I am happy to see a few people following the blog. Well, I guess I can't really say "happy", as that means there are people out there looking for information, help and support. To those people who have emailed me personally, I hope you are doing well, and coping with your personal demons.

I would like to add another question to the original "Will I Ever Be Good Enough?"....Will I Ever Be Happy? It doesn't seem to matter how much I accomplish in a day, a week or a year, I always feel like I am falling short. The accomplishments just don't seem to make me feel any better for any amount of time. I have a hard time sticking with things that I *think* are going to make me happy. I look to outside sources to offer me praise. I can be proud of myself for my accomplishments, but this only seems to last for so long. At least I have stopped jumping on the "next big thing", as I now know that I will lose interest in a bit and those big things usually cost money.

I will try to keep posting on a more regular basis, but I would love to hear if other people feel the same way as I do....never being able to find the "thing" that releases them from their feelings of inadequacy.

Is Anyone Out There?

Is "anyone" out there? I had hoped to help those women suffering as I had from the effects of having a narcissistic mother; the self doubt, the feelings of never being successful, never being good enough. I always felt that no matter what I did, not just in my relationship with my mother but in almost all areas of my life, it just was not good enough. When I was succesful at things and people would praise me, I felt like a fake. If only they really knew me.

I had hoped to share my experience and the journey to feeling good about myself. The ups and downs, the discovery of all the areas of my life that having a NM affected. I am still trying to get over my tendency to procrastination to the point of self-sabotague, but my issues with food, cigarrettes, other substance abuse, and really bad men, seems to be on track and under control and I am enjoying myself and realizing the potential in my future for the first time in my life. At 48 years of age, I wish I had discovered all this a long time ago, but I am still healthy, active and strong, so there are not too many things I can't do if I want to. I had hoped to do all this, to expand on the book, go over some other helpful books, share with someone who needs to share (as this is not exactly a problem you go around telling everyone about), BUT, there doesn't seem to be anyone actually reading the blog.

If you are out there just let me know. Until then, I may post if I feel like it, but I have other people to share with now (when I feel I need to) and I have lots of personal development work to do. While I can see an open future, I have to figure out where I want it to go. Do I want to continue to breed cats and go to cat shows? Do I want to open up my time and go back to doing artwork? Should I think of that as part of my future income when I can no longer do dog grooming? I want to open up my time to do some of the things I haven't had time to do like gardening. I was so busy last gardening season that I didn't get to really do any of it at all, and I missed it. Martin was nice enough to plant the garden and harvest things as they came up, but I didn't get the joy from it. I need to figure out where the joy is in my life and expand on those things, go back to those things, and get rid of the things that stagnate me. So many things you do out of habit, obligation, etc., and you don't stop to think about why you are actually doing them. I have been thinking lately of why I am doing them and a lot of the time I spend in a day is busy, but not really doing me any good either financially or personally.

Please if you are out there, email me or post a comment to the blog. I want to hear from you if you are there.

Introduction to "Will I Ever Be Good Enough?"

Dr. McBride states that "our relationship with Mother is birthed simultaneously with our entry into the world." In my case this is not quite right, as I was adopted by my narcissistic Mother, she didn't give birth to me. I had been told I was adopted along with the 3 Little Pigs, so this wasn't a sudden revelation or anything. The first story about my life told by my mother was the day I was adopted. She had her family for company as my cousin was performing with the National Ballet at the CNE in Toronto. Apparently the Children's Aid just called her up and asked her if she wanted another child (they had adopted my non-biological brother a few years earlier). That would have been late August and I had been born in January, so I was already 7 months old, having been in a foster home until that time. At that time the Children's Aid Society would hold onto children for at least several months to make sure they weren't mentally deficient or unhealthy.

The whole family was there so she kind of had to say yes, but she didn't change her plans and went to the ballet as planned, leaving me with my grandmother (her mother) that day. I had apparently not been treated particularly well in the foster home, which was taking care of many other babies besides, so at 7 months of age I couldn't even sit up. I was used to lying on my back and being tossed a bottle a few times a day, with a diaper changed less than that. My rear was apparently like raw hamburger, yet my new mother felt no instinct to say with me that first day.

I can empathise with Dr. McBride's comment of having unexpected tears streaming down her face at reading about the mother-daughter bond, as I could also not "recall attachment, closeness,...the solace of her rocking, holding and comforting,....".

I also knew this was not natural, but had no idea why. Our family dynamic was more a pretense. We actually didn't have much to do with friends or neighbours, perhaps because it was too hard to keep up appearances. I spent most of my childhood playing by myself in an imaginary world.

Dr. McBride discusses her feelings of thinking perhaps she was crazy or delusional, or just having a poor memory. She couldn't find a book that explained this phenomenon of feeling unmothered or that some mothers were not maternal. Nor could she find any books on the conflicting feelings...good girls aren't supposed to hate their mothers. "Motherhood is a sacred institution in most cultures and therefore is generally not discussed in a negative light".

I only began to speak truthfully about my own mother after realizing what she was (a narcissist) and that pretending to my children that "grandma is just like that", was hurtful to them. She would, and did, damage their self-esteems as well my own. Grandma has a major problem. It was extremely hard to pick out a birthday or Christmas card for her, and Mothers Day was almost impossible. All the mushy, lovey cards not only didn't apply to her, she would have criticized and mocked them even if we had given them to her pretending they did.

Dr. McBride explains reading books that discuss the mother-daughter relationship, it's complexity, how it is rife with conflict and ambivalence, but like her, I felt "a void, a lack of empathy and interest, and a lack of feeling loved". I felt I was taking up space, making a mess, wanting things, and I deserved none of it. Writing the book was a culmination of years of research as well as a soul journey going back to her childhood when, as a little girl, she knew that something was wrong. She felt the lack of nurturing was not normal, but didn't know why. She goes on to explain that the book is not written as a way to blame your mother. It is not supposed to be a journey of projected anger, resentment, or rage, but one of understanding.

When I read this I had a very hard time with it, as I didn't have much but resentment or rage for my mother. She talks about healing ourselves with love and forgiveness for ourselves and our mothers. We are accountable for our own lives and feelings and we have to understand what we experienced as the daughters of narcissistic mothers, and then we have to move forward. "Without understanding our mothers and what their narcissism did to us, it is impossible to recover. We have been taught to repress and deny, but we have to face the truth of our experiences - that our longing for a maternal warmth and mothering is not going to be fulfilled and our wishing and hoping that things will be different are not going to change things."

This was probably the hardest thing for me to accept as an adult. My mother was never going to change and never be the mother I wanted her to be. If I pushed her to try to get her to act motherly, to act lovingly, she would let me down every time.

We will continue with the Introduction to the book in the next post.

Moose Hunting Resolutions

1) Write Stuff

2) Lose Weight

3) Eat Better

4) Tone Up (more exercise)

5) Quit Procrastinating

I'll have to expand on and figure out exactly how I'm going to do those things, but at least I have a place to start. Moose hunting is a great place to make resolutions as you have lots of time to sit and think as you remain perfectly still, waiting for a moose to appear. There is actually nothing else "to" do but think. Much better than those resolutions made in a tipsy state New Years' Eve, which don't tend to last until dawn.

To hunt pretty much anything, you go out in the wilderness, either well before it gets light and wait for the sun to come up, or in the afternoon, and wait for the sun to go down.

There is an eerie quality about those times, when everything looks like a moose or a bear in the semi-darkness. There are lots of weird noises at those times: Hoots, screeches, scratchy noises, yips, leaves rustling or crunching, branches cracking. Keeps your blood flowing. There are lots of recognisable noises as well: planes, trucks, logging machines, 4 wheelers, chain saws, shots in the distance, shots much closer. The forest can be a very noisy place.

I didn't have to write down quitting smoking, as we quit smoking (again), September 3 of this year. Myself and smoking (cigarettes & otherwise) has a rather long history, going to back to the first cigarette my Mother stuck in my mouth at age 13. I'll go into that later, as we go through the book together, which it is getting time to do.

I thought that I would share a bit of who I am with you before we got going and will continue to do so as we go along.

This week, my 20 year old son is home from college for reading week. He's not doing much reading. I have hardly seen him as he is just waking up when I am finishing my grooming schedule and crawling in the tub at about 4. He doesn't go to bed until 3:30 am so I guess it makes sense. When he does get up, he eats dinner and then plays "rock band" with his 27 year old brother, who just moved back home 6 weeks ago after a 5 month wayward affair with a 40 year old in Toronto. They think I'm weird to be in bed by 9:00 pm, but I'm up at 5:30 am, so we are just on different shifts apparently.

The next post will be a review of the Introduction of the book "Will I Ever Be Good Enough?".

No Moose, No Foul

Well, we didn't get a moose. We didn't even see a moose except on the way up (10 hour drive north), but we did see a lynx, lots of bear poop, various kinds of squirrels, a more-or-less tame fox, 2 varieties of grouse, blue jays, whiskey jacks (like a grey jay), a golden eagle, martins, raccoons, ravens the size of turkeys, an owl, and I'm sure a few other creatures I'm not remembering right now.

I have attached a photo of one of the areas we go to hunt moose, just to give you an idea. These are logging areas and look somewhat like a nuclear bomb has completely devastated the area, leaving only a few scraggly trees. This is a first year "cut". They come in with humungeous machines, kind of like a huge bulldozer with gigantic teeth, that clips off trees at the base, picking them up like twigs, stripping them of all the branches, then cutting them in 12 or 16 foot lengths, depositing this rough lumber in large piles, which are later picked up by big logging trucks. Surprisingly, the moose just love these areas and will follow these big machines around, waiting for the free lunch. Moose eat leaves, not grass like a deer or a cow. For them, the freshly cut trees are a delicious buffet and it is not uncommon to see moose tracks all around these huge machines, where they are parked for the night. We saw lots of moose tracks, laid down by the moose wandering around at night, but unfortunately for us, but fortunately for them, we were tracking very smart moose, who seemed to know to stay in the woods during the day. You are not allowed to hunt at night, only in the daylight. While the "cut" looks rather ugly and horrible after it is cut the first year, the second year the small poplars and other trees try to regrow along with an abundance of blueberry plants, making another bounty for the moose and bear. Somewhere in the 3rd to 5th year, all the dead wood and scraps are piled up and burned and the next year, the area is replanted with new trees to be harvested 40 years in the future and the whole process starts over. They do leave the odd rare protected species of tree and we saw huge gnarled looking pines standing like windblown guardians in these otherwise stripped areas. They also don't take the trees from around the lakes and ponds, to leave a natural habitat and hiding place for the wildlife.

While commercials will tell you to recycle paper to save the caribou, moose, bears, etc., they actually thrive in these areas where commercial logging takes place. I was shocked the first time I saw one of these "cuts", but as I saw the various years of progress, up to the areas replanted 20 years ago, it seemed a pretty responsible way to harvest this natural resource as ugly as it may look for a few years.

We were 25 km on a logging road, or about 15 miles from the nearest highway, which is 2 hours from the nearest grocery store or coffee shop on a 2 lane highway. I don't know how people can live here, and very few people do. There are no stores, no bowling alleys, no bingo's, no anything for miles and miles but trees. We had everything from heavy frost to26 degrees Celsius (that would be about 80 F) in the one week.

If you go to an area like this, not that far north of civilization, you realize just how empty this country really is and how much of it is owned by the "crown", or the government. The land is rented to the lumber companies for logging rights, but otherwise anyone can camp, hunt, or do whatever else they might like to do. No private property signs, no fences, and more 4 wheeler trails than roads. A land where a can of spagettio's will cost you $4.59, if you can find one.

Self-sufficiency

I can frequently out-shoot at least the young hunters, which gives me some internal praise. As daughters of narcissists, we need to learn to get validation from sources other than people. We need internal validation. We need to do things we can feel proud of even if other people tell us we're crazy for trying to do it.

I have no idea why, when I was raised in suburbia, I would have the urge to move to the country and raise my own food. It is a matter of self-sufficiency I suppose, seeing as I figured out pretty early that I couldn't depend on anyone else to take care of me. I didn't want to have to rely on anyone else to take care of me, they always let me down, so I learned to change electrical outlets, grow and freeze vegetables and make jam and pickles. I actually can't stand to have anything from the garden go to waste. I don't have a lot of time to do this Suzie homemaker stuff, so I have learned how much to plant and what I can actually use.

I had thought I wanted to have a hobby farm and raise my own meat, but reality and time constraints brought me to my senses. I only have an acre and a half of land, which really isn't enough to grow an animal. I tried rabbits, but spent more time chasing them around when they got out of their pen. I knew that large animals probably weren't a good idea when I bought a pony for the kids when they were young. Electrical fencing was the only thing I could afford, and the pony, being lonely, would close it's eyes, brace itself and race the fence. I would get a call from someone miles away asking me if I'd lost a pony. Poor Misty would be off somewhere visiting another horse. I felt sorry for her so I sold her to someone who raised POA ponies and would give her the time, space and equine company she seemed to crave. The kids didn't seem to care less. I learned to run a Skil saw, hammer a nail, put down flooring, hang drywall, and the largest project we completed was putting in a new septic system. My older son Chris and I did that. The toilets were backing up into the lawn so I made some calls and got some prices. There was no way I could afford $14,000 to replace the septic system. I started out from the house with a trowel, where I saw where the plumbing pipes left the house in the basement. I found the septic tank, and then kept digging. Beyond the septic tank, which is pretty much just a large cement holding tank, I dug with my trowel looking for the septic system. I found a few broken tiles, but there was really nothing else there. I had hoped for a plugged pipe somewhere, but there were no pipes. Either there had never been a tile bed, or it had disintegrated away in the 100 some-odd years the house has been standing here. The shovel seemed like a good idea at that point, but it was too strenuous and time consuming, so we rented a mini-hoe from the local Rent-All. Surprisingly, they will allow anyone to have one of those for the weekend. They don't seem to think they need to tell you how to use it, they just drop it off and away you go. My son Chris was about 13 at the time, so he was able to manage it quite nicely after playing with it for a few minutes. Like wanting the window seat in an airplane, we took turns running the mini hoe and dug up the front lawn. It was fun! I had read a few articles on how to put in a tile bed and it didn't seem too difficult, certainly not $14,000 worth of work or materials. We dug trenches, put down straw, newspaper and gravel, then the actual tiles, which are just plastic pipes with holes in them, then more stuff on top. It cost us $1300 all together, including all the materials, including a dump truck full of soil to go back on the top of the lawn. My son is now 27 and the septic system has never given us a bit of trouble in all that time, not even needing the septic tank pumped out.

We were pretty handy at running the little back hoe by that time, so we took out a bunch of stumps while we were at it. There were a few tricky moments when a stump and the mini-hoe were about equal in weight and it looked like the stump might win, but we managed to keep the mini-hoe out of the hole under the huge roots and eventually won the battle.

I am back from my trip on October 17, hopefully with some meat for the freezer. It will all be packaged in little brown paper and labelled as to the cut, so it becomes much more civilized once it has been to the butcher. I will start going through the book then, the one this blog is about. I don't think it is such a bad idea in the meantime for you to get an idea of who I am, or perhaps I should say, who I have become.

Shining Tree

By the time this post is published, I will be in Shining Tree, Ontario, which is about half way between Sudbury & Timmins. What am I doing way up there?....Moose hunting. It may seem strange for a female to want to hunt, but it was something I became interested in over 10 years ago. Before that, I had tried keeping rabbits, but I had to have someone else butcher them for me. Don't get me wrong, I consider myself a very feminine female, not masculine in the least.

Now, I like to hunt for deer, moose, geese, ducks, wild turkey and yes, I eat every morsel. I had always like to fish. It was a way as a kid I could get away from the house and be off doing something constructive that wouldn't draw attention. Like reading, fishing was an activity that got me away from the criticism and having to listen to my mother complaining about her life or her health. When I brought home fish, which I would also have to clean myself, my Mother would be quite happy to cook them and declare how delicious they were, always an added bonus to the daughter of a narcissist. Pats on the back don't come along very often.

I have no idea why I had the urge to hunt, why it doesn't bother me to kill something for food. Perhaps my realism in living in the country and knowing how animals are raised and how their quick demise in their natural habitat is so much more humane and logical than the fate suffered by beef steers. Their fate is to be chased, herded and prodded into trucks for a trip of hours or days to the stockyard, where they might sit for more hours or days smelling death and fear until their turn to be herded and prodded into the killing room. Sounds horrible I know. It is. Also quite real. It is how we eat meat. I won't even go into chickens and how we get the milk we put in our coffee or on our cereal. The most humane thing to do would be to shoot an unsuspecting steer as it happily munches on flowers in its field, but this is not cost effective so it's not done.

I am getting off topic. I decided I would like to hunt so I took a course and got my license to be able to hunt. Anyone can take the course and as long as you don't have a criminal record, you can get a license to carry a gun and purchase the various "tags" required to hunt deer, geese, moose, etc. I got the highest mark in my class! Depending on where you live you contact the Ministry of Natural Resources or Fish and Wildlife. Was I accepted by other hunters as a someone serious about what I was doing? No, not initially. This didn't bother me, as I was used to being pushed out of my comfort zone as a kid. Whether it was selling light-bulbs or chocolate bars door to door to raise money for my brothers hockey team, or making phone calls for my father pretending to be his secretary when he was secretly working from home, I was made to do a lot of things that I didn't want to do, and saying "no" was absolutely never an option. I don't mind public speaking or things like that and the adrenaline rush of pushing past the fear of doing the unknown is rather thrilling.

What would you do if you weren't terrified of doing it?