How many years has it been? Seven years? I had a “diary” in an open forum that I stopped writing in about seven years ago when I felt like my life fell completely apart. I didn’t have the heart to write any more. With the end of that went many friendships that I had created in those years. In looking back I may have hurt some people by my distance, and I regret that. I was and have been so enmeshed with the upheaval of my life that I didn’t really stop to think about it. I wrote in that “open diary” almost every day for about eight years and that, my friends, is a LOT of chronicling. In a stroke of luck, I recently downloaded my entire diary. Shortly after that the diary site went defunct and disappeared forever. I was able to save everything. I go back and forage through it occasionally if only to recollect what I was doing when, what I was thinking and what was happening. It is amazing how much one forgets.
Despite the gift of having a chronicle of eight years of my life, the one fantastic thing I still have is my friend, Imp, who I met on that site and would never have known otherwise. I don’t see her much as we live hundreds of miles away from each other. We really don’t talk too often enough either, but she is one of the most important people in my life. So often we are of one mind, but yet she is as different from me as day is to night. Imp has a sense of humor and wit the likes of which I’ve never had in any other friend. She opens her mouth and makes me laugh. There is surely not one person on this planet that understands my struggle with my dried-up, narcissistic dishrag of a mother-in-law more than Imp does. She has almost been there from the very beginning. I’m pretty sure she’d help me shove her off a cliff it we thought we could get away with it without jail time. MIL is from the west coast. My nick name for my MIL is WWW, which stands for Wicked Witch of the West. I find that so appropriate.
I’ve been struggling with WWW issues again, after having lived in a “denial” coma for almost 10 years and letting her trample all over me, my husband and our daughters thinking I was doing what was best to keep the peace. In January of this year, she had the biggest drunken, diarrhea-of-the-mouth explosion that I have ever witnessed and I was jolted out of my coma. Now! Now! Now! My brain screamed. Now is the time to strike, to make DH see her because there was NO denying it. And … umm. He kind of did. And we kind of are making progress. But I’m scared. Because he sees her like through a fog. He understands that INSTANCE (whatever the issue now), but doesn’t apply it backward or forward if a similar issue arising. But it’s more progress than we have ever made in all the years we’ve been together. As Imp succinctly put it:
“Oh man, she dug her own hole so deep she finally even put off DH and I thought I’d never see that! As for that miserable slab of beef jerky across the street from you...why isn't that hag's house up for sale yet??!!”
(How can one not love Imp? She loathes the woman as much as I do.)
I’ve been scouring the internet looking for information on Narc’s, how they operate, how to deal with them, and hoping to find information specifically on NMILs. I’ve found a few blogs that I absorbed as fast as I could read them: Narcissists Suck, House of Mirrors, and Open Your Eyes and See. It was Jonsi’s blog that got me to thinking that I should start one of my own. It was her blog that resonated with me so very much as there are so many things that are scarily similar to my situation. Dumbfounding really. So here I am. The woman of those blogs are amazing in strength, intelligence and resolve. I can only hope to be able to someday understand the way they do.
I’m not quite sure how to begin and unfold this tale as I feel like a stopped up mess. I’m trying to avoid an emotional explosion of my own, so-to-speak. I guess we’ll see.
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