my mom in male form

Something about that dynamic between two people, where one executes all of the power through maltreatment of the other, didn’t fit for me anymore as an adult.

It just feels mean and creates fear in me because I can’t be myself around him.  Here I am again, disturbed as soon as he left because I don’t know when I’ll see him again.  If he said he would call me, “promised me” to call each night before he goes to bed, does he not do it to hurt me?

How do I find my voice and speak up about this?

“How does it feel when you don’t hear from me?”  Oh, I forgot you don’t express feelings, but you did say that you would be available to talk at any hour of the day.

“Do you do it on purpose?”  You said yourself that people make time for those whom they care about.

“If you want to be the Alpha male who controls everything then why aren’t you leading me with integrity?”  I’ve admitted my longing to be led by someone I can trust, yet, somehow you drop the ball of accountability on every turn.

“Is it a retaliatory thing when you withhold connection because I want to spend time or call the person I’m dating?”  When I ask a simple question and you dismiss it with a smirk, you hardly convince me that the leftover time I get outside of your escaping through work is valuable.  Actions speak louder than words so avoiding me until you are ready hardly supports your professed love and places you in the category of an insecure child trapped in a mans body.  But I’ll play along because it is obviously more important for you to call the shots than it is for me to expect honesty.  Just know however, that cycles like these remind me of my past marriage and I was the one who ended that for mistreatment.

I may have seemed like I didn’t expect much from you since we started off with my not knowing where you were half the time, but after the unveiling of a girlfriend you hadn’t severed things with, my ability to put up with masses amount of bullshit shifted.  That truth rose to the surface at a most profound time for me, when I was allowing my heart to embrace the man you presented to me.  Unfortunately, but fortunately, the game changed after I learned about the man you really were when I was alone wondering about your whereabouts.

My hopes of a future faded tremendously and I paced myself with calculation to decide how quickly I would escape based on observing your level of deception.  I mentally charted your patterns of punishment because they would evolve after my curiosity of your schedule, archives, sensitive alerts and texts through the common creeping actions on social media.  What you didn’t get was that I already anticipated your lectures to cover up or deflect from accountability; part of me wanted to hang in long enough to determine if you believed your own lies.  You always had a manipulative cop-out through some appeasement, both of which proved your guilt and eventually nullified my concern over it.  You had indeed become exhausting.

As you grew more careless to cover your tracks and you told on yourself while slipping on the details of previous embellishments, I boiled down our whole relationship to a necessary evil that brought me true freedom.  I confided in you that my mother was a narcissist and you often turned it around on me which was the best thing that could have happened.  The feelings of abandonment, rejection, being in the way, dismissed, scapegoated and insignificant came up with you only after first feeling them when I was a child under her control.  Something about that dynamic between two people, where one executes all of the power through maltreatment of the other, didn’t fit for me anymore as an adult.

Maybe it was all of the extra jargon spoken from your mouths to convince yourselves that you were telling the truth, that blended your role into my mothers.  I couldn’t quite place it in the beginning but the recurring sweeps of shock after the charismatic cover-ups, only lowered my respect of you to that of a spider who entangles others in a web of cruelty.  And that felt too close to home.  I had disengaged from my mother after I had to address the family about something she said.  I was young, yet out of her perceived betrayal from me, I knew she intended for me to feel just as small.  When I was a child I didn’t understand that she too had been manipulated all of her life through poor parenting, it just felt like I was to blame for her misconduct.  Yet, your uncanny resemblance to her master mind of conditioning submissive responses in me, was a huge red flag.

I am not so easily persuaded and my years of being gullible are far removed.  I believed I had put behind me the pains she caused me because I seldom invite relationships that feel familiar into my circle of reference.  Yet I still trust that sensitivity inside of my heart that knows how to spot a narcissist who is still responding out of his or her own childhood pain.