u/rokka279

Hello! This is my second post here as I’m in the middle of a break up with my mother. We’ve been NC for 6 months but she’s still triangulating via friends and trying to break the boundary / block occasionally.

Anyway I’ve been thinking of the past a lot lately. I’ve always considered my childhood a good one, as far as I knew. I don’t really remember much. But my adulthood have been pretty intruded by her and her needs.

Firstly:
She sometimes used to wake up at night with anxiety attacks and heavy heartbeat and immediately called me saying she’s scared to die and she just wanna talk with me until it settles down and she worried she might die without talking to me first.
I usually wake up at night hearing my phone buzzing and seeing her number and feel a knot in my stomach and then I answer and calm her down.
It’s very exhausting as I have 2 small kids of my own and this ruins the whole night for me, but at the time I’d never even consider telling her that.

Secondly:
Sometimes she have issues with her boyfriend (they’ve been together ca 20 years). He’s very oppressed by her. He was abused as a child and now he’s treated like a household slave by her. She yells at him and I think it’s terrible to treat him like an animal. Anyways sometimes when they fight and he fight back it’s very extreme. He runs away over a night or two and she always calls me and cry and she is so scared he will kill himself or leave her. She then sometimes ask if I think she’s so horrible.
I have to console her for a while until she feels better.

This all have felt natural for me all my life. But now, as me and my mother had a massive conflict over a boundary I finally set (I didn’t wanna participate in a family conflict & asked for peace and to be left out of it, wich her reaction was explosive guilt attack that’s lasted for many months now), I’ve began questioning our old relation and its patterns. I’m trying to structure everything together as I wanna solve my life situation and work as well as I can as a father and a husband.

Hi I’m 39m and my mother is 64F. I don’t know where to begin so I’ll just write and sort as I go along.

6 months ago my mother called me, sad and crying about her brother whom she’s NC with. She’s also NC with the rest of her relatives. 2 brothers, their kids, her mom.

My grandmother died around that time and my mother reluctantly had to deal with paperwork about it with her brother. She called crying saying he’s a narcissist, demanding I stay away from him, hes not good for my kids, and so on.

I’ve always been supportive of her and comforting her, even if I’ve felt terrible giving up the rest of my relatives for her sake. I’ve kept contact with one of her brothers though. We have very low contact due to me being worried my mother will go nuts if she know I talk with him.

Anyway as she called and cried to me I just felt like crap and thought ”here we go again” now I’m gonna lose my uncle as well. All I have left is my mom now.
So I stopped replying to her. It felt like pure terror in me. I said I want my kids to still have my uncle and his adult kids in their lives. They have only me, my wife and my mother and I want them to have more family. And my mother became aggressive at once, repeating her brother is a narcissist and so on.

I hung up the phone and wrote her a phone text to leave me alone I don’t want to be part of any family dispute and it has nothing to do with me or my wife or my kids.

What followed was a barrage of messages back, increasingly aggressive, guilt inducing, and her acting like a victim for me setting a boundary.

I didn’t reply for the first 10 messages, then I told her to leave me alone I don’t want any part of this.

She didn’t stop, over 40 messages in 3 days, I only replied a couple of those asking for peace and to be left alone. She continued very harshly, especially with guilt, threatening to kill herself, that I’m robbing my kids of their grandchildren, claiming I’m ripping her heart out of her chest and comparing me and my uncles relation as if were friend with her rapist. (He’s not raped her as far as i know).

I couldn’t eat almost nothing at all during those 3 days, I was shaking constantly and had deep anxiety, no sleep. Then I blocked her.

Anyway this went on for 4 months, she contacted my wife making it out as if I was furious at her and was using silent treatment, my wife blocked her though. I only asked her to leave me in peace and to let me stay out of it. She found other channels to reach me. After all digital ways were closed she sent postcards. Some messages were odd and kind of nice just to suddenly induce guilt again and blaming me for everything.

Now it’s been almost quiet for 2 months. A couple nights ago she wrote my wife’s friends messenger and suddenly deleted her messages before my wife’s friend could read them.
It’s triggering anxiety in me.

I adviced her to seek therapy as I will do the same about a month into the ”conflict”. A few weeks after she claimed the therapist said my mom is so wise so she have nothing to teach her.. also that my mother is victim of psychological violence from her family, but also that my mother had exemplary morals. She further said they’re gonna talk about why I reacted so strongly. (I have only told her to leave me out of it and to let me have peace, wich she haven’t let me have at all).

After several talks with my therapist, she seem to think that this is something I’ve been exposed to all my life, that I’m her emotional regulator since I was a child, that I’ve always been on guard from showing my feelings to her because they are less important than her feelings.

I have a suspicion my mom is some form of narcissist, maybe communal or have narcissistic traits. I have more to say but yeah, trying to keep it as short as I can.

Sorry this is such a long text. Basically I’ve felt like shit for half a year I’m still NC with my mom and I’m confused what to do. My wife hates my mom because of what she did and how she made me feel. I just wanna function normal for my kids sake.
Please any advice or anything at all would be helpful.