My mother. Freud would have a field day with the way I feel about my mother. She has been mentally unstable all of my life. She was never officially diagnosed but she is as clear cut a case of Borderline Personality Disorder as I’ve ever seen. My entire childhood she was prone to irrational, violent outbursts and then would either shut me out for days or pretend nothing had ever happened. I don’t mean Mommy would get angry and scream once in a while. I mean Mommy would punch holes in my bedroom wall and destroy our living room sofa with a kitchen knife and threaten to disown selfish, irresponsible, horrible little me just about every time I talked back. I would have hated her for it but she hated herself enough for both of us, enough that she tried to kill herself when I was about 14 (we also pretended that didn’t happen even though my Aunt broke the front window in with a baseball bat to try to get into the house to save her.)
If I sound bitter, I’m not. I mean, I’m angry now, but I’m not the sort who lets rage consume my life. I’ve put up with a lot of her shit – I mean a LOT – I put up with all her loser boyfriends and her four husbands, two of which were alcoholic and two of which abused me – I even put up with her bullshit reason for divorcing her fourth husband, the one who abused me for years–and her bullshit new identity as Domestic Abuse Victim. You see, Dad #4 got angry with her and gave her a good shove once, and she fell and landed on something sharp and injured her back. So she has convinced every person in her new life that she was the victim of domestic abuse, when she is in fact the one who dished it out year after year after year. Don’t get me wrong, the guy’s an ass and I have no sympathy for him after what he did to me, but her connection to reality is so tenuous it’s amazing she can function.
My God, I am angry. Because since her latest divorce I have tried so hard to be supportive of her, I have watched her take a few stuttering steps forward into the world of adulthood. Nobody knows or loves my mother like I do – period. I have tried to help her all of my life, but she is in many ways like a child trying to have adult relationships. I see where she came from, all the hurt she carried with her, how unfairly she was thrust into the position of teen Mom, all the years she worked to get her degree as a single parent raising me. She has openly acknowledged (while drunk) that all those years I was more mature than her and that she learned from me. She has openly acknowledged that she feels so much more free now that she is divorced, that she put too much trust in him and allowed him to ruin her emotionally and financially… she will no longer be dependent on men who manipulate and abuse her.
…and now, her 2nd live-in boyfriend since divorce #4, the guy who told her his grandmother was dying so that he could go do housework for the woman he truly loved as recently as 3 months ago, this man, I have been told, is going to be my new stepdad. She called to report this about 20 minutes ago, and then, true to form, promptly ignored everything I had to say about my own life.
Fucking yay. Let’s break out the motherfucking champaign. How many phone calls from you should I expect to get asking advice on your relationship this time? What am I going to tell you when you lose your temper for the first time and he is scared shitless for himself and his children? Why do you torment yourself like this? What is this deep-seated need you have to be attached to a man – some man, any man will do? When will you wake up?
I told my Mom when she broke up with him for the first time that you can’t fix asshole, if he does something wrong he will most likely do it again. And at the time she said, ‘‘Thank you, you are so right, you’ve opened my eyes.’’ Next day I get a fucking phone call where she causally mentions they’ve moved in together. Since she seems so devoted to blithely ignore my advice (and my Aunt’s, and my Grandma’s), I don’t feel I should bother telling her she’s fucking insane and she is in the middle of filing fucking bankruptcy for chrissake due to her last marriage. I don’t feel I should bother to do anything but respond in a perfectly neutral way. I don’t give a shit about this guy but all I ever wanted was for her to find her happiness. Right now she thinks she has found it, but I fear it’s a short-lived happiness.
I can’t change her. She won’t listen. Most of the time I have accepted this, most of the time I am perfectly at peace with who my mother is. But right now, god damn. Merry Fucking Christmas.