Toxic Mothers Leave Painful Legacies

I saw a friend of mine recently, a friend who I had known since I was eleven. We had met at school, spent much of our time fighting and threatening each other and then made friends over a detention we were given because of said fighting in class.

From that moment, he and I became best friends. Back in the eighties, it wasn’t the same as things are now. When you had your friends, they were separate from your family and the two never really mixed. Sure, there were sleepovers and nights, but they were for staying in your room and playing dungeons and dragons. Not for spending time with your parents. They were carpet picnics and spy missions, and discussions about how we thought the world worked. Would Mighty Mouse really beat Superman in a fight?

It was easy.

And it made it easy for me to hide what my mother was like. My mother’s moods were always up and down. One minute she could be talking to me about something she’d seen on the television, and the next she’d be smacking me across the face because of the way I’d looked at her or the tone of my voice. It was never so clear cut either. She could flip, like turning on a light switch, and as such, I had a very volatile childhood with her.

It left me growing up anxious and cautious. It made it that even now, I struggle to make friends with people or any kind of connection. It also made me good at keeping secrets.

But the outside world never saw what she was like and back then, it was one of those times where what happened behind closed doors, stayed behind closed doors. So, when my mother was in one of her moods and things were being thrown around the house, I escaped to my friend’s place and said nothing about it. Just put it to the back of my mind and enjoyed moments of being a youngster.

It never occurred to me how much I had shielded the outside world from the truth of my parents, not until recently.

By chance, I saw my friend, and we grabbed a drink together. We’re in our forties now and have families and life has meant we aren’t the best friends we’d been, but it’s still great to have a catch-up. He brought something up about a day when we were kids. He laughed and said, god your mum was great, wasn’t she?

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