Hi. I guess it's been 4 years, or so? Time flies when you're having babies and pretending you aren't as emotionally damaged by your mother as you portray in real life. The joys of childhood trauma are the gift that keeps on giving, right? Anyway.
What to say? I have 5 beautiful, amazingly funny and lovely children. The fifth one was a little surprise from the universe, or maybe more accurately, a surprise from an overly enthusiastic weekend with the husband. We are quickly outgrowing our house but the local market is ridiculous and I'm not confident in the longevity of the high values, I don't want to list our home, sell, and then buy a larger one only to get burned by some sort of housing bubble burst.
A few years ago I took a break form this blog. I found that writing about my trauma while leading up to and through a relationship hiatus with my mother was too difficult to navigate. After my 4th baby was born we went through a traumatic event as a family that ended up spurring several months of intense anxiety and panic attacks. I finally went back on medication and started therapy with a counsellor trained in EMDR and it changed my life. EMDR treats PTSD, I was having many flashbacks to my childhood and over-reacting with my kids and my husband over tiny things because of similar situations I experienced as a child. I won't detail therapy today, perhaps I'll write about it another day.
I cut all contact with my mother from September 2016- June 2019. In 2019 I unblocked her from one of my less used forms of social media, she came to town that July and stayed with my brother. I saw my mother for about 3 hours, and my brother and his spouse barely saw her despite her staying with them. Turns out her reason for staying with them and coming to town was because she actually wanted to see her boyfriend at the time, she didn't mention him until right before she came to town, and she even skipped out on the single outing my brother planned to take her out for. Oh, she also was looking for a co-signer for an MLM that operates more like a ponzi-scheme, I'll detail that another time.
My mother moved back to my city and didn't contact me at all until December 2020, she had already been back for just over a month and I hadn't spoken with her since summer 2019. I have briefly chatted with her via text twice since Christmas 2020. I am still very much detached from the mother-daughter relationship, and at this point, both of my brothers are essentially no-contact.
I think this is enough for a general update. I have decided I will be exploring my feelings again through this blog. I will be writing about my mother, our relationship, how it affects my day to day life with my children and spouse, and how I'm making the effort to break the cycle of intergenerational trauma. I hope whoever finds this blog is able to learn something from it, whether that means they can commiserate with me, learn to recognize their own childhood trauma, or maybe they can learn about what it's like to grow up with extreme dysfunction. Despite this being mostly about my mother, my dad wasn't always great at dealing as a single parent so I will be writing about that as well.
Hope the weekend finds you well.
