Twinkle: Triggered

I saw a friend last night. She said that she had seen my MIL and had a nice conversation. Of course she did, because my MIL is great at pretending to be nice in front of my friends. She has always done this, so that y’all will be like, “How can you not like your MIL? She’s SOOO sweet!!!!” 

My friend is smart and knows better than to trust her, and can see right through it. But, for some unknown reason, in the conversation, my friend told my MIL that she thinks my middle daughter looks like her.

My MIL said, “I think so too but don’t tell Twinkle that. She won’t like it.”

I hate the word triggered, but triggered does not begin to describe the RAGE that I feel about this interaction. It is almost enough to undo a year’s worth of work on distancing myself and not caring. It brings back all the anger and the hurt, times a million.

First of all…it is so typical of my MIL to be like, “Don’t tell Twinkle.” The implication here is that now MIL and my friend have a secret, just between them. They both know that E looks like MIL and can both admit it, but I can’t handle admitting the obvious, because I have a problem. I AM a problem.

The second point is the rawest wound for me, because it’s undermining me as a mother. Again. I have spent my whole life as a mother being undermined by her. As you all know, no one in that family ever ONCE said, about my babies, “She wants her mommy.” Never ONCE. She came to visit when my first baby was a week old and told my husband and me to go to the movies because “she’s too young to miss you or even know who you are.” When I remember the cruelty of that statement, as a new mother, to be so disrespected, it breaks my heart. As babies or toddlers, they could be screaming “Mommy!!!” and she’d be like, “Her feet are cold. Don’t you ever put socks on her?”

I have endured YEARS of hearing them talk about how little my children need me, and how much my children look like everyone but me. And, she’s right. I don’t like it. Maybe I would feel differently if this were a normal family. In a normal family, where everyone is respected and everyone has a place, OF COURSE I could acknowledge that my children have traits from both sides. I’m not some genetics denier. This would not be an issue if my MIL, or FIL, or anyone in the family for that matter, ever acknowledged that I played some part in the fact that my children exist. That maybe they look like me; maybe they got some facial feature or personality trait from me. 

The underlying message is that I’m not respected in this family. There is no place for me. There’s no room for me to help out on holidays. My culture doesn’t matter. My traditions are forbidden and not discussed. My children look like THEM, not me. MIL will tolerate me when she has to but everyone knows my children are really just like her, and my SIL, and my husband, and my FIL. I’m just an inconvenient but ultimately insignificant factor.

And the worst part of it all is that SHE’s the one that made this an issue. In my family (that family that she claims to know so much about, that she so maligned and called dysfunctional), of course people might look like one parent or another. It wasn’t a competition, because there was enough love and recognition for everyone to feel a part of things. “Doesn’t this baby look like her daddy?” was never a weaponized statement used to undermine someone. Every person in my family was—is—loved, and valued as an equal. Something like that would NEVER be an issue. No one would think twice about making such a statement, because no one would have any malicious intent behind it. 

This brings me to my third point of RAGE. In typical MIL fashion, she created this toxic situation, and blames me for it. She spent YEARS belittling me, undermining me, bullying me, excluding me, and now she has the AUDACITY to tell my friend, “Don’t tell Twinkle. She won’t like it.” If I’m a monster, she’s the one who created me. (I don’t think I’m a monster.)

The fourth point is most frustrating, because exactly what she said would happen did happen. I didn’t like it. I did get mad. I am filled with RAGE over it. If she tells my friend not to tell me because I’m going to get mad, and then my friend tells me and I do get mad, it just confirms everything my MIL knew about me all along. I’m just emotionally unbalanced and unhealthily attached to my children. This is just SO typical of me. MIL saw it all along and TOTALLY called it.

I can’t figure out why she hates me so much. What did I do? I will never understand.