When I was 3 or 4

I didn't want to write this post before I could find the post at Roots to Blossom that inspired it, but I just can't seem to be able to locate it.

She writes about how when she was around that age, her narcissistic, incestuous father poisoned both her and her mother's minds so he could turn them against each other and have little roots2blossom all to himself. The mother was told she was incompetent and couldn't take care of her daughter, while the little girl was told her mother didn't love her.

My father wasn't a sexual molester, but when I read that post, I had an intense emotional reaction and I knew something similar happened in our family.

3 or 4. That's when I started biting my nails. That's when I stopped wanting to cuddle, ever - and my mother was the only one who even ever wanted to hold me. I think I sat in my father's lap exactly once and it felt stiff and forced.

Until recently, I thought kids just stopped wanting to be held around age 3. And my 5 year old still sits in my lap and wants to be held and hugged and kissed. Until recently, I thought my mother just wasn't the motherly type, and that's why she didn't have anything to do with me when I was growing up. But I learned from other people that she was told she was incompetent by my father and that she wasn't happy about that at all.

I wonder what lie I was told that made me start avoiding my mother.

I don't remember it, but there must have been something.

I told other kids at school my mother was dead. I didn't want anything to do with her. That doesn't just happen, right? Somethings prompts that kind of reaction in a kid, right?

For the longest time, I felt like I killed her by rejecting her to please my narcissistic father. And it's easier to think that she'd already been dead, her soul crushed by a narcissistic mother and a long barren relationship with a narcissistic spouse, voided and made narcissistic, albeit passively so, by them.