Content warning: verbal abuse, dysfunctional family dynamics, sexism, ADHD
So, roughly a week ago I promised my Mastodon followers a rant about growing up as a single mother's child in the 90s. Here you are!
Specifics of the situation
I have to preface this rant with some circumstances. First, this happened in the mid-80s/early 90s. Second, it's a very specifically western German situation.
I am the oldest of three children. The first cracks in my parent's marriage appeared when I was about 10. My parents were legally divorced when I was nearly 14. As it was customary back then, my mom got exclusive custody of us children.
I am not even sure all of this happened the way I remember it. My memory is fuzzy, and sometimes I'm not sure if my mom or my grandmother said or did something. There is a nasty voice claiming I'm making it worse than it was, and I need to challenge that voice. While I'm not sure I can classify the situation(s) as abusive and there are certainly others who have it worse, it still wasn't healthy.
This account is very negative, and while there were things that went right, moments of joy, things that worked, I need to get all those negatives off my chest. It's long and it may be quite depressing to read.
During the divorce: The endless yelling
The period before the divorce decree was valid was emotionally destructive. My mom – and thus we kids as well – moved in with her parents for some periods of time. I only have a blurry memory of the sequence of events, but I remember that she desperately tried to get back into work, and the most practical solution was to start working in my grandmothers cosmetic salon.
My mom and my grandma don't have the best of relationships. My grandma has, on top, a very destructive way of criticising people, and it seems to have rubbed off on my mom. On top, my mother used to have this tendency to swallow things until she just can't take it any more, and then she would erupt like Mt. Krakatoa. Looking back, their conflict behaviour was being taken over by intense emotions so much they couldn't give any regard to anyone else. There was no such thing as manageable emotion, much less making amends. Sometimes, my grandmother would start griping about the same small thing over and over again for days, making it way bigger than it actually was.
I remember those periods of living with my grandparents as shot through with vicious yelling orgies, always being on my guard because my mom or my grandma could explode at any given moment without warning over a small mistake, I remember that I wasn't allowed to contradict them, and that crying was often seen as manipulative and I was punished for it.
There was a strong compulsion to pick sides as a child. I remember being asked who I wanted to live with at one point. I wanted to say “my dad”, but my siblings were quite clear that they wanted to stay with my mother, and there was no way I'd leave my siblings alone. The relationship between my parents was so conflict-laden that seeing my father was always fraught with bad air.
There was a lot of moving around during those years. We lived in a two-bedroom condo that belonged to my grandmother for a while, and while I liked the place (I could walk to school, there was a playground nearby, and I liked living in the city), it was tiny. The living room was also my mom's room, the kitchen was tiny for a family of four, and my siblings shared a room until my brother was about 9 or 10.
After divorce
1990 marked the year when we moved in with my grandmother another time. This time, my mom and my grandma had decided to build a house together, after my grandmother fell in love with southern Rheinland-Pfalz and my mother had looked for an affordable, larger place for our family for a long time. So they built a duplex in a village in Rheinland-Pfalz: my grandma and grandpa lived in one unit, and we got the other, slightly larger one.
My mom continued to work in my grandmother's beauty salon, and at the time, they also owned a vocational evening school where they both taught.
Moving into that house finally brought some sense of space and stability, but it also brought other challenges.
Sexism (and other prejudice)
People leveled a lot of blame at my mother: Blame for getting divorced as a mother; blame for having three children (that was considered “a little too much” in Western Germany then); blame for working; and finally people told her she'd better marry the next best man (so we'd be a proper family again).
All of that seemed to say: Whatever she chose in that situation, apart from scrambling to stay in or get back into heterosexual marriage and being a stay-at-home mom, made her a terrible person, and a family outside the classical heteronormative model wasn't a real family and doomed to fail. It seemed to suggest that perhaps she got into that situation because she was a terrible person, and that a single mother couldn't possibly be a good – or even just good enough – mother.
Characteristically, that was stronger and more openly displayed in the rural situation. But it also came to light when my mom was looking for a flat in Karlsruhe – no one wanted to rent to a single, working mother of three children. I had one teacher who held that I didn't belong to the Gymnasium because “I came from an asocial family”.
The overwhelm
I guess my mom was overwhelmed with juggling all the tasks. I saw her doing her best to work enough to support us, keep the house running and doing all the duties that parenting brings, like attending parent-teacher conferences, on top of having a responsible role as a senior employee in my grandmother's beauty salon and school. She'd fall asleep on the couch soon after coming home from a teaching job at the evening school three or four nights per week, and I'd just switch off the lights and the TV when I went to bed.
I rarely saw her not working or not running late. There was always too much to do.
Of course, we were expected to help with household tasks and to remember which ones were to do. We were expected to see that the living room had to be vacuumed, or the garbage to be taken out. Nowadays, I'm like “duh, of course”, but then, being asked to perceive what needed to be done without a plan or checklist was something impossible for me.
I remember afternoons when a ginormous pile laundry had to be put away, the dishes had to be done, my siblings were arguing or doing nonsense, the dog had to be taken for a walk and I had homework to do, and all I wanted was some quiet time practicing the piano. I remember nights when everyone was exhausted and hungry, but it took all of us what felt like an immense time to get dinner going, and often I was the one who finally took the initiative, but then I did something wrong and promptly got grumbled at.
Distant father
Around the time we moved into the new house, my father found a new job near Munich and married his new partner.
He had been rather uninvolved with us before. Now, he came to visit a couple times, slept in our living room, and it was obvious that my mom didn't want him around. The air was heavy with bad feelings. I guess having him visit us turned more into a chore for my mom than giving her a free weekend.
We went to visit him once or twice, but his new wife wasn't so happy about the fact that children – even teenage ones – meant work. So … we basically saw him about once or twice a year, if at all.
Financial straits
I learned later that my father didn't always pay his part of child support, and rarely the full part. I guess we were struggling a bit financially.
I say “I guess” because money was never spoken about openly. I only noticed that I had way less spending money than others my age, my clothes were weird un-stylish hand-me-downs or from my grandmothers boutique (which catered to middle-aged women), and whenever I found something cool (without even directly saying that I wanted to have it), the sentence “we can't afford that” or “you already got x this month” or something else to that effect came very quickly. So I learnt to pretend that I didn't need anything, and feel like there was a glass wall between me and beautiful things.
My problematic grandmother
My grandmother is in her 90s now, and suffering from dementia. That's why I'm oscillating between “was” and “is” in this paragraph; I feel like dementia has made her unable to exhibit some of those traits, while amplifying others.
When I was young, she used to be an important person for me, and for a while, when we were living with her, she took a role that was somewhat like a caretaker. And I loved my grandma!But she also has some personality traits that are hard to deal with. And those came to light more strongly when we moved into the duplex.
Firstly, she has a very harsh, destructive way of criticising people; she just dumps her dissatisfaction onto them and puts them down, checking off every box on the checklist for destructive criticism. She can't seem to let go of grievances, even small one, and keeps starting over and over again about it for days. She doesn't seem to stop, and if I started crying, that often only got her started for real.
Second, when we moved into the duplex, she started walking into our place all the time, wanting help with something or a favor, and it had to be at once. We basically had to drop everything and do her bidding, or else there would be a flood of reproach later on. Often it was something that would be supposedly done “just quickly”, but I grew very wary of the words “just quickly”. They usually meant something took way longer than anticipated and would throw off my schedule.
Third, she had this way of making people feel bad by spreading busy-ness. While she was still able to be a busybee, she wasn't able to truly relax; she was always doing something supposedly useful, often “cleaning up” (we dreaded when she “cleaned up” our things, because that meant we wouldn't find anything). And she made everyone feel bad about being “unproductive” while she was “working”.
Fourth, I wonder if she resented helping my mom out by letting us move in with her, being around when my mom was working, taking my mom on as an employee. She acted as if a terrible burden was placed onto her, and she blamed my father for all the bad things. She acted as if we owed her eternal, infinite gratitude, and liked to style herself as a martyr. She constantly made me feel like us kids were taking advantage of her or exploiting her.
Impending chaos = catastrophe
I don't know why or how (maybe it's just being a teen with ADHD and “pull yourself together” as their only coping mechanism), but I remember that our everyday life was filled with a sense of chaos. There was the feeling that things were about to spin out of control as soon as I wasn't perfectly on top of things, and that “out of control” meant something catastrophic.
“Us against the rest of the world”
There was a short period when the spectre of us kids being taken away from my mom hung over us, and it turned into pressure to be poster children.
I felt pressure to think of the family as a team, and put “the team” first, before my own needs. We needed to stick together! There was a sense of “us against the rest of the world”; a sense of “we're different, and thus we need to make sure we're better”. Maybe there was pressure to prove that we're a real family, and that we can do it.
Support from outside the family wasn't even thought about. Intervention from outside, e.g. from officials, so we felt, would have meant being patronized, would have meant trouble and ultimately that we failed as a family.
Even nowadays I feel like I have to defend my mother, as if the slightest bit of criticism amounted to high treason.
Being a weirdo in a provincial place
I wonder if my grandmother really thought things through when she decided to build a house in a pretty rural place in Rheinland-Pfalz. She is from Northern Germany and grew up speaking Standard German. In that village, “newcomers” aren't welcome; if you don't speak the local (or at least regional) dialect, you're out. Speaking standard German is considered uppity. Apart from occasional beef with the neighbors, my grandma didn't get to feel this until she retired. She was at work; work was her life and her identity.
I, however, was that nerd who wore terrible clothes, was heavily into classical music and had an A in Latin. I was the nerd who read Existentialist philosophy in French in grade 11. All of that would not have been a problem at the Catholic all-girl school I attended in Karlsruhe, but here it was.
It wasn't just me who was the outsider. It was the whole family, being nonconformist in ways that fewer people would have minded in Karlsruhe than out there. My grandfather had retired early and become a stay-at-home husband and accountant for my grandmother's business. My grandmother was definitely the dominant person in that relationship, and the one who drove off to work every morning. My mom showed no inclination to get another man. She told me later that she dated a bit, but there was never anything lasting, and she was very hesitant to confront her kids with a new boyfriend; having someone move in with us seemed totally out of question. Our house deviated from the norm a bit, looking more like a longhouse than the typical single-family house of the neighborhood, with a lush, always slightly overgrown-looking garden and apricot trees instead of the typical German front yard.
The neighbors also complained about me and my sister making a lot of music. And we had beef with at least three neighbor families, probably just because we weren't like them.
All of that contributed to the sense of “us against the rest of the world” and the feeling of isolation.
I moved out as soon as I started going to music school at 18. I was incredibly happy to finally be back in a more urban environment, out of this small-minded place.
It wasn't healthy (but I didn't know that)
It is only now, thirty years later, that I work through the atmosphere back then in therapy and start understanding how inappropriate the expectations that landed on my shoulders were for a teenager.
Back then, I didn't know that. I didn't recognize verbal abuse as abuse. I thought I just needed to grow a thicker skin, be more disciplined, more diligent, more orderly, pull myself together a little more, pull my weight and stop dreaming.
And there were the nice things that my mom and I did together. I did have music and dance lessons, tight money or no tight money. We went to the opera or ballet together – cheapest tickets available, but we did. There were the occasional evenings sitting on the terrace and relaxing. There were the summer afternoons I spent on the balcony, painting or reading.
I didn't realize that I didn't get to be a teenager, and being a weirdo and an outcast (who had a lot of disdain for her supposed peers) masked that perfectly. I was a teenager ten years later, when I had come out as lesbian, ditched music school, moved to Berlin and spent more time with Goth subculture than with university for a few years.
I didn't learn to acknowledge my needs, set boundaries, say “no”, “enough”, “stop” and “please help me” until much later, and with the help of counseling and therapy. Instead, I learnt to internalize blame, seek my own shortcomings and weaknesses first, and second-guess myself all the time. The overachiever who has it all under control is still my favorite mask to wear.
What has ADHD to do with that?
I was diagnosed with ADD in 2015, after struggling in university and in my working life for basically forever. Finally getting my diagnosis explained a whole lot of things in my biography as well as why I struggle with the things I struggle with.
Knowing that ADD is strongly hereditary, I look at some behaviours in my family and I see how ADD might have compounded things. It's not my place to diagnose anyone; I just want to acknowledge two phenomena that might have made things worse: emotional dysregulation and executive dysfunction.
Emotional dysregulation means that we ADD people don't have emotional brakes. We have a way harder time calming down than neurotypical people, and some of us tend to have meltdowns or just lash out driven by emotions. Our emotions can be incredibly intense – mine certainly tend to be larger than life.
On top of that, many of us are very sensitive to rejection (real or perceived). In his book “Driven to Distraction”, Dr. Edward Hallowell characterized the behavior of ADHD people as “eggshells with sledgehammers”, meaning we are quick to lash out, but very fragile when we are on the receiving end of criticism or aggression. That certainly sounds familiar to me!
Emotional dysregulation probably contributed to that sense of emotions as something unmanageable, something that had to be pushed away so that you could function. Emotions were this explosive, disruptive thing that led to yelling, slamming doors and a poisoned atmosphere for the rest of the day. Exhilaration, excitement, unbridled joy? They just meant the other shoe would drop very soon.
My way of coping with emotions was channeling them into music and painting and/or retreating to my room, hoping that no one would follow me there, and only emerging again when I was done crying.
Executive dysfunction is when we have difficulty planning, organizing and executing tasks. I tend to have a hard time executing a plan, or getting out of the door to go shopping, or working on projects like writing assignments. I misunderstood that as “I'm undisciplined, chaotic, unreliable and lazy.”
I suppose executive dysfunction contributed to the ever-looming sense of chaos and things spinning out of control. Probably it also contributed to the sense that I constantly had to stretch my willpower to its limits. Running a household with kids is already something that requires a lot of organization, and back then I didn't have all the organization techniques I have now. Heck, no one in the family even wrote to-do lists, and given how scatterbrained and aimless I feel without my bulletjournal today, I seriously wonder how we didn't screw up more often back then.
What's my takeaway?
Now, I'm wary of saying “Divorce is alway terrible for the children”. I firmly believe that my mother had the right to leave a relationship that wasn't working for her any more. I believe that staying in a relationship that has turned dysfunctional “for the sake of the children” just wreaks different kinds of havoc with the mental health of everyone involved (apart from being a terribly dishonest thing). I believe that there are better ways of parting ways as parents, and that parental divorce doesn't necessarily need to be terribly traumatic for children.
What could have made the situation better for me?
If I had seen ways of getting support from outside that didn't seem to threaten my family. But at the school I went to, there wasn't even a school counselor, and I didn't have friends to turn to.
If we had found a place to live in Karlsruhe instead of moving out to the countryside. I would have countinued to go to the one school where I felt OK, and being a weirdo would have been more OK in the city than in that village in Rheinland-Pfalz.
If money hadn't been so tight.
If we had had some support to deal with the household and with caring for my siblings.
If my father hadn't been so distant. And if there had been a way for me (for us?) to see him more often without risking terrible fallout and poisoned atmosphere between him and my mom. If he had been committed to making things easier for us as a family, instead of us seeing him becoming yet another burden for my mom.
If we hadn't lived with my grandmother, and if there hadn't been that terrible sense of dependency.
If I could have had the experience that setbacks or failures aren't the end of the world, and that you can overcome them.
Probably getting diagnosed and getting ADD-appropriate support would have helped a lot as well. But back then, who was aware that girls who performed well in school could have ADHD? Even nowadays that's still not acknowledged enough.
But most of all, I suppose we would have done better, and been able to make better decisions, if there had been a sense that my mother was doing her best, and that she was worthy of effective, unconditional support and empowerment, not blame.