

So I never got a chance to say goodbye when he left for Australia. I was heartbroken for months! He wrote me a letter once he got there with his details. After a good few months, my mother said to me one day, oh we should phone him in Australia.  You see now she felt safe as he was miles and miles away, so now it was okay to call, as she knew nothing could come from it. Typical narcissistic behavior! We phoned each other a few times, but as soon as he started phoning too often, she put an end to it. I will continue the story in my next blog....