Borderline Diary – Mirror Without Reflection – Borderline Mother
Borderline Diary – My Borderline Years – Mirror Without Reflection – My borderline mother, my mirror without reflection. My borderline mother, blank face, blank stare – angry. Always so angry. How many more times will you reach out to her only to be abandoned again. Only to be rendered just a little more invisible? How many times? She hurts me. I hate her. She hates me. I love her. I hate her. I need her. I can’t stand this.
She says, when I ask if she loves me at all, oh so disengaged, "Well … let me put it this way, you know how you can love someone but not really like them?" Oh sure, mom, sure. I know. I thought to myself as it felt like I had literally disappeared. Standing in front of her bearing way too much, again, essentially with my heart in my hands, she just smacked my hands together. She squished my heart. A heart that hasn't ever been whole. A heart that has always been so broken. A heart that she fragmented so many years ago.
Borderline Diary – My Borderline Years – Mirror Without Reflection – Invisibility’s Painful Perfection
July 17, 1994
3:20 am
Okay so here I am again writing stuff down. Remembering so much stuff. It's all bad stuff. It’s all stuff that hurts. I am learning so much in therapy. So much I just never knew before. Never understood before. Never could have withstood before. Can I bear it now, really? Will I get through this pain? Really?
I don’t know why I saw my mother last night. What a useless visit and conversation. What a pain. It still pisses me off beyond description only now I don’t just feel the rage there are also tears. Tears of a little girl. I was that little girl seeing my mother’s face. A face, a mirror without reflection. A blank slate most of the time. An unhappy and often rather blank stare on a face that definitely hated me the more she saw herself in me.
She hates me. I hate her. I love her. She sees in me the little girl in her who she was taught to hate. So hate me mom, hate me. I hate you too. I love you – I hate you. In times when I have tried to say I love her or reach out for something more – for something – she lashes out with a violent vengeance. She can’t tolerate the thought of us connecting or of there being any demonstrated love. This seems nuts to write but I feel abandoned when she spurns the love I have tried to give. The times when I have extended myself to care for her and look after her in ways that she has never been able to do for me.
She hates me. I hate her more. She hates me more. I love her. I’m lost. She’s busy. She’s raging. She’s drinking. She tells my father lies and he beats me right in front of her. Silently still she sits condoning his violence. Powerful she must feel in these hateful choices. All my life my fantasy was to beat her to a pulp. I so wanted to punch her head in. I still feel it. I dream about it. I feel urges to do it.
For years I really believed the only reason I didn’t beat my mother silly was because if I touched her my father would kill me. But really, that wasn't the reason. The real reason is because fail me as she has, hate me as she does, beneath my rage, my abandonment, and my hatred of her, my wanting to punish her, under it all, there is this love. This love that I wish I could get rid of. I can't.
I have tried so hard to make her insignificant. For years it worked. Now, now though, not so much. Hating her is just hurting me. But so is feeling any love for her. No win.
I am learning so much about this "self" this part of me that I am supposed to be or something. I don't quite get it really. It is frustrating to have the therapists continue to tell me I know what they mean when really I have no clue. At least I don't think I have a clue?
This whole concept of self and the mirroring stuff I've been reading about is confusing. But really, seems to me right now that for a self to be reflected there needs to be light. There hasn't been any light in my life where my mother is concerned. Just that damn dark disconnect and pain. Her rage. My rage. Her hate. My hate. Her punishment of me and my punishing her right back. It has been such a circle. A circle that has wound itself tighter every time it has spun itself around between us. Millions of times we've traveled that circle.
I am just beginning to really understand it I think. There is so much pain. How could she say to me that she loves me but she doesn't like me? That has to be crap. Has to be. I think it's like pick one or the other. All I know is that what I'm learning in therapy about myself is that you can't really have anything both ways at the same time. You can't just say two opposite things and have either one of them really mean anything or be real or honest. You can't love someone if you don't like them. God, I don't like her at all and I guess if I was shoved to answer a question like that I'd say that I do love her sort of. It makes no sense to me.
She has said so many things that I don't think anyone should ever hear from their own mother. So many things. Her favourite thing to say when I'd ask her for something all my life, when I needed anything, even when I was real little was, "Some day I'll be dead and gone and you'll be dancing on my grave."
What!? I still shake my head at this. I know when I was a little kid that would scare me a lot because it was like she was saying she'd be dead soon. Odd though, she didn't die. She didn't go away. I was spared that type of abandonment. She stayed in the house, in my life, in my face, but she wasn't really ever there – not emotionally. It was like she didn't really have a personality a lot of the time. Just disinterest or raging anger but nothing in between.
Last night when I asked her why I was never good enough for her as a daughter she said, "Oh shit, I don't want to talk about this crap." As she got angrier she then said, "It's not that you weren't good enough, it's just, well, tell me, when weren't you causing trouble?"
Wow. Ouch. Devastation and so much grief. I almost tried to defend myself again. I managed to stop myself. Even as I bawled after I left my parent's place it was as if something was partially lifting from my soul. I heard what she said and she said so much more I can't even keep straight enough in my head to write down here right now. But, I didn't feel the same. It didn't feel like it always has for me before.
I am not accepting the shame. It's not going all the way in this time. It hurts like hell but it's not going all the way in. I just don't have to internalize her stuff. Her blaming and her denials and her rejections I see now are way more about who she is or who she hasn't been able to be.
She says I was always "causing trouble". My God, I was trying to exist. I was just trying to protect myself. I was reacting to the abandoning abusive ways that they treated me. I was reacting against the invisible place they had shoved me in because I wanted to be separate from them. I wasn't just going to be their emotional dumping ground – their garbage can forever. Odd, actually that I get that. I think I did some of that in my relationship, in my own borderline way. Some thinking that my partner did stuff that really was more about what I had done first. I guess it's not that difficult to only see your own side when emotionally blinded by BPD.
My mother isn't going to ever see the light. Not even a shadow of the light. She is in the dark. She is a mirror that doesn't give anything – doesn't give a reflection, and certainly does not give me any accurate reflection that I can trust to define as having anything to do with who I am.
Mirror Without Reflection – Invisibility's Painful Perfection
The fact that this reflection is and has always been absent and that I have not ever experienced it with her is really invisibility's painful perfection. The seat of narcissism. The soul of the need to be grandiose I am hearing about in group. I hate that stuff and yet slowly it is starting to make sense.
There is this grand illusion my mother has about her parenting ability. With the mirror image blocked by the darkness of her borderline dissociative emotional disconnect she can feel a sense of perfection that has absolutely no base in reality. That must be why my facts, my reality, my pain, my anything and everything must be devalued by her. Welcome to but one of the many grand illusions of Borderline Personality Disorder.
I get that now. Just as I have devalued others so that I could keep some of my own borderline dissociative emotional disconnect alive so that I wouldn't have to feel the incredible pain of the death of my self. This pain that I know is actually the way to healing more but this pain that continues to feel like it'll kill me. Between this pain and the flashbacks from the sexual abuse I don't know how much more I can take. I have had my own grand illusions going on. I am now experiencing the group's mirroring this to me. A working reflection of all the work and learning I still have to do. Every time I make progress, climb a steep emotional hill, it leads to yet another and another. The recovery is demanding so much. More than I could have ever thought possible.
Am I writing on and on here so that I don't have to just sit with that unbelievable pain of her abandoning rejection? I think I feel numb right now if that is a feeling? I feel kinda distant from the grief that I was drowning in a little while ago.
No mirror reflection from my mother for me or really from me for my mother. I think we somehow both managed to reject and abandon each other. I have a sense I just never trusted her. She so didn't know what she was doing. She so didn't know what it really takes to be a mother.
No mirroring. No connection. No bond. No relationship. No getting along. No end to the war. No end to the ways that she punished me and had my father punish me too. She is so out of touch with her feelings. I know what that is like.
How am I ever going to make sense out of all of this? Right now I am treating "S" so bad in group. "K" says I'm doing a "bad mother split" onto her. I can't even stand to be in the same room as her and yet I have to be. I am being so rude and actually really mean to her but it's like she's so not her – she's so my mother. I don't know. It's nuts. I feel bad in some moments for how I am treating her. I actually like her a lot and no doubt that's bugging me too. There's a softness about "S" that I have perceived as weakness though "K" has warned me I'll find out that's not the case.
The pressure is on to get this. They keep saying I do get it. I haven't caught up yet or something.
I think that I will miss my mommy, the mommy she never was and the mommy I never had, for the rest of my life. Will it always hurt this bad? Will it always feel like it's killing me? Will it always give me panic attacks and the runs?
It's like I so want to connect with my mother and be loved by her and there just is no way. No way. No way. Such abject powerlessness here.
Oh yeah this is freaking perfect. Just great. I'm so screwed. Really screwed. Not good enough for my own mother to love me – NO – wait, stop that. This really isn't about me. I have to remember that. It's so hard.
So when I look in the mirror it's like I don't really see a "me". I don't have a reflection of "self" that I recognize or understand. If my mother and I stood in front of the mirror together, of course something we could never do, it's like we'd both see blank space. Or we'd each be focused on the other and all that she isn't in our own eyes. Creepy that similarity.
My main goal now, well, along with all my other goals, and God knows the goals I don't even know enough to have yet, is to just NOT be like my mother. Big time, I can't. I have to fix myself. I have to find myself. I have to learn to behave or something. I've come a long way but this stuff really sets me back.
In a heartbeat I can feel like that invisible kid being raged at, screamed at, punched, kicked, and so insulted and devalued – the little invisible kid sexually abused into a fantasy mirror's reflection. Into an over-compensating illusion of any mirrored sense of self at all.
Why did my mother have to have BPD? Why did my mother refuse to ever get help? She still refuses, as does my father. That of course means that every friggin thing is my fault. No wonder she says I was always causing trouble. I understand from all this therapy how hearing the truth can sure be misconstrued as "trouble" if one isn't taking any personal responsibility.
More tears now. I realize how much I've been a mirror reflection of her in ways that just sadden me. Disgust me really. I have really given back to her, in my own ways, so much – as much as I could of what she has given to me. I doubt it will ever come close to equal because I was the helpless little child that she abused from age 2, if not before that. My rage and my punishing her seems more fair – not right – I know now, but more fair because it's all been about trying to get her to stop what she does and says that hurt me – whoever "me" really is.
I feel like no matter how much I tried to punish her back it would never be enough until this morning when I realized that being hated is what she wants and needs. Being hated is what she is used to. Now I know that I cannot remain complicit in this pattern anymore. It's toxic. It is killing me – or killed me? It actually leaves me feeling sad for her. Oh this is too much. This is so confusing. When I feel sad for her, it's real but it leads me back to feeling rage for all of her incompetence and abuse.
I can't get the love I've always wanted. I am not going to. I know that. I can't hate her really. Not way down deep. I am still so angry. God I'm friggin dizzy! I hate this! It can't stay like it is. It can't. I can't take it anymore. I don't want to. It is defining me. I won't let it anymore.
What does that mean? Now I am shaking. I am going to have to let go – somehow. Okay, this is driving anxiety and panic. Here I go again. Fighting the pain. I am fighting the pain. That's why the anxiety and the panic.
I can do this. Feel the pain. Cry. Do it. I know, it feels like I've cried about this millions of times. Will it ever be over? Will I ever be done? Will it ever be enough? Will the tears ever stop coming. Now I am crying. Now I feel so powerless. Now I get it.
Grief. Sobbing. Such a hollow ache. Such heartache.
She likes me but she doesn't love me. She hates me. She hates herself. I am her to her. She has been me to me. I must now find me. A me, without her. I hate that I love her.
© A.J. Mahari, July 17, 1994
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