  

TRIGGER WARNING / CONTENT WARNING: Domestic violence &amp; child abuse, eating disorders, self-injury, suicide, GRAPHIC abnormal sexual behaviour (incest &amp; paraphilias; autoerotic asphyxiation, autoandrophilia, necrophilia) 

You know those times when you try to Google a bothersome experience and there aren’t really any results that properly relate to what you’re going through-- even on Quora – so you feel all isolated in your bizarre freakishness? 

Well, I sincerely hope that you can’t relate, but I’m going to tell you about this little problem that’s been bumping around in my head for ages. 

My parents divorced when I was a year-and-a-half. On Christmas Eve, my father called my maternal grandmother and told her to pick up my mother and I. That was the end of that. 

I was raised by my grandparents until the age of 5. Then my mom got remarried to a man who was older than her father. Additionally, my mother went no contact with her parents, so, I was having some adjustment issues to the new parental situation. 

In fact, my mother stopped talking to her parents after I raced off to my grandmother’s car for a planned visit and my stepfather was offended because I didn’t hug him before I left. In my stupid child mind, my misstep was the reason why we weren’t talking to my grandparents anymore. My mother saw my resistance to my stepfather’s expectations as jealousy. I felt deeply alarmed by this perception because being a jealous person was not in alignment with my self-concept … but then I also feared that maybe she was right, and I became quite vigilant to stamp out any inner experience that could be interpreted as jealousy. (To this day, I like to test myself by encouraging my husband to pursue people he’s attracted to. This isn’t exactly received well because he genuinely seems to be satisfied with a monogamous lifestyle. On the aside, I do recognize how messed up it is to use someone as a tool to examine a personal insecurity.)

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Fast forward to the age of 8 when Mom is having a dinner party. She doesn’t get to socialize very often and is really enjoying herself … and her wine. I’m told to go to bed. I hug and kiss Mom goodnight, and somebody at the table asks if I’ll do the same with my stepfather. Well, no, I don’t normally hug and kiss him goodnight and I feel frozen in place, not knowing how to respond. My mom breaks the silence by announcing that I suffer from Oedipus complex. Confused, I go to bed. 

\~\~\~

A couple of years have elapsed. I’m a student library assistant at my school, and I happen upon Sophocles’ *Oedipus Rex*. I take this opportunity to ask the librarian what Oedipus complex is. Somewhat uncomfortably, she explains the Freudian psychosexual stages of development to me. I am so mortified. Does my mother REALLY think that I have the subconscious hots for her? Does she REALLY think that I want to dispose of my stepfather?

\~\~\~

Hah! Well, one divorce later (for which I am blamed), my mom is with her new man. I won’t talk to him because he unceremoniously inserted himself into my life without introduction. He gets pissed with my attitude and throws a full beer mug at my head. Mom tells me that I got what was coming to me, and also, the beer is good for my hair (silver lining in every cloud, I guess). She also asks me what I expected. Do I think that she’s going to stay single forever?  I certainly can’t fulfill all her relationship needs. While I understand that what she’s saying is correct, this strange sense of indignation bubbles up within me. How could she say that without even letting me try? Maybe I COULD fulfill all her relationship needs. I’m terrified of this thought and try to shove it away. 

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I’m 14 now. Going to start high school in the autumn. Been bulimic and self-injuring for two years, and I survived my first attempt and prolonged hospital stay. Mom and her boyfriend are locked in their room having a domestic dispute and Mom screams. I’m scared and I call the police. Mom tells me to get in the car a minute later and we’re off to the hospital. 

He hurt her. 

We fill out police reports at the hospital and when we go back home that evening, Mom says, “Let’s go to bed.” So, I head upstairs, and she motions for me to go into her room. “Why don’t you sleep with me, isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?” Her voice is dripping with disdain. 

Fear, panic, anxiety! Just what exactly is Mom implying? Did she think that I called the police because I wanted to be rid of her boyfriend…and take his place? What is in this offer? I don’t know how to unpack it, but my instincts are screaming DANGER!!! I make up some feeble excuse. “Remember when I tried to sleep next to you when I was three and my restlessness and breathing bothered you, Mom? I don’t want to irritate you. Thank you, though.”

I must really be sicker than I thought. Did I actually think that my mother was contemptuously offering me sex? Surely, I was mistaken. She was actually just offering for me to sleep next to her, right? Admittedly, we both had a long day and probably weren’t in our right minds. 

\~\~\~

I met my biological father when I was 15. It opened up this seemingly endless world of grief that I just couldn’t evade. My psychiatrists and psychologists all thought that it was such a positive development for me because I was – and am still certain -- that my father is just about the most amazing human to ever grace this world. Is he even human? I don’t know. Sometimes it’s hard to tell…

Shit went downhill fast, and I was homeless a year later.

\~\~\~\~ 

When I called to tell my mother that I was pregnant and getting married at age 18, she told me that I had destroyed my life. She never reached out to me again. Whenever I contacted her, she respectfully requested that I leave her alone…and I’ve been doing that (to the best of my ability). I felt like I didn’t deserve to feel pain because her refusal to communicate with me was MY fault. 

I’m not entirely certain that repression is the best way to deal with problems. Who woulda thought? Anyway, one thing led to another, and I’d developed this masturbation nightmare addiction to thoughts of my mother. She was always this caricature; completely unreachable. I couldn’t do anything to please her. My touch repulsed her. I fetishized her rejection of me. I was in the absolute depths of emotional poverty and my other paraphilias didn’t really do anything to help the matter. The autoerotic asphyxiation was probably going to kill me (not that I cared) and the gender dysphoria from my nearly lifelong autoandrophilia would flare up at the most inopportune times. The shame and guilt were brutal. My compulsion to engage in this completely unsatisfying pastime was unfathomable to me…until it wasn’t. Until, one day, my maladaptive nightmare self, entered a sterile morgue and rolled my dead mother out of a cold locker. I realized partway through ‘the act’ that I’d had enough of crying with my phantom penis. I didn’t actually want this. I wanted my mother to let me in to her cold, dead, heart, and that probably wasn’t ever going to happen. Holy fuck did I sob my brain dry after this rather obvious revelation. 

As I started piecing together the history of the impotent mother-thirsting identity I’d created, I shared what I was going through with my father. I was baffled. Why would my mother look at her child and see licentiousness? (As a parent, I just didn't get it!) Surprisingly, my father told me that he knew what it was like to be misconstrued in this way… and I never asked him for the specifics, but my sister made a FB post soon after saying that some people in her family were *apparently* incestuous. (That was over a decade ago)

Recently, I recalled that my mother said my father was a mama’s boy. My mom brought this up because she was trying to explain why her first marriage didn’t work out. Suddenly, the pieces seemed to fit. I mean, it’s still all speculation but I do look a lot like my father, and I’ve inherited some of his mannerisms. Maybe my mother was insecure about the relationship that my dad had with his mother. Maybe, to subconsciously undermine it, my mom viewed my father’s relationship with his mother as indecent. And maybe, I triggered that delusion just because of the way I look. 

As for Freud…well, apparently, he based Oedipus complex off a groinal reaction he experienced as a little boy upon seeing his mother’s silhouette through a somewhat sheer nightgown (or evening gown, or whatever). The thing about Freud was that he wasn’t raised by his mother, he was raised by a nanny, so he failed to form a strong familial bond (Westermarck effect) with his biological mother. Thank goodness Freud has little place in modern psychology, but I do find it funny how the perversity my mother perceived in me reflects so poorly upon her performance as a parent.