Martyr Moms

Martyr Moms

The thing that has struck me the most about the Stapleton case is how so many don't believe a mother can simply not have their child's best interest at heart.
I have had the (mis)fortune of having a martyr mother myself so I know how they operate.

Attention, attention, attention. The attention they receive for having a 'problem' child is far more important than actually helping the 'problem' child.


One of my earliest impressions of my mother was one of confusion. Whether I was a 'good' or 'bad' child depended on who she might run into in the grocery store and what she thought would earn her the most attention. I can recall hearing her brag about how well behaved I was to one person ("You're obviously such a good mother, Barbara!") and minutes later hearing her tell someone else I was a 'miserable brat' ("You poor thing. Children are such assholes, aren't they?"). What I overheard was irrelevant. My feelings meant nothing because I was just a child. I was also hyperlexic so she got the 'mother of a genius' treatment, too. Still haven't figured out how a blip in my neurology translated to praise for her.

I was a sickly child with many food intolerances so that came in handy for her. Not only did she garner the sympathy that having a sickly child brings in but she could use me as a weapon. She and my eldest sister hated each other so one time she fed me an ice cream sundae and a 'king sized' chocolate bar before a sleepover at my sister's house. I was sick as a dog and my sister had one hell of a mess to clean up.

Hardly in my best interest.
Neither was the parade of scuzzy guys she spent time with throughout my childhood. The kind of guys who loved hanging around women with female children.

By the age of 9 I was no longer able to cope and became suicidal. Now life really got fun for my mother.
Poor Barbara has a crazy daughter. I don't know how she does it. Her life is so hard.

Now, I don't think she realized just how much sympathy and attention she could get until I was institutionalized at the age of 11. Then she had an entire hospital's worth of professionals feeling sorry for her. When I would complain about my mother trying to make me feel worse I was told that it was in my head and if she had a problem she would be in there instead of me. I found out years later that a couple family members had gone to them and tried to warn them about my mother but it didn't do any good. Mother = Saint, don'tcha know?

When I was 13 things began to fall apart for her. I was sent to a residential facility that attempted to tackle the task of undoing the damage she had caused. I had a brilliant caseworker who put her in her place and would call her out when she'd catch her trying to trigger me. Over the course of the next two and a half years I began to learn the skills that would enable me to withstand my mother's issues and return home.

That was too much for my mother. Try as she might she could no longer provoke me into hurting myself. Not only that but I began to stand up to her. When she realized that she could no longer control me she moved out and upped her game.

How could she best regain sympathy from people and convince them she was a victim? How about telling everyone who would listen that her husband and daughter 'kicked her out' because they were 'sleeping together'?

Let me make it absolutely clear that while my father was 100 different kinds of fucked up he never touched me.

So, yes, she told everyone that her 16 year old daughter and estranged husband were having an affair. Now, I don't know exactly what happened to make her realize that she had gone too far but she called my previously mentioned caseworker and therapist and cried about how she didn't know how to undo it. She received no help or sympathy from either of them so she hatched a 'fake suicide' plan. She would take a bottle of pills, drive herself straight to the hospital so they could save her and then bask in the sympathy and forgiveness that such an attempt would gain her.

Unlike Kelli Stapleton's fake attempt, my mother's backfired. Due to an internal issue, the drug was absorbed at a rapid rate and the hospital staff was unable to save her.

I can only imagine how much worse my mother would have been if the internet existed during my childhood. She would have had a sympathy blog and a snarky Twitter account. Would she have tried to kill me once she realized there was an entire army of followers willing to defend and excuse her? That I'm not so sure about. It's far more likely that she would have tried that much harder to make me kill myself. Just think of the attention and sympathy she could have received for that.

So excuse me if I don't feel sorry for Issy Stapleton's poor excuse for a mother. There's been entirely too much evidence of her lack of respect for her child and too much evidence that she loved the attention that having a 'problem' child brought her. And, yes, ladies and gentleman of the internet. Fake suicide attempts are a thing.

#IAmNotKelliStapleton #ButMyMotherWas And many of us #WalkInIssysShoes


By Anonymous