Tag Archives: daughters of Toxic Moms

Toxic Mom Toolkit – Mending Hearts – Community Volunteering

11 Apr

May I share with you my syllabus for volunteering in the community?

I’m planning to visit my local childrens’ home with Toxic Mom Toolkit friends to teach sewing & mending to children the week before Mother’s Day. It’s one way to put a positive spin on how we are feeling around Mother’s Day; by hosting a fun learning activity for kids who may be missing their own mothers very much.

 

Mending Hearts Syllabus 

Today’s Project:

Learning to mend by sewing small hearts as keepsakes, decorations or presents. This tiny tokens can become gifts for their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters or other loving women in their lives on Mother’s Day.

 Definition of mending:

 To restore something

to a satisfactory state.

Mending is never perfect, but it is what we do when we care about something and don’t want to throw it away.

We can mend torn clothes and we can mend friendships and relationships.

The only thing required is a willingness to do so and patience.

* * *

Materials: Pre-cut red felt hearts, material hearts, embroidery thread, stuffing, buttons, red pipe cleaners for hooks, and large embroidery needles.

Examples: Can include several finished hearts in different sizes and materials, vintage linens and books on embroidery for inspiration.

* * *

“Forgiveness is the needle that knows how to mend.”

 – Jewell

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Toxic Mom Toolkit Journal Project – Are you really my mother?

31 Mar

Toxic Mom Toolkit Journal Project – Are you my mother?

Remember that children’s book that had the little bird that fell from its nest walking around asking every animal “Are you my mother?”

Sometimes, being the daughter of a toxic mom can make us feel a little bit like that fledgling bird. Some of us even wonder if we are our mother’s real daughters and begin searching for family secrets like adoption or cross-generational parenting.

When I was a private investigator researcher specializing in identifying the birth parents of adult adoptees it amazed me how many times a woman would discover something she felt all along: that her actual mother was her aunt or much older sister, or the family friend who stopped by every fifth Christmas.

One way to decide who your mother really is can be solved by asking yourself who really looked out for you when you were growing up. In the 20 Questions Every Daughter of a Toxic Mom Should Ask Herself blog post at 8womendream.com, I suggested that you sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil and try to write down three wonderful things your mother ever did for you.

Giving birth to you doesn’t count.

Can you think of one but not two? Can you only think of things that were really rooted in your mother’s image of you like paying for a good school or buying you designer clothes you didn’t really ask for or throwing an over the top wedding.

After compiling your list, turn that sheet of paper over.

Ask yourself: Who has done the nicest, the kindest things for me?

In my case, a boss I worked for cared for me like another daughter. He paid me well, he established a retirement fund and made me contribute to it even if he had to loan me the money to do it. He told me I was smart. He paid for my early writing classes. He told me to write because he could see I was a writer before I did.

My husband constantly does so many kind things for me from handling all the stressful stuff involved in staying solvent and keeping a peaceful home – to always texting me positive and encouraging messages and scheduling time to just talk and listen.

My friends, who know more about me than any member of my family ever did, have regularly checked on me as I went missing during the two years I worked on my book. The coffee dates, phone calls, emails and small treats that arrived in my mailbox have really encouraged me.

So, who is my mother – the one who nurtures me and wants the best for me? It was never my mother, the woman who raised me. My life has taught me that the people around me who possess those loving impulses to encourage me are mother enough.

Look at your list. Who really is your mother/encourager? Who has the power to sustain you when you are discouraged? Mother’s Day is coming on May 12th. I don’t think Hallmark makes a card for this: Happy Mother’s Day to You – Thank you for being like a mother to me. Or maybe they do? How many cards like that could you send out? Write about this in your journal. Explore the idea of mothering and how it applies to your life.

And report back!

Visit us on Toxic Mom Toolkit on Facebook for daily humor,

encouragement, support and positive images and ideas. 

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Toxic Mom Toolkit – Media Page

30 Mar

TOXIC MOM TOOLKIT

Addressing the last taboo: talking about unbearable mothers

 NOT EVERYONE IS EXCITED ABOUT MOTHER’S DAY

 Mother’s Day is Sunday, May 13, 2012

Is it possible that not everyone is excited about Mother’s Day? For some,  Mother’s Day is the most emotional and difficult day of the year.

TOXIC MOM TOOLKIT is an online support community established by journalist Rayne Wolfe for adult daughters of toxic mothers. Reaching 45,000 visitors per month and growing, it is a daily resource for anyone endeavoring  to rise above toxic parenting.

Purpose: Toxic Mom Toolkit on Facebook offers support through humor, positive images and quotations, video messages and links to news stories, books and other resources. A companion blog, ToxicMomToolkit.com, provides topics for independent therapeutic journals. A Toxic Mom Toolkit YouTube channel encourages frank discussion and mutual support.

Community: With over 45,000 visitors per month Toxic Mom Toolkit connects women from all over the world who face stressful issues concerning their mothers. For many, it is the first time they have ever spoken up about dealing with a toxic mother.

Rayne Wolfe is available as a media resource or radio and television contributor on the subject of surviving toxic parenting.  Her background includes ten years as a daily news reporter for a New York Times regional newspaper in Northern California. From 2010 to 2011 she was a lead blogger at 8WomenDream.com, which focused on encouraging women to pursue their passions. In the late 1990’s her business column, “What Works,” ran in the San Francisco Chronicle and Seattle Times and other papers. She has published in numerous magazines including Glamour Magazine, has taught creative writing at Book Passage, and has read her own short stories on NPR affiliates. She is also a contributor to the Chicken Soup series – Chicken Soup for the Gardener’s Soul.

A former Sonoma County law enforcement chaplain, she has helped families deal with the trauma of sudden loss.

She has written and is preparing her first book Toxic Mom Toolkit for publication. It includes her own memoir of growing up in 1960’s San Francisco, the daughter of three mothers: a toxic birth mother, a toxic adoptive mother and a loving step-mother. Her book includes stories of other women who grew into loving, happy and optimistic adults despite toxic mothering.

You can reach Rayne Wolfe at 707.481.7180, newsyrayne@gmail.com or message her at Toxic Mom Toolkit on Facebook. She is based in Northern California.

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E-Publishing Loves Daughter Memoirs

25 Mar

I just finished reading Cris Beam’s short memoir Mother/Stranger about growing up with a mother so mentally ill that she told her family that her daughter was dead, when, in fact, she had just moved away for her own safety.

Beam is a creative writing professor at Columbia University who also wrote Transparent, a nonfiction book that covers seven years in the lives of four transgender teenagers, which won the Lambda Literary Award in 2008.

Mother/Stranger is one of several very short memoirs I’ve recently downloaded as Kindle reader editions. These books can run from free to 99-cents and are often less than $10. There are a ton of new biographies and memoirs written by first effort authors who have struggled with toxic mothers.

One of my other favorites is by June Cross entitled Secret Daughter: A Mixed Race Daughter and the Mother who gave her away.  When her white aspiring actress mother has a love affair with a black comedian, she first intends to keep her baby – – if it can pass for white.

But this was the 1950’s and soon, June Cross is placed with a loving black couple living in Atlantic City. Her story of bouncing back and forth between the east coast where education and hard work are valued to summers in Hollywood where all that matters is the next fun party is fascinating particularly because she loves her mother and the “Aunt” who raised her, but struggles with literally being a secret.

Cross graduates from an Ivy League school and eventually becomes a producer for the television news show Frontline. It is in telling her own story of creating a documentary about her unique experiences that she shines.

I always say that you shouldn’t be afraid of your own story and that if you have to go out and interview relatives – do it! Cross shows us how to conduct an interview, when she finally asks her own mother all of the questions that have tortured her for her entire life. I was on the edge of my seat.

I asked for a Kindle reader this Christmas and received a Kindle Fire. Having had a library card since I was six-years-old and being the type of person who visits my local branch twice a week at least, I thought I’d mainly use it to download big, long, challenging reads. But what I’ve discovered is that e-publishing is making available so many little books written by real people and at such a low-cost, instantly via Amazon.com and other providers, that I’m reading like a maniac.

These earnest little books that can be read in one setting are often less than 100 pages and feel like meeting someone on a plane or a bus. We have a tendency to tell strangers so much more than we would ever tell our own social circle, don’t we?  These books feel like a whispered conversation. Almost like we’ve found an abandoned diary and are turning pages quickly for fear its owner will return and snatch it from our hands.

The other great thing about Kindle reading is that you can highlight lines and create a treasure trove of nuggets. I was highlighting a lot of Beam’s book Mother/Stranger. For example:

“I remembered the way my mother had told her family that I was dead and wondered if they ever believed it. I thought how strange it was to be a ghost: solid enough for everyone’s projections to land and stick but too ephemeral to fight back.”

Beam has great insights into what a child must suffer through having a mother with mental illness. She also reserves great sympathy for her mother.

“After therapy or years of a safe and protected life, a person can suddenly give language to what was once only a sensory terror. That’s what happened with my mom.”

She also has a great way of looking at the big picture, at one point writing that “estrangement runs in our family.”

Whether you use a library card, a laptop, or a Kindle reader be sure to explore these new memoirs that might help you to better understand your own experience. Check out the online book descriptions and be sure to skip down to the reader reviews that often refer to additional books.

Have you read a good memoir lately? Please tell us about it in the comments section below

Happy Reading!

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Toxic Mom Toolkit Journal Project

2 Mar

In honor of what would have been Dr. Seuss’s 108th birthday, today’s Toxic Mom Toolkit Journal Question is:

Q: At the very hardest time dealing with your toxic mom, what book saved you?

I think I became a writer simply because I loved to read. I developed a love of reading because I was alone much of the time, unsupervised. When I was small I used to carry very grown up leather bound books around to impress adults. I probably only impressed them as far too precocious. I spent many evenings on my tummy on the floor with my chin in my hands devouring the Wizard of Oz books, Heidi books and Betty & Veronica comic books.

Reading taught me that people’s lives are stories.

When I understood that, I started listening more closely, paying attention and taking mental notes.

I was the child who lived for eavesdropping. I became an adult apartment dweller who kept an empty water glass handy – just in case I heard neighbors fighting. I wanted to know why people did the things they did. I suspected that the way I was raised was not right and I relished observing others acting out their daily lives.

I wrote stories about the widow and the tomcat, my dashing motorcycle mechanic, the way people behaved under pressure or in the throes of love. I took writing classes and read like a convict on death row. I became a self taught writer and journalist.

I read adult books too early. I discovered children’s’ books too late. I have repeatedly been saved by the right book at the right time including, Gifts from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh and 52 McGs, a collection of the best obituaries from legendary New York Times writer Robert McG. Thomas, Jr.

Hands down the book that saved me more than once is To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. It showed me that the first job of a parent is to want what is best for their children. This is my favorite scene from the movie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7CX_5D6y6E&feature=relmfu

Growing up with a toxic mom sometimes it’s hard to know what is normal, what is better, or what is worse. Biographies, memoirs and fiction focused on survivors have not only inspired me but also saved me from feeling too sorry for myself. They taught me that I could write my own life story.

What book saved you?

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The Voices in Your Head: They’re part of you but not you

21 Jan

As part of our ongoing journal project, here is our next question.

Every mother has sayings that are repeated over and over. What did your mom say over and over? As an adult, what do you think of that line or those phrases? What do they say about your mom?

Most people fear growing up and sounding just like their parents. They cringe when they blurt out – “Because I said so, that’s why!” or “I’ll give you something to cry about!” to their own children, the exact same way their parents did.

In a way it’s unavoidable. The child becomes the adult with adult concerns for their children.  But for children of toxic parents those messages, those sayings, can have more meaning than the typical scold not to run at the pool.

My mother, who schemed her way up in life through men and marriage, had a few lines that float through my head despite my best efforts to erase them.

She always said “Because Frank Sinatra might be in the parking lot,” whenever we complained about the length of time she took to put on her make-up. No sweats for my mom. No day complete without red lipstick and eyeliner. The world outside our house was a mysterious place and she had a beautiful part to play. She could park her car next to anyone – even Frank Sinatra. She had to be ready.

With little more than an eighth grade education she wanted to appear sophisticated. She never went to night school or travelled to learn a language and yet she tried to pretend that she could speak Spanish AND French by always saying “Uno momento – s’il vous plaît!” – “Wait a moment, if you please!” like Sophia Loren being manhandled by adoring fans at Cannes.

“Uno momento – s’il vous plaît!” is what I say when I’m in a hurry, stressed, often in the moments before I’m leaving my home for a trip. I have to be flustered to feel it forming in my mouth. But once I do, it trips out naturally, as if I am the very clever person who thought it up. As if I summer in Italy and winter in Mexico City – for the museums. As if I had nannies or tutors or can speak French to girlfriends in crowded cafes so others won’t be able to eavesdrop. (I wish!)

I know what this expression means to me now. It’s part of me through decades of repetition. When I say it, I’m not my mother, I’m me. I view the words spoken by my mother as  a sad attempt by a sad woman to appear sophisticated. I say it as often I say “bull-dinky!” like my dad did instead of swearing in front of us.

Don’t we all have a lot of voices from our childhoods in our head? It doesn’t make us them. These familiar expressions don’t define us. We can take them or leave them. But it is interesting to look back and study them a little bit.

In doing so, I’m reminded of my Aunt Rhea, who used to always say the opposite of what she meant.

“Come ov-ah he-ah you rotten kid!” she’d growl like Eartha Kitt before tucking you into a headlock and kissing you till you squirmed away.

I have a hard time expressing affection. Yet, I’m laughing and feeling happy when I call my husband rotten, my dogs “rotini’s,” even my friends, rotter’s. They know it’s my way of expressing my deep affection for them.

It’s funny that the neighbor we treated like an aunt, the neighbor who was kind enough to take me along with her kids on many weekends up to the country, sparing me from my deteriorating home life, probably also had a problem expressing affection. Half a century later, Rhea’s rough love carries over into my life on nearly a daily basis. She’s a good voice in my head.

I know now that my aunt was in a tough spot trying to help the neglected children of a good friend. She did what she could and I’ll always be grateful. I should probably call her and tell her so.

“What a rotten thing to say!” she’ll say. I know before I even look up her number.

 

 

 

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Toxic Mom Toolkit – Six Holiday Survival Tips for Daughters of Toxic Moms

11 Dec

Daughters of Toxic Moms often find themselves walking on eggshells. During the HoliDAZE we’re walking on eggshells on a tightrope above a pit of lava. We don’t want to be a wet blanket. We want the people who get along with our mother to enjoy themselves. At the same time, this might be the year you feel like you’re just not going to take it anymore.

I have a few suggestions on surviving the holidays despite having a Toxic Mom. You can pick and choose, slice and dice, blend, as needed.

First, have a plan.

If holiday gatherings always end in fights or tears plan only a brief visit to wish everyone well and place presents under the tree and when your little timer goes off, leave. It will feel scary, but you’ll have created a game plan that protects you and allows you to enjoy other more joyful gatherings.

Count your blessings and give thanks.

Daughters of Toxic Moms often feel isolated where others feel part of the group. Take time to sit down with the people you love – who love you back – and count your blessings. Also take time to thank the people in your life who have loved and encouraged you over the years.

Create new Christmas traditions that will make YOU happy.

Make a big pot of cocoa, set up chairs in the driveway and invite friends over to watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” projected onto the garage door. Volunteer to wrap presents for your local firehouse toy drive. Ask to adopt a needy family through your church or local homeless shelter. Donate a stack of old towels to the animal shelter.

Whatever it is that might warm your heart this Holiday Season, don’t second guess yourself or talk yourself out of it. You can create new holiday traditions that work for you.

Avoid common traps of the season.

Gift Giving: Give what you want to give, what you can afford, and what you think is appropriate. You can always send a very nice card.

Drinking and Dredging: Avoid drinking with your Toxic Mom. It can only lead to strolls down toxic memory lanes.  Tell her you’re choosing to have a sober season and if she chooses to drink you’ve got better things to do. Wish her well before you leave.

* * *

If this year turns out to be the year you absolutely can’t take it anymore?

Opt out.

You can decline invitations to homes that make you unhappy. Send a sparkling $4 card and take a deep breath. You may be missed, but you wo’t miss having a toxic mom hangover. Why not make this the year that you choose to book a lovely B&B over the holidays – or visit old friends. Heaven forbid you take a trip to a city you’ve always wanted to explore. Would it really be so bad to start the New Year with happy memories and photographs you’ll enjoy sharing?

* * *

You CAN re-define Christmas!

You could decide that December is when you finally discover that it’s Natural to Nurture: No amount of tears, conversations, or pleading will turn a toxic mom into a kind, nurturing mom. If your mother is incapable of relating to you in a welcoming and pleasant way, decide to nurture yourself. This includes allowing others to be kind to you and accepting expressions of affections gratefully. Allow yourself to value yourself. Plan a day of spa pampering, or turn off the phone ringer long enough for a home manicure. Buy flowers. Move furniture around to re-decorate for free. Make positive phone calls you’ve been meaning to make. Catch up with organizational tasks or take a day off from housekeeping to paint or create art.

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