A Heart Left Hanging

My mother. Those of you who have read my archives (thank you!) know a bit about my judgmental and rejecting OG primary caregiver. Even on her deathbed, she displays narcissistic and histrionic traits.

Who am I kidding, they’ve only gotten worse. She’s addicted as ever and high as a kite, trading property for painkillers and leaving chaos in her wake.

In short, she’s always been a sh*tty mother.

Mom was unable to give her children the nurturing and attunement kids need for healthy, individuated development.

How could she give what she’d never had?

My mother suffered developmental wounds from her alcoholic mother which she buried under multiple addictions. She unwittingly passed her mother’s compounded trauma onto her children, thankfully we are all child-free.

Of the three of us, Mom resents me the most. This is well-known amongst anyone who’s ever seen our family together. She resents who I am at my core.

Or rather, in her core she deeply fears me.

I posit that I represent many things she abandoned in herself long ago. Things like freedom and choice and change and fluidity. Things like the development of self.

Her fear-based fixed mindset bristles at any attempts to widen her lens. My love-slinging, anything is possible vibe never resonated with her familiar and comfortable doom-and-gloom rhetoric.

In the face of my joy and enthusiasm, she feels threatened by the lack of her own. In the face of my fear and pain, she feels repulsed at the reminder that she is human.

As a result, I spent most of my life hiding my truth.

Deep down, I believed that in order to be loved, I had to extinguish my light.

Of course, this played out in relationships. I was habitually drawn to people who were emotionally unavailable. People who turned on a dime, who used my greatest insecurities against me, like calling me fat when they’re angry.

People like Mom.

I spent most of my dating years instinctively trying to heal my attachment wound. Searching for a love that would fill the void my mother left.

Ken was the first.

Ken developed a crush on me at the end of my seventh, his eighth-grade year.

We had a passionate telephone love affair, talking for hours each day that summer. Laughing and flirting into the wee hours. We made plans to meet up but I canceled. Every time.

At first, it was just nerves.

I had no experience with boys, hadn’t even had my first kiss, and I was terrified. Then I got chicken pox. I was relatively older when it happened, my younger brother and sister had it first.

I had it the worst.

By the end, there was very little skin left unmarred by the deep pox. I was left feeling disfigured and embarrassed for months.

We had built seeing each other up so much, the thought of disappointing him made me sick. There was no way he was seeing me like that.

We continued to talk daily for years and to his credit, it took months for him to stop asking.

Despite my feelings, I never told him how I felt. Part of me was scared of rejection, but another part of me didn’t want to ruin our friendship.

I thought that if I just played it cool and didn’t reveal my true feelings, he might eventually develop feelings for me too.

That never happened. As time went on, it became clear that Ken was not interested in me romantically.

Or if he was, he was not going to act on it.

He talked to me like a buddy about girls he was dating. He came to me first when he lost his virginity, expressing how “different he felt now” and thanking me for being there for him.

It was like eating razor blades.

Each word left a thousand little cuts on the tongue of my self-esteem. I was jealous and hurt. I felt humiliated passing him in the halls at school. Arm in arm with whichever girlfriend, laughing and touching and so not us.

Often, he barely acknowledged my existence as they breezed on by.

I dated other people during high school and usually had a boyfriend. But that didn’t quell my unrequited infatuation with Ken.

My obsession with Ken lasted five years.

The constant, nagging voice in the back of my mind, telling me that I wasn’t good enough, telling me that if I could just win his love, I would feel complete.

Well, that voice stuck around a lot longer.

My dynamic with Ken set the stage for all intimates to follow.

For years I toiled in agony and confusion. Wondering why one relationship after another ended in chaos and deep, deep earth-shattering loss. Unwittingly re-enacting my role as my mother’s daughter hoping this time I will be loved.

I sought corrective experiences for decades. One inappropriate partner after another, desperately surfing for that particular frequency of invalidation. That familiar hum.

The death knell of my inner child.

The need to heal that hole became so great, it nearly got me killed. I survived and I’ve got the scars to prove it.

But the first cut was the deepest. And that Cat, I mean cut, was Ken.

© Kelley Murphy, 2023. 

Thank you so much for reading! xo

Click here to get my Substack newsletter in your inbox!

Create your own beautiful images with Canva.com! Click here to get started for free!