The beginning

I'm not entirely sure how to describe my relationship with my mother, at present it is non-existent but she is still present in my head. I don't justify myself in my mind every day, but I do and it happens way too often. It's not helpful that my father is fairly abusive too and their relationship with each other was, and remains, poisonous.

We all lived in a giant tinderbox with sparks constantly flying, I seem to remember physical fights from when I was very young, but maybe I imagined them. I definitely didn't imagine the verbal fights, they are still going on and pretty much as vicious as they were then. As a child I just remember wanting to disappear when this happened, the fluttering would start in my stomach and I would want to shrink to nothingness.

The arguments would start over anything, and seemed to almost instantaneously blow up into being verbally abusive with my father calling my mother derogatory names. He would attack her intelligence, her weight, the way she looked, her family, her habits, I don't think anything was taboo and as the years went by she grew equally vicious towards him. These arguments would erupt in any situation, with their friends or mine in the house or outside in public and I would want to die with shame. My close friends called my dad 'Psycho' and avoided him if they could, they knew it was better not to call at the house and that I lived in fear of him.

From the time I was eleven I went to school on a school bus and pretty much every night I would hope that the bus would crash, then maybe I would have to go to hospital for a prolonged period. That was bad enough, but if they weren't arguing with each other, they were often using me as a scapegoat. With dad, it was similar verbal abuse to what he dished out to mum but with mum it was always emotional. Oddly enough that was harder to take.

It is only really now as a 51 yr old that I'm starting to realise just how damaging this family environment was, and how detrimental it was to me. It has left me with so many emotional scars and odd behaviour patterns. My love life is littered with broken relationships, I have very little self-confidence and I am still very emotionally unstable, and that's just to skim the surface. That is what this blog is about, I feel a need to finally make peace with myself and move forward with my life. I also need to ensure that I have passed on as little of this toxic legacy to my children as possible.