Shannon,

How better to come to a place of peace than to write about how your mother’s mental illness looks, how it has affected you, how it makes you feel and how hard it is to navigate.

As an excessively maternal woman (yes) and your friend it’s hard to stomach.

I don’t know why people give you crap. It’s your story to tell.

I’ve raked my mother over the coals more than once here on Medium and it’s been cathartic. My Mom was not mentally ill, but sometimes she was a mean spirited bitch and I was her scapegoat. I maintained a peaceful relationship with her but she really messed with the wrong person.

What I found was it took me a while to understand what it was she was doing. (Holding me responsible for the twists and turns of her own life.) Then it took me awhile to process it. Then I got mad, then I grieved. It wasn’t until she died that I was able to sort through the shards and glue my pot back together.

I miss her but her death liberated me in more ways than one. With nothing new being heaped on the pile I finally had enough time to get to the bottom of it. Until you get to that point a daughter/child is merely treading water.

I truly understand your desire to report your Mom’s abuse, her malaise, her disease. Validation is…important. It can also be a comfort. In my case, since my Mom took her swipes at me almost exclusively in private and kept witnesses to a minimum, people would be surprised to read how she treated me. But the thing is, as she got older she slipped up. In the last two years of her life she lived with my brother and sister-in-law. During my visits to her my sister-in-law heard some of her verbal barbs. She asked me about it and I told her.

Validation is sweet.

The thing is though, even with no validation at all, I know what she did. It was a really fucked up thing that she did, every time she did it. I had my father’s support always while he was alive but he died young. Her behavior continued, ebbing and flowing, believe it or not, based on my fluctuating weight. And there were times when my Mom and I were actually friends. Trust me, times were better when I was skinny. It makes no sense though, because I was a skinny kid and her pokes started when I was a young child.

I think a lot of what your Mom has perpetrated is horrible stuff. It is no way to treat a child. Knowing someone is mentally ill doesn’t do a person any good when they are receiving the brunt of it and you have to actually get to the point where you can process what is happening. Until you get some distance or life experience behind you, how do you even know? Your mind and body know it’s not right but you don’t automatically know why or even how.

These are the unfortunate circumstances of your early life. Your Mom continues to have an impact on you because you are a good person who is trying to stay helpful and trying to do the right thing by her. Not everyone would be so earnest. I think your attempts to make her life easier are admirable and I hope the toll will not be too great for you.

I pat myself on my back for being a good daughter…even when my Mom wasn’t always such a great mother. Like you I can review and see everything she did right. None of that excuses what she did wrong, Shannon.

I hope you remain very gentle with yourself. You deserve it.