Reply to found out my mom lied about her past

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[quote=Anonymous]As I've become an adult raising children of my own, I've realized that a lot of the things my mother did during my childhood weren't the behaviors of the kind of person my mom always claimed she was. She really left me without support at critical times in life and forced me into situations that I shouldn't have been involved in (having to mediate my parents fights at 7, being told that if they divorced it would be my fault but if they stayed together it was because I was selfish and wouldn't grow up, etc). As I got older I wasn't allowed to socialize, had to beg rides off of people, and go without things I needed because my mom wouldn't give me a ride to a drugstore or pocket money for personal hygiene essentials. It took me years to realize that she wasn't "giving me more than any parent at your school" but was actually weirdly neglectful and self-centered. She never had friends and thought she was better than everyone in our town and it left me isolated, too. She would go into rages out of nowhere and was unpredictable and verbally cruel.

Anyway, as I've watched my mom brag about how  she's a great grandmother but basically ignore my children, I've started to question how she describes things vs. how they actually were. On a hunch I did a Google search of her maiden name and was stunned.

My mom is really secretive about her past but I know bits and pieces because we have a big extended family and have always lived in the same town. I always knew she'd been married in her 20s to someone before my father. She was actually married twice before and in both cases to people who did some shady stuff. She married the first man when she was 27 despite always telling me that she married out of college and hounding me constantly while I was single in my early 20s. She criticized me for not getting great jobs right off the bat "like she had" but the wedding announcements suggest that she didn't work for years. There's more but it involves her exes and I wouldn't want to drag them into this, except that now I get why she hated the name I originally wanted for DS- it was her first husband's name!

I'm not going to confront her but I suddenly have this crystal clear understanding of how her past and insecurities influenced how she raised me. I wish I could throw my new knowledge in her face but that would be pointless and I don't have siblings so I can't run to them with this info. all of her insults over the years seem like they were criticisms of herself, and I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I kind of feel freed because I have this outside proof that she's not the person she always said she was and I don't feel crazy anymore.

I don't have a question, just wanted to get it off my chest and ask if anyone else had to reassess who they thought they were after discovering family secrets. [/quote]

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