Borderline Stew, Anyone?

My mother is a work of fiction, and as we all know the best works of fiction are the ones that are seeded in truth.  As I delve into my mother's history, I will do my best to tell you both the facts and the fictions that accompany the reality she has built for herself.  There are parts of her story that are truly awful and at times she sought to make those things even worse or change them to be as if from a beautiful fairy-tale.  I am assuming that much of the story I was told was dependent on who was playing the role of villain at that time in her mind.  The reality is, there was a villain to her story and that is what shaped the woman she became.

What I know with absolute certainty is, my mother grew up in a home that was fraught with turmoil.  By the time my mother was 10, she had already gone through her mother's infidelity, her parent's messy divorce, complete estrangement from her father, the birth of her brother and an enormous lie that she must at all times adhere to.  As far as family lies go, this was a huge one.  She was never allowed to admit that her brother was her full sibling and not her half brother. 

My grandmother had decided that anything associated with her first husband was poison and that included my mother, who happened to look a lot like her father.  Since my grandfather was not around, it was my mother that copped the brunt of my grandmother's rage.  My mother was the "all bad child" in the family dynamic.  She could do no right. My uncle through no fault of his own, was the "all good child" since my grandmother had rewritten history and genetics and convinced herself that he was in fact her second husband's child.

Sometimes, my mother was downright inconvenient to my grandmother, so she would dump her with a stranger or on the doorstep of an orphanage (This is where you should note that the orphanages were turned into snooty private boarding schools in my mother's telling.  However, I've done research into the organisations that she referred to and the only things that come up are: a school for wayward girls and a series of orphanages.  There were NO all girl boarding schools run by the organisation she specified.).  Please note that my mother was only ever put in the care of her grandmother when very young and the rest of the time she was dumped on the doorstep of  a series of strangers.  My grandmother never allowed my mother to be with her father.  She also never allowed my mother to stay with uncles, aunts or cousins.  My mother was a child alone and adrift.  I believe that's exactly how my grandmother wanted it.

As early as 10, (which is a pivotal number both to her and later to me) my mother sought solace in religion.  In fact she sought so much solace that she was devout if not downright zealous.  She adorned her childhood bedroom with religious paraphernalia.  My uncle once told me that if he wanted to tease my mother (as siblings do) he'd turn her religious pictures face down and she'd go nuts!  (I'm not condoning his behaviour just stating a pattern of religious fervour.)  For the rest of my mother's life, religion would be both a comfort and a weapon.

My mother's teenage years are a mystery to me, she never discussed them and almost no one knows what happened to her.  I do know that she was in contact with her mother, but had little or no contact with her brother until her late teens, early twenties.  By 19 my mother had met my father and they were engaged and so began the next leg of her journey and the start of a new life.

Epilogue:

It should be clear that my mother was born into a highly stressful situation.  She was a child that was rarely nurtured, who lived with her mother's rages, and her mother's oscillating moods of occasionally being loving and often being indifferent or abusive (There were times of physical abuse that I have not documented because I cannot verify them although I tend to agree that they most likely happened.) 

I believe that my grandmother was, most likely, also suffering from BPD.  It should also be noted that I despise what my mother went through as a child.  I cannot think of it without tears welling up.  I can't help wondering what my mother would have been like, had she not gone through what she did.  Of course, while I can feel both empathy and sympathy for my mother I am not negating her responsibility in how she parented us.  I believe that, at some point as an adult, a person must take responsibility for their actions and do their best to stop a chain of abuse.  My mother was/is smart enough to have done that, but she didn't.