WARNING – This post is extremely long and contains graphic descriptions of my past – sorry, it is approximately 5k words. (For my stalkers, would you like me to send you a copy in the post so you can really scan and tear it apart in venomous discussions with your cronies or are you OK for now? Joke, get a life, don’t read this if you are easily upset.)
It may seem strange and a little deceptive, but some of my depressing prose, rhyme, songs, poetry etc. are not actually based on my current states of mind, some are, but most aren’t. They are memories of various people and sometimes even empathy with people who have loved as deeply as me; I in this particular week have heard several friends online tell me that their relatives, friends or spouses are dying, just died or broken with them – I mean a lot of people in just one week and this has made me remember my darkest feelings when I have lost someone I have loved either because of a life choice or because of the non-choice of their life suddenly ending.
I can very easily slip back into old frames of mind, by simply focusing, remembering and being empathic. I am a very strong empath and I soak up the energies of my atmosphere like a sponge, if the people around me are happy, I am relaxed and happy too, if just one person becomes negative I feel it like a brick hitting me and it saps me and if you are close to me, you notice that when I go quiet it is not a good thing, that it is affecting me in some way deeply. I have always been this way, I have always been a sensitive person like that, but I have always been a cunning person (according to my mother), by that I mean I have always managed to come across as unaffected or even cold, it is hard to read me until I get too much of it, then I explode like a bomb and become a wreck for a while and it always takes person who know me by surprise – they haven’t learned yet that this is my way and I can’t help it. I think it has a lot to do with how my mother raised me, because she was always encouraging me to hide my opinions and emotions from others, saying that I must never let anyone see my weak side, must never talk about my weaknesses – but that’s a problem too, because I am a person who after a while, will start to talk about my problems as a means to solve those problems and act as a sort of therapy for myself too. If I am uncomfortable with something or someone, I will tolerate it a long time before I voice it, when I voice it, it is purely to try and come to some sort of compromise with each other, not to upset the other person at all. I always want to solve issues before they get too big for me, but a lot of people think that when I do this, it is a big insult on who they are. Seriously it is not, I am way too liberal and cooperative to be vindictive and critical.
Where is this post heading exactly?
I originally made this blog to act as a therapy for coping with my past. Unfortunately a relative or two found the website and spoke to the people of whom I mention and it caused a big extensive family upset, because I had never in my life, voiced out loud my problems to anyone until literally, it was too much for me to take anymore. To think I took twenty nine years of emotional suppression within a malevolent coercive relationship where I was controlled by four people in particular in my life who are part of my extended family – people who quite literally had mini meetings about me and how to handle me and what they should do with me and what they should make me do, half of the time I was never invited to these meetings.
Some days I would wake up to find my mother giving me that look which tells me that my life and my life schedule has changed yet again or I was about to lose something. Things such as, Tina I want you to drop out of your college course again because we have decided that you should do this instead or that instead. Tina we have decided to send your new puppy to the rescue centre because it looks at me funny, or you happen to have the flu for two weeks now, we can’t look after it, you promised, so we are getting rid of it TODAY! The amount of times we had pets less than a month or two, I didn’t realise until I moved out that it was because certain relatives would only visit around once every 6 to 8 weeks, so they never got to see the new member of our family. Sometimes she would decide that I would leave a job, simply phone the boss right now and say you are never coming back, no notice.
Some mornings I would wake up and there would be a different look in her eye, a mischievous look, I hated those more, they were very unpredictable days. I would find that I would be the butt of a lot of jokes, the entertainment for the evening with her friends or some relatives, or victim of some nasty trick which plays on my fears – such as, I used to have severe clown phobia, she bought me a porcelain clown, black with silver stars all over it and a star patch over its eye, she knew I was affected by many horror movies which had evil clowns in them – so she would tell me she had seen shadows and things around the house all day and things have been unnerving her and how she felt watched and keeps hearing movements upstairs. I was always bad tempered with these silly little things she came out with, because I never really knew where she was going with this. So I would march upstairs in a bad mood to find that my unwanted clown ornament was sitting at the bottom of the bed, arranged in a position which would make it stare directly at whoever walked into the room – with two new clown toys either side it, those were more malevolent looking than the ornament. She would sneakily follow behind me, I stood in the door looking at these unwanted clowns, knowing it was some dumb trick, but then she would go one step further and grab me from behind and push me into the room with them, shutting the door firm behind me. Little did I know at the time that one of the clowns actually was radio controlled to laugh evilly? It was very sudden and scary. I could hear nothing but the clown laughing its head off as well as my mother.
My mother’s type of Munchausen was mostly mental health conditions, skin conditions and ear conditions. She ignored most other conditions if they were outside of this niche she wanted for me. For some reason or another she always encouraged an eating disorder, she encouraged from the age of seven to be paranoid about my weight, sending me to weight watchers, against their rules, but she talked them into letting me go and take part. I would be put on very tightly monitored crashed diets and then made to stop, then she would over feed me and made sure I got bigger every time, then she would put me on a diet again and this continued into my late twenties. Feast or famine kind of life, the damage she did to my digestive system was immense and I am paying for it big time today, my colon and immune system is in a right mess with what she has done. She used to roughly clean my ears and dip my head into the bath to get my ears wet, despite doctors from the age of five telling her not to do this as I had terrible glue ear. I was diagnosed age seven as having lactose intolerance and a suspicion of other intolerance, but mum ignored this and never altered my diet to help me. The amount of times growing up I would have severe night-time diarrhoea that would make me exhausted the next day, teeth chattering pain and ice cold shivers whilst on the toilet, stomach in cramps, fighting not to vomit on my mums pink bathroom rugs. She would tell other people that I was up all night worrying about the next day for whatever reason and keeping her up and that all of this is simply down to psychosomatic reasons because I didn’t want to do something or go somewhere and I worked myself up into a frenzy about it – the amount of people who believed her too! By the time I was eleven she had convinced the world and even my-self that I had some sort of severe social phobia, but I always knew deep down I didn’t. I had to play along with her game because the alternative was horrible.
I developed dandruff and mum made such a big thing about it that she was determined I had some kind of horrendous fungus infection the doctor didn’t seem to know about. She bought a nit comb and would often scrape my scalp sore, weeping and bleeding to get it off me and gave me all sorts of age inappropriate medicated shampoos. I had severe skin infections in large masses with huge weeping oily sores all over my head most of the time growing up and even as an adult for a time, one time was so bad it developed into a huge bald patch. She would only let me wash or bath once a week too, until I made her change this when I was fourteen and was getting self-conscious around my cousins and family friends children. She agreed only because people started to talk about how I lacked personally pride and this embarrassed her.
I didn’t realise until my late teens that I was dressing inappropriately either, around the house when guests arrived. Mum made it normal for me to parade around the house whenever in a chemise day and night if I wanted to, even garden in it in the summer, even if we were an overlooked garden in North London, primarily as it saved on the washing. I had no idea until I first moved out aged twenty that it was all completely shocking behaviour and that I simply shouldn’t dress certain ways at certain times even within my own home, especially with guests or overlooking neighbours. I didn’t even know until then about personal private hygiene either, I had to be taught by my ex-boyfriend, he had to teach me so much, like how to turn an oven on and how to wash and iron clothes, because my mother never taught me. She gave me chores yes, lots of them, but clothes washing and putting on the oven were never a priority, yet I was taught how to cook, but she always turned it on for me and chose the number and did the timer. When this particular ex couldn’t cope with how sheltered my life had been, he sent me back to live with her because he knew I wasn’t ready to live life on my own just yet.
When I reluctantly moved back in with her, I had a break-down that lasted for around ten months and I didn’t leave the house for nearly seven months. I think it wasn’t so much that he dumped me, it was that he sent me back there, to her, when I thought I was free. I tried to get away again aged twenty four, but that person was very different to how I think about life and how it should be. I didn’t get away again until Paul came into my life when I was twenty seven, by that time; things were getting worse for me. Because as I would start introducing new things in my life, to get a life and becoming more determined to have a job to actually keep, she felt she was losing more control over me and this made her become very irrational about a lot of things and she started to become a physical threat.
Constantly causing accidents to happen around me where I would get hurt and if I disputed this with her, she would insist it was an accident and how foolish I am to constantly walk into the cupboard door as she opens it, do I have eyes? Or am I blind? I remember she had two BBQ grills once, one was cooked on and the other was still cold waiting to be cooked on later. She told me she had changed her mind about the other one being used as there was plenty of food and not everyone turned up that day, so she said to me, Tina take the coal out of the BBQ for me and put it back into the bag, after she said this to me she whispered something to her friend and nodded with a smirk, I thought nothing of it until I was shocked with burning pain in my hands, then she laughed and said to her friend, there you are see, told you she would! They laughed too. I could never understand how many evil people my mum found to collaborate with. Some were very lovely and were like family to me, but others were like witches, literally. I wasn’t taken to a doctor or a hospital with my burns, both palms were entirely blistered, she wouldn’t get me any soothing creams at all, her only comfort for me with my burning blistered hands was to run them under the cold water for a couple of minutes. When that wasn’t working for me, she reluctantly and lazily got me a bucket of ice to put my hands in, they were not getting better and I had to sleep hanging over my bed that night with my hands in that bucket of ice water in a heatwave of 30c, she wouldn’t help get me more ice during the night to top up, I had to get it myself.
As much as no one believes me now, who knows my mum; she often would call me over to kneel in front of her when she was on a corded phone if an ashtray wasn’t around, I had to hold the fag for her and let her drop the ash into my palms, sometimes it would burn, sometimes it didn’t then when she finished her fag she would drop it into her tea cup and signal for me to wash the cup out and get her another tea quickly, because she would want another fag in less than ten minutes again. My mother is the sort of person who can drink three cups of tea an hour and smoke every ten to fifteen minutes, she gave up smoking just two years before I moved out.
I have been threatened with defamation for telling these truths, because there are people who simply can’t imagine my mother being like that, because they have never experienced this side of her. One of these people happens to be a sibling of mine who is fourteen years older than me and lived an almost jet setter life from the age of nineteen. Mum changed a lot around a year after we moved to Hendon, when I was just about to turn seven.
Up until I became seven, she was a normal sweet mother and I really wanted to be like her when I grew up, smoking and all. But when things started to change by the time I was thirteen I really wanted to try so hard to avoid being the slightest bit like her. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink like a fish from Friday till Sunday mornings, I don’t go on wild parties, I don’t send my children across the country to various relatives for 4 months of the year in dribs and drabs because I can’t be bothered with them, I don’t criticise my child endlessly and try to shape him into the image I want him to be, I don’t eat McDonald’s four times a week, I don’t constantly sniff, I don’t like starting arguments or drink endless cups of tea or try to upset neighbours or hit and throw out my child because he was open about being gay or loving a black person – I am not like her at all!
I remember one of my brothers once joked to see her reaction that he had got a black woman pregnant and he has to marry her. I am not exaggerating when I said she didn’t just hit him, she literally beat him up like she was in the WWF (former name of WWE), he was curled in a ball in the hall floor begging her to stop because it was a joke, which just made her madder.
My brother often had fights with other guys after nights out, he had a bruise or two afterwards, but he was like he had survived a car crash when mum had finished with him that night.
I even remember mum telling me stories about how she deliberately arranged to break my dad’s leg to stop him from going into the Falklands too. Though when this is bought up the story changes slightly all the time, it is one of these Chinese whisper rumours that goes on in my family, it is always different when it’s retold and if challenged by anyone who was horrified by the story – of course it never happened, whoever bought it up is a liar, that’s what they usually say!
My mother is relentless and tireless in her control of everybody’s lives, some people are too trapped in reverie to realise how much she controls their lives and their observations and reality, so they never really know or feel that she is coercing them in so many things. It is so weird how so many people can live their life so blind all the time. She gets them by being a very generous person who is a pillar of strength for them when they are both mentally and financially in need. I have noticed a lot of the good friends who are kind and relatives who are kind are those who are disabled, formerly homeless, lonely, or were ex suicidal people, people who usually feel they owe everything to my mother because my mother had gave them a home, gave them a chance, gave them money, pulled them together when they were hospitalised and cleaned their homes for them without asking for anything in return. It is difficult to get people to believe you about your problems with a person when the person in question seems like an angel to a lot of others.
I have been around a lot of unsavoury people from a very young age. People that was always risky to be in the room with as a child; ex-convicts, drug addicts, drunks, violent people and those with violent brain degenerative diseases like aggressive personality changes due to dementia and Alzheimer’s. I have even been babysat by said people. One or two of them were not as good as they promised to be to my mum but mum always felt it was too much bother to handle the situation because she needed anyone to babysit me at the time. Not all of them were family, some people were hardly known even by my mother. I even remember once she was so desperate she promised to pay the electric bill of an impoverished neighbour who had a drunk wife beating husband and five kids, I stayed with them for the night and for them it was a normal night but for me it was a horror story. Their dad came home drunk and beating his wife by eleven and I had to just get used to the fact that I had to stay there until morning. When I told mum about this, she attacked the poor woman about how much this woman promised I wouldn’t see that kind of behaviour but a man like that is unpredictable, mum should have known better because she was raised with a father like that herself.
I can’t stop my therapy; I need to move on with my life. I can’t be done for defamation because it is all true and I do have solid proof that certain things did indeed happen, despite how my brother wishes it didn’t. My solid proof are minutes and papers from social services and a variety of charities which helped me from the age of ten to sixteen, I have doctors reports I can summon up at any time to give papers about how violent my mother had been to various members of staff, I have an aunt who will vouch for the violent outburst mum had too. I just have too much to prove and I can prove it.
The thing is, if this goes further and I do indeed find myself in the court for defamation, I will win because of these minutes and reports and not only that, the person in question would do my mother no favours because there is a lot more I will never voice because she will surely go to jail with huge fines if it was revealed and at her age and current state of health that wouldn’t be nice for her. But then again the person who threatened me with defamation was warned seven years ago that mum was too mentally fragile to know about this blog and the truth being revealed and that she was already suicidal herself about her health problems and they didn’t care enough about her then, they still told her, so I guess they won’t care this time around either!
You can only see how much weight mum has put on since she was told the truth is out, my mum eats when she is scared and only scared, I received an unwanted photograph of my mother a few weeks ago from someone online and I couldn’t believe my eyes about how big she has got. It tells me everything. I didn’t want to scare her; I didn’t want her to know about me revealing things, because to be honest, I didn’t want to be the one who got blamed for killing her. Because I still remember the sweet mum I had before we moved to Hendon and I still remember the good times we had, my childhood wasn’t completely horrible, there were good times even if it was always tainted with a bad ending at the end of the day.
But I cannot sit back and let people believe that my childhood was great, that I was spoiled that I have mental health problems of the kind she claims I have.
I do have severe mental problems but they are not the kind she tells people. I have manic depression where I go into bouts of laughing and being happy and then going suicidal, I have post-traumatic stress syndrome, trichotillomania and self-harming issues, I still retain her trained into me feast or famine habits two sided eating disorder, starve for a month and feast for a month thing, mild dissociative disorder (where my personality changes, it has been suggested I have more than one personality, but I never had this dealt with by a therapist and it was hard for them as I never had different names for my different shifts of personality and they felt my personality was shifting a lot, purely because I didn’t have a chance to grow up and define my-self freely) my dissociative problems also cause me to forget the body I am in; make me think that I am in a healthier body and I try and do things and end up having accidents or fainting as the body can’t cope with what I am trying to do, I often have these flashes where I am some kind of super healthy and fit athlete and I try to work out and collapse within ten minutes as my shell is really suffering from more than one auto-immune problem.
Because of my varied types of guardians growing up, I have a strong chav come wigger side (excuse the expression I have no idea how to describe that), I tend to put my hair in dreadlocks during those times and write rap songs and hang around beatboxers and wear chav style clothes and big brash gold jewellery and black hats, a middle class side which is probably my most normal personality socially and my most used; and then there is an extremely aristocratic side where I can’t tolerate inconsistencies in language and etiquette and I yearn for renaissance parties or larping. Also as my father’s family are very Victorian in their manner and speech, I have a Victorian side and my speech can seem almost two hundred years outdated very easily, this is more seen in my writing than my vocalisation though often when speaking, a lot of my contemporaries struggle with my language usage and voice change.
I also have a very aggressive side which only comes out if I am soaking up too much aggression around me and if I feel physically threatened, I was never told what this kind of mental illness is called but if someone physically attacks me (and they have done so a lot in my past) I get dizzy, my eyes seem to fill up with blood and I go blind and I snap out of it several minutes later to find out that I have hurt my attacker badly or I have been restrained before any damage was done, this has only ever happened four times in my life.
I must also admit – I don’t realise that my voice changes between personalities. But I have recorded myself various times and I can do accents and different class styles very easily, I have been told by a friend who works in radio that I really should become a voice over artist as my voices are so varied and consistent. When I knew Rebecca just two years before I met Paul I remember we sat down together and she asked me to deliberately think of my various voices and try some new ones to see how I go.
My list is huge. My best voices are, Marge Simpson, Jimmy Krankie, Joanna Lumley, Mariella Frostrup (when my throat is having a bad day and I try to be posh), Julie Walters, Jane Horrocks, Maxine Peake, Kathy Staff, Peggy Mount, Bonnie Tyler (when singing) as well as Etta James (when I sing, I have a powerful soul, mow town and rock singing voice); My best accents are Southern Irish, Scottish highlander, rural Cheshire, Alabama, New York Jew, New York Italian, Italian, Greek, Russian, German, Chinese, Japanese, Hindu, South Carolina country bumpkin and New Zealander, as well as cockney, middle and upper class west London, Essex and Welsh. There are other voices I can do, but they are not defined as an individual yet, or at least we’ve never come across a person who talks like those people yet and there are some American accents I can’t seem to decide what state they are from either. I do have a very versatile voice when it is in full working order and unfortunately I haven’t been able to play with my voice for nearly a month now and for an average of 4 months of the year my voice is affected due to severe throat infections. My real voice sounds a lot like Martine McCutcheon and when I was younger and I died my hair dark purple which was almost black in some shades, people even mistook me for looking like her when I was in the street, but this is my main voice when around my blood family – my voice has changed a lot since but often floats back when dealing with my past. My voice nowadays is described by others to be more like I am from the West Midlands, a mild, middle class accent which would make sense considering how often I was sent to live for a few weeks here and there growing up to Cheshire, Market Drayton and other areas around here – what makes people laugh is whether I was with blood family or not, if I got upset my voice would change into a very strong Cheshire accent all of a sudden!
My life was so unsettled; it isn’t difficult to believe how hard it was to define myself, even my voice.
This post has got far too long now, nearly reaching 5k words, I should really give you all time to digest this and I am very nervous about admitting to the kinds of mental illnesses I have in as much detail as I have. But the mental illnesses I do not have, which my mother has lied about are social phobias, compulsive eating (yes I have an eating disorder but it is not that), self-isolation, hysterical tantrums and screaming fits on the floor and to some people she has even lied that I have a mental learning disability as well as going into funny trances and doing weird things which scare her.
