Borderline Diary – Why Did My Borderline Mother Hit Me?
Excerpts From The Diary – My Borderline Years
Why did my borderline mother hit me? Why was that her only solution to what wasn’t even that stressful a situation? Why was it that I could do nothing right in her eyes as a child? Does this woman, or will this woman ever, have even a clue how much she has negatively impacted my life? I have a million questions about so much about my borderline mother. I have most of my answers, not from her, but from the reality that I too was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. Living inside the world of borderline hell has provided me a lot of insight into my mother. But, to what end, I wonder?
Borderline Diary – My Borderline Years - Why Did My Borderline Mother Hit Me?
September 7, 1993
1:20 pm
It is Wednesday and I have just returned home from group therapy. The weather is so nice out but my emotional temperature is stormy. I can’t believe what I just went through. Sitting in group and being so triggered by that woman “Lady Jane” as we call her. What a drama queen. What a snob. What a bitch, actually. What a reminder of my mother she is. God, I can’t stand her. Every time she opens her mouth I just want to shove something in it so I don’t have to hear her. I wish someone would just make her go away. She thinks she knows everything. She’s been in group all of two days and I am already at my emotional wits end. I’ve been reprimanded five times in two days for getting into to “it” with her. As if it’s just my fault? As if “Lady Jane” isn’t in the game. She’s in the game alright. She’s the one spinning the games but as usual it seems I’m the one getting all the blame. Unfair, unfair, unfair. I can’t stand it!
Art therapy was just hell today. It sure feels like the last straw for me. I can’t – just can’t listen to or put up with “Lady Jane” anymore. What am I going to do. I’ve been in enough trouble lately. I’ve been high on the group’s radar in terms of feeling like my every word or choice to not speak is overly scrutinized. This entire experience is my friggin family all over again. Like I need that – NOT!
The therapists seem to think that everything that happens with and/or is said between me and “Lady Jane” is somehow my fault. It’s driving me crazy. How can it all be my fault? If C…. says it’s about my “upping the anti” one more *&*&*^%^ time I swear I’ll just lose what’s left of my mind.
I hate art therapy. It sucks. I don’t like crafts. I can’t draw. I don’t paint – houses, and walls maybe, but not canvass in the artsy fartsy fancy. Oh “Lady Jane” is just so perfect – so she thinks. Between her and J bragging endlessly about their unending artistic skill there really wasn’t air let alone space left in the room for the rest of us peons whose artistic talent peaks with stick people and child-like suns with straight-line rays.
“Lady Jane” looks down on everyone. “Lady Jane” has contempt for everyone. “Lady Jane” is so judgmental. “Lady Jane” is self absorbed. “Lady Jane” manipulates the guys into fetching her paint brushes, paint and supplies. At the end of the group, as I sat there getting the blaming and shaming how-rude-can-you-be-A.J. riot act jammed down my throat by K, my prime therapist, “Lady Jane” was smiling behind K’s back and laughing at me. She got me good. She threw out the lure and I bit it, hook, line, and sinker. The therapists just don’t get what goes on under it all. There are people “out to get” others and they know it. “Lady Jane” is like that. She got me. Somehow I can’t let her get me again. I also really want to “get her” and get her first.
Reminds me of one of the cardinal rules of hockey - you can take a shot at someone, break the rules, or have someone trip, punch, slash you but if you retaliate or defend simultaneously, you’ll not only be caught you’ll be penalized in hockey – punished and shamed in life. Lectured to and at in life – especially in group therapy. I should have known better than to allow myself to be bested that way.
I am so pissed! Pissed at K, pissed at “Lady Jane”, pissed at those guys falling all over themselves like idiots to please her and wait hand and foot on her – to say nothing of the way they accused me of shit and defended her pretty little useless ass. I could just scream. Oh wait, I did. God that felt good. I just let my rage fly at “Lady Jane”.
I was kept back 30 minutes after therapy ended today – lectured about my behaviour. Oh yea, right, it’s always about my behaviour. Screw it! I know it’s not over. Tomorrow they’ll start all over again at me about me and “innocent-acting” little pretty air-headed “Lady Jane”. So much to look forward to.
Why is this so Familiar to Me?
Why do I feel like such a child around that annoying bag of hot air? I guess I feel outcast and left out and criticized and played with to boot like my mother used to do to me around my father and brother and others. She’d provoke me, be so cool, have everyone in the room believing her and there I’d sit like the puppy who pissed up the rug seemingly in plain sight when really no one saw anything.
I don’t know why but I feel like I’m four years old again. Shit. I know enough to know that this isn’t just some “feeling” attached to nothing. It means something but what?
The tears come in answer to my question. The grief wells up inside me as I continue to stew about “Lady Jane” and all she is not only doing to me but getting away with doing.
This feels so much like being four years old. The very first day of my school career, “trial day at Kindergarten” when I was four. Being dragged to school by a five-year-old from down the street who was a regular little school vetran of exactly one year more of school than my zero experience at school.
I had stood outside in the school yard with this kid, watching all these other kids run around, play, yell, scream and stuff. I was lost. I didn’t know what to do. It all seemed just too much for me. I wasn’t safe. I wanted to go home – not that home was exactly safe either though.
Suddenly there is this shrill loud noise. It ends the chaos of play and everyone lines up in an orderly fashion just as my insides become totally chaotic. I am scared to death. What is that loud noise? I can’t catch up to what’s going on. I panic. I feel all shaky and hot. Fuzzy. Weird.
I just turn and start running as fast my little legs could carry me. I ran all the way home. I ran to the one person I knew I could never count on for anything and yet I ran there as if I was going to be rescued, cared about, soothed or something? Had I lost my mind?
I pounded on our front door. My mother seemed to take forever to open the door. She didn’t really want to answer the door. There I was, four years old, scared shit-less, alone, and rejected by her yet again.
I needed. I needed so much. I was so lost, so out of touch, so out of step.
I needed.
Finally she threw open the door, “What the hell are you doing here” she screamed at me her face turning beat red. God she was mad. I was scared, shaking, crying, and she was mad. I didn’t think she was going to let me in to the only world I truly knew – a different kind of fear-producing world. A world, some people call it “home” where I was even more invisible than I had just been on that playground.
I needed so much.
I got nothing.
My mother pulled me in the house by my arm. It hurt. I thought she’d pull my arm off. As I remember this, the tears, the anger, and the growing hatred I have for “Lady Jane” all increase.
My mother screamed at me long and loud that day. I just cried harder and harder. Four years old and able to cry. I wouldn’t be able to cry much past the age of 8. Was there any comfort in that crying, I don’t know.
My mother finished her raging tirade by dropping me in the hallway outside her bedroom. She went into the bedroom to call my father. Whenever she was mad as hell at me, and that was often, she would call my father. Tell him all about it. Never mind me. Never mind what I needed. I sat in the hall crying while she told my father what a little shit I was.
This of course meant I was about to hear “you’re going to get it when your father gets home.” My mother’s mantra of malice and mean. She’d call my father at work which would get him as pissed as she was and of course because she called about me it meant that my borderline father would blame me and be as enraged at me as my borderline mother was. And when borderline Dad came home, he would do the rest of my mother’s bidding. He would pick a fight with me, no doubt, to ease his stress, though I never understood that as a kid. He’d rage, and hit me. He’d punish me. In his mind and as he used to say to me, “I’ll teach you …” He never was very coherent or making sense when he’d start a sentence that way and/or I just blocked him and all of his threats out. I grew used to them even though often he’d act them out and I would be abused. I felt helpless and insignificant. Truthfully, back then, I had no frame of reference to know that life was any different in anyone else’s house. I sure do remember that day that illusion was shattered and how much that hurt. I thought I’d died that day.
If only I had a hole to crawl into.
Wow, I am feeling all of this now, again. Why?
When my mother hung up the phone she yelled at me to “shut the hell up”. She screamed, “Stop that bloody crying or I’ll give you something to really cry about.”
What? What? That was so confusing. I was crying for a reason. I didn’t need another one. I really didn’t.
I couldn’t stop crying. I was bawling – the noisy kind of kid crying.
She told me a couple more times to “shut the hell up”. I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was so distressed. I was so in need of something – anything other than what I was getting.
My mother came rushing out of her bedroom at me. I was still sitting where she’d dropped me, thrown me really up against the hall wall. As she came out of the bedroom she banged her elbow on the bedroom door frame – I knew somehow that too would be my fault.
Sure enough, she was even angrier. She lunged at me. She screamed, “You little brat”. I heard this loud thump and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. All the air was out of me and I had a sharp pain in my back.
My mother had round-house punched me right between my shoulder blades with all she had to give, literally.
What should have made me cry harder – pain that should have made me cry harder, abandonment and rejection that I now get should have made me cry harder. Instead, my mother finally won what she had demanded. I was silent except for gasping for air and coughing.
What had I done? I needed her. What was wrong with her?
I no sooner got my breath back when my mother again grabbed me my the arm. “Come on” she bellowed as she dragged me to the front door of our house. “You are going back to school”.
Totally traumatized was I and now back to the place that left me in a panic. Oh, this was so just laying a foundation for the way I would experience the world – the way that I am trying to change the way I experience the world right now in therapy for God’s sake. The very therapy that got me thinking, feeling, and writing all of this down today. What a circle.
My mother dragged me back to school yelling at ladies in the office, “Where is this little brat supposed to be?” How embarrassing. Everyone was looking. God, it felt so unreal. I wasn’t really there was I? This wasn’t really happening was it?
Yup!
She was directed to the class I was supposed to be in and she walked there quite quickly dragging me the whole way by a very sore arm.
She knocked on the classroom door and when the teacher opened the door she threw me into the room saying something rude and mean to the teacher. All the kids stared. The teacher looked shocked. I was numb. I wasn’t really me. I was and wasn’t there.
This is how I feel around that friggin “Lady Jane”.
I don’t know how I am going to cope with therapy tomorrow. Now I not only have all the feelings from what happened today in therapy but these feelings about my borderline mother hitting me and abandoning me at a time of need when I was four years old. I feel it all. I have no idea what to do with any of it. My dog needs to go out to do her business. Suddenly I feel like I can’t go out. I don’t feel safe. I am having one of those moments where now is yesterday. I am scared. I am not feeling safe. I don’t feel like myself.
It is dawning on me that there is a lot about my borderline mother that I haven’t even yet begun to feel. I feel sad writing this down. I feel devastated actually. I feel like it wasn’t real even though I know it was. Why am I back in this place right now? What’s the purpose of this?
My mother didn’t give me what I needed. Back then I didn’t know what I wanted or needed. I don’t think I really expected her to be any different than she was. But, why did she hit me? Why was my pain and fear something to be so punished and shamed for?
I have pain and fear about tomorrow in therapy too. Will they punish me too? I have shame for what happened today.
I guess my borderline mother hit me because I needed her. I think I broke the cardinal borderline rule or something. I wanted so badly to do what I was supposed to do but there were so many reasons why I had to run. There was so much fear.
The hatred and indifferent rejection, invalidation, and abandonment I experienced from my mother that day when I was four was but one incident in hundreds that was making me lose me.
So all these years later I am in therapy and K keeps saying all this stuff about I don’t know who I am and that I am not so tough and intimidating as I act that there is this vulnerability and fear. I am beginning to think she is right because I feel four again and all of those feelings that I had on that most unsuccessful day – that first day of school. A day that, looking back, sure did foreshadow so much more heartache and difficulty to come and my struggles to go to school or to even stay a full day if and when I’d go.
That’s what the thought of going back to therapy tomorrow feels like now. How do I know I’ll go. I don’t really want to. I just want to stay home.
Got to take the dog out. God I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place. Damned if I do and damned if I don’t. What to do?
Am I comparing the way my mother chose to treat me when I needed and felt scared to how I think the therapists will treat me? How can that feel the same. I mean, I know they won’t hit me.
My borderline mother hit me because, to her, I wasn’t really there. It was all about her. My needing her just left her feeling more and more needy herself. She felt out of control, I think, when I needed. She sure did teach me how to be out of control. All these years later I am still fighting to try to control my own emotions instead of controlling and being mean and punishing to others.
Does this ever end? Will I ever get through this? What is the purpose of this? Why did my borderline mother hate me so much? Why was it all about her? How can I face “Lady Jane” and find a way to cope when I now know that “Lady Jane” triggers me back to some very deep and troubling painful feelings that still scare me, from my childhood.
We’ll see. I have no idea. But I guess I just have to go back to therapy tomorrow and soldier on not only for that little four year old in me but because she soldiered on for me all those years ago. What a strong little kid I was I guess. What an amazing inner child I really do have.
I have to pay more attention to that stuff they are talking about around inner child stuff in group. Maybe there’s something I can learn in all of this that will make a difference in my life.
I think I just need to sit and cry. I’ll walk the dog, then I’ll come back, put music on, lay down and cry myself to sleep.
© A.J. Mahari 1993 – All rights reserved.
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