I'm afraid I can relate to your story only too well, jacqui c. I think I even once said the same thing to my children that you did. My dad and my brother were affected by my mother's manipulations and childish spitefulness. No doubt she needed help, but we were too close to the situation to see that she was the one with the problem, and my dad and took on a lot of the guilt she spread around.

My brother's perspective was slightly different, as she chose him to be the favourite, but after a while he found that very claustrophobic, and escaped by leaving the country. He has been living in the UK and France since 1974. Although my mother tried to turn us against each other as children, we are now very close, in spite of the geographical distance, and occasional visits are delightful. It was he who paid for my son to set me up with this computer last November. So her attempts to alienate us from each other did not succeed.

After surviving an abusive marriage, I decided to deal with all my mother issues which were making me act like a victim. I had to do a lot of work on myself over several years to undo the harm, and I thought I had put all that behind me until my last relationship, in which this person was like a reincarnation of my mother, and I found myself responding in a similar way to their attacks, and also in a similar way to how my father reacted. I felt I was in danger of becoming a victim all over again, so I got out of it, thank goodness.

I now have a very good close relationship with my children, who also copped a lot of nastiness from my mother before she died. The biggest compliment they can give me is that I am "nothing like grandma". It seems sad, but some people are just poisonous. I just need to learn to stay away from them.

I seem to be doing very well in that department right now, as my new relationship with a very sweet generous person is everything I could want it to be. The ex is still hovering about (in the same folk scene unfortunately) trying to do harm, but that is not going to be allowed.

Although I allowed myself to become a victim like my father in the past, on the other hand, I can see signs of him in my sense of humour and love of reciting funny poetry, and in the love of music. So I just take the good bits and leave the rest. Come to think of it, my present love reminds me a lot of my dad. Life's a funny thing!

Jenny