When Mother’s Day memories bring enormous stress, there is not much an affected person can do other than to ride out the season of greeting cards and commercials.
People who are from toxic families often report loving their mother and noting every mini success in life she once had — but they are quick to note as well that she is the person who vexes them typically the most in life.
Mommy Dearest figures are the type of personality who makes their children shudder remembering having grown up their kin. The memory of her toxic behavior is likely to resurface on holidays where she behaves terribly while expecting kowtowing kids, grandkids, and adult children to worship the ground she walks on and to always prioritize her happiness and demand for creature comforts over the needs and rights of all other people.
If a mother is narcissistic, expect her to make selfish decisions. But if she is Anti-Social and Machiavellian? Expect epic holiday sabotage shams — forcing everyone to take note of special holidays and holiday seasons like Mother’s Day month than going out of their way to socially wreck them.
Narcissistic mothers are like watching the before and after of a CAKE WRECKS presentation. If you have never researched the term online we highly recommend you do so any time you need a laugh about intentions and the best-laid plans of Bakers and of humans.
The idea MOM is something sacred and special — just like the perfect cake someone seeking to make one just like it tries to copy. Only when they do, the result is a mocking parody.
Trying to celebrate Mother’s Day when your mother is toxic, MIA, deceased with an unpleasant aftertaste left in her offspring’s mouth from unresolved toxic family issues, in low to no contact status with their kids or a specific child, or if they are profoundly psychologically or socially unwell is one of the dumbest physical sensations most who experience inevitably report.
The Dumb.
That is a real physical sensation and emotion, you know.
It is that feeling you get when you realize some fool made up a money-making holiday that means little to nothing in a home where a mother soils the family nest or does harm to her young before they are pushed out or choose to fly the coop of the nest.
If you are upset reminded of a toxic mother every Hallmark commercial or seeing HAPPY MOTHERS DAY items like cards and flowers for moms, realize you are not alone and that you are experiencing PTSD related to the holiday event.
It is perfectly normal to note the absurdity of honoring a woman who chooses to behave in ways towards their offspring that are socially toxic and likely to do their children tremendous NLP damage and emotional harm.
What is not normal is going through the motions of making a big deal about your mother’s existence — meaning a transactional attempt to purchase or to win her social approval or public validation by overdoing any holiday or memorial event tradition trying to make her day or life better. If she is the kind of person who is more than likely totally unpleasable or if she won’t even bother to try to appreciate the fact you tried to let her know you care for, about, and truly appreciate her for having brought you physically into the world, it is truly absurd.
What’s NOT normal is being forced to celebrate a person who harmed you — especially if you were only a child when they did the social, physical, or sexual damage.
What is normal is feeling Cognitive Dissonance about any toxic parent on a day you are asked to remember and to celebrate the best memories you have of their person, their performance as a parent, and or about their actual personality type in everyday life — things incredibly hard to do for any child who has been socially mistreated, neglected, helicopter parented, or who has been abused,
If you are in low contact status or trying to avoid a family debacle, mail the card — avoid the snark — and if you are feeling especially froggy in the week leading up to mothers day (rather than on the day itself) send her something like a pretty new house plant or some traditional Mother’s Day flowers.
That way she can ease up on worrying what you are going to do or say to celebrate her having had sex and created a baby or children back in the day while you — you do the honorable thing by yourself on her behalf.
You see, when people engage in memorial event celebration it is not about the spiritual or emotional dead. It is about the person doing the honoring striving to remember and to behave in a way that connects family and community with a sense of honor.
For a toxic parent, holidays are about what they get. Toxic people seldom concern themselves with what they give back unless they think giving is going to net gain them some kind of disproportionate “favoring them only” sense of reward.
The goal is to validate yourself for having remembered the holiday and for trying to send her gifts or spending time with Toxic Mother to make her feel good hoping to ease an internal state all children tend to have — hoping to please and be valued as a socially differentiated being by our caregivers or parents. If you give that job to her, expect consistently to be worked over-emotional, physically used, and talked to and about like you are some kind of jerk.
Let that be her perception, not yours.
And if you were abused or harmed by your mother when you were a child, you have been betrayed by her as an adult, or you were forced to go No Contact because she is Cluster B, know that Mother’s Day celebrations are supposed to make you remember your mom.
Honor that process by taking Mother’s Day holidays to do something mindfully special for her by choosing not to engage in drama.
Take care of and protect your own health and her karma by avoiding any kind of toxic social enmeshment without indulging emotionally hedonistic nurtured feelings of shame, guilt, and longing most children of Cluster B mothers and parents tend to report if and when they realize mom is, in reality, a Hospitality Abuser — not June Cleaver or anyone who cares about the health and emotions of their offspring as much as they care about themselves.
Keep the faith and educate. Narcissistic Abuse recovery is possible even if you have a toxic, unloving, or abusive mother.
Even if your blood relatives who made you are socially incapable of actually acting like kind and sincerely loving people.
