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The Authentic Eclectic
Shame & Blame: Part Two
Discovery — this is the ‘blame’ part.
I was a strange, intense child and a wilful, stubborn teenager.
That’s what my mother told me. She told other people that we were the best of friends, so we had to keep that front up and maintain the image of our relationship she had created in her mind. It was what she wanted, but it was not what we had.
My mother — she was (probably still is, we’re estranged, she’s not dead, I’m relatively sure anyway…)she was some piece of work. She had what would probably now be diagnosed as emotionally unstable borderline personality disorder (EU-BPD). She had a problematic relationship with her father, my grandfather, who had the capacity to be verbally vicious — and he never held himself back from unleashing his wicked tongue on his children. My mother had grown up being told she was useless, incompetent, most definitely not good enough. She was the youngest and had siblings who were more academically adept than her, so she was called stupid. Her thick glasses and two left feet did nothing to help the image and reputation she was tormented with. She was picked on and she was insecure.
She married my dad when she was twenty. She had a baby three years later. She wasn’t ready to have children yet, my dad wanted to…
