She will go on one of her famous tyrants, say everything she can think of to hurt me, then try to just act like it never happened!! I don't work like that! These things just play over and over in my head.
This helped me: As their mothers, we have a responsibility to teach them a better way. Whether they hear us or not has nothing to do with us. Our job is to do the best we know.
That is the only thing that is our job.
To do the best we know.
Your daughter is verbally abusing you. My son used to verbally abuse me. As it does for you, the things he would say repeated and repeated in my mind. I felt worse once I got done beating myself up for having a son who thought so little of me than I did over what he said in the first place. I needed to stop that circle. I needed to name what he was doing verbal abuse. I had to think about that for awhile, and then, I had to confront my son with what I now knew to be something very different than anger at a mother, or anger during a conversation, or anger that had any valid cause at all. What I needed to admit to myself was that, as is the case in every kind of abuse, my son was hurting me with his words to make me vulnerable, through my love for him, to destroy the part of me that was still able to stand up to him. I had to get it that my son knew what he was doing and that he meant to do what he was doing...and I had to get it, really get it on a gut level, that my own son was hurting me this way to weaken and make me amenable to manipulation.
That was tough to face. But once I did face it, I could stand up to it when he did it. I could name it what it was.
No guilt.
The next thing that happened is that I realized my child ~ however old he was ~ could never truly respect himself if he did not respect
and cherish his own mother.
That is how I still see it, and that is what I am working toward. How my son responds is not the issue. How pleased were they with us when they were toddlers and we taught right from wrong? They weren't. We believe our grown children are coming from the same internal place we would need to be coming from, were we to treat someone we love as they treat us.
Were we to see someone we love in that cheapened, twisted way they seem to see us. It's a hurtful thing, to admit that to ourselves.
But that stable adult center we are listening from is not where our adult kids are speaking or behaving from. Once we get that, we can keep ourselves in our stable center and address the situation from that good place. Our kids know better than to do what they are doing. Like toddlers, they are screaming and throwing tantrums
because they can. It is not good to cower before your toddler, and it is very bad to cower before your adult child when he is behaving like a toddler instead of an adult.
Your child, like mine, needs to be held to adult standards of accountability. You are her mother. Like me, you need to learn how to stay steady state in the face of the wholly unanticipated situations our troubled kids present with.
"It is wrong to speak to your mother as you do. Stop it."
That helped me, too ~ to have a string of words to say. Variations on that theme will get you through. Hearing your own words to your child will stop the echoes of the pointlessly hurtful things she screams at you. It is a very true fact that no one should speak to her mother the way your child has been speaking to you ~ and that includes your own daughter.
It will make all the difference in the world for you, I think, to begin seeing these episodes in this changed way. Changing my perspective on what was happening ~ changing from victim to centered adult ~ when my son was verbally abusing me helped me respond correctly.
That is what we are looking for, here. How to walk through and function through what is happening with our kids without being destroyed inside in some essential way that leaves us so weak and puzzled and hurt that we can't function. Part of this understanding is knowing full well that if there is something we need to address with the kids, we have done that with integrity. I know I sound a little off-base here, but when a parent is down in the trenches the way we are, and when horrible, off the wall, absolutely unanticipated things happen to the kids...there are times when integrity, when knowing we are doing the best thing, or at least, the right thing, to the best of our ability to know what that is, may be the only thing we have left.
I have been in that place.
It is very hard to be in the kinds of relationships our troubled kids insist on. I am sorry this is happening, but I like your fiery spirit in refusing to accept it.
Good for you!!!
:O)
There is a better way. We just need to find it. The first step in finding a better way to do those things we are determined to do is to define the parameters of the problem. You have done that.
You are doing well.
You have zero control over what your daughter will dish out. You have every smallest breath of control in how you will respond, and in how you will come to think of yourself in relation to this difficult adult child that you love with your whole heart.
You have courage. I see that in abundance in your post.
Ha! I love that in you. As far as those who say you should not turn away? Your only response could be: "I love my daughter very much."
That's it.
That's all anyone has to know.
Cedar
