A huge part of my disgust with being back home has to do with my troubled relationship with my mother. I am angry that I was somehow duped by her into returning home after living away for 15 years. We have a history, which I will go into in future posts, but somehow I thought we had gotten past that time. I’m realizing that actually what happened was, I forgave her for what she did to me, but she did not change, and will never apologize. And so here I am, living in South Louisiana again and hating it.
I need a place where I can vent my experiences and frustrations WITHOUT resorting to Facebook or Reddit threads. I do not want my NMom to find these posts or to see that I’ve liked some post, this education is for me only, to help me heal, and hopefully to share my experiences in the hopes that I can help others avoid the same fate.
Since I returned to this godforsaken place that is South Louisiana, I have been learning the fine art of ‘gray rocking,’ or not reacting to my narcissistic mother (N-Mom)’s cutting remarks. She will say something in the course of a conversation that I will miss in the moment, but it will come back to haunt me later and incite full rage. It looks like passivity, yes, but it is a tactic I have learned in order to avoid blow ups. In the past when I have blown up at her or taken her to task for something she says, I lose every time because I’m the one being ‘unreasonable.’ The best way I have found for dealing with her, is not to deal with her. That’s gray rock.
I’m working on going low-contact. My husband and I want to move out of this state, but cannot for another 2 years or so. In the meantime, I need to better regulate my exposure to my mother, and conquer any feelings of guilt that I have from being low contact (inflicted by her of course). It is also time for me to deal with and process all of the past hurts that she’s caused me, all of which lead up to now. She would have me believe it was all my fault, but I am now seeing that, as the child, I was the victim all along, not her. She is not the star of my story, she doesn’t get to steal the limelight from me any more.
Chicken Stew 