Friday, December 20, 2013

Mother? I Have No Mother

I think I always knew it would come to this.  My whole life I have been making excuses for this woman, alcoholism is a disease...blah blah blah...under it all it's all routed in love...yadda yadda yadda...she loves me she just doesn't love herself.  Bullshit.  All of it. 

A quick history for those who don't know, my mom is f'ing nuts.  I grew up poor, like POOR poor.  My dad gave my mom $50 for food she came back with bulbs for the garden.  BULBS!  Somehow, no matter how poor you are, alcoholics will find means to drink and she did.  Then she left.  Then she showed up 2 hours late to the custody hearing (drunk) and my dad was given full custody of his 2 kids and my 2 sisters who aren't even his.  It was that bad.  She showed up at our house that night with an ax and busted down the girls to get her girls.

As a kid I would wait many Sundays for her to show up for our visits, many times she never did and when she did it was a crap shoot as to whether or not she would be drunk, driving us around.  We saw her for 5 hours a week, 5, during football season she bought us coloring books and crayons so we wouldn't bother her while she watched football.

Even with all of this, I loved her.  No number of DUIs or missed visits could change that.  She was my mom, she had to have my best interest in mind.

Then she got clean, for like 12 year.  Like most addicts she just replaced one addiction with another but she wasn't boozing and we could spend the night at her house.  The she started boozing again.  And 2 years after my dad died from a real disease she moved away.  Just deserted us, gone.  Again I didn't hold it against her because she was doing what she needed to do. I was a "grown up" (22) anyway, who needs a mother around?

All of these things though and countless little things that have hurt me so deeply in my life I have always given her the benefit of the doubt because, well, she's my mom.

On Thanksgiving this happened (look past my typo, I really don't take facebook seriously)


Clearly I was joking.  Anyone who knows me knows it was a joke.  I thought my mom knew me.  I emailed her and told her that she was being totally ridiculous but in the future if she has an issue to deal with it privately, I am not one to air my dirty laundry on facebook (that is why I have this blog!).  I also noted that despite everything that she has done in my lifetime I have not once been ashamed of her, that word has never even been on my radar.  She came back like a 2 year old telling me I was the one who started it by posting anything and I need to take responsibility for my actions!


There were other things said, I can't look up the message because I blocked her on facebook but she was pretty nasty.  I did throw in a low blow when I told her I didn't answer her call because I thought she was calling to try to mother me 30 years too late.  It's true, she was never a mother - a weird older friend sure, but not a mother.  I told her I was done fighting over this because it's stupid and if she wanted to keep pushing I would block her, the only reason I hadn't yet is because of my kids.

The next day her status read "Ask yourself this, would your dad be proud of your actions?"

Oh hell no!  She knows that is my biggest fear, I am not living my life in a way to make my father happy.  She was promptly deleted and is out of my life, for good this time too.  If for no other reason than I want to save my daughters from her antics.

It's easy for me to say, I am done with her but it is not easy to do.  After I saw what she said I lost it, we were still staying with friends and I had to get up mid conversation and run to our little room so they wouldn't see my emotional outburst.  There I was on my knees in a bed that wasn't mine violently bawling.  The last time I cried that hard was when I lost my dad.  It was that bad.  Fitting too because at that moment my mom was now dead to me.  I cried for a good long time too, the kind of crying that leaves you tired and hungry but unable to eat or sleep.  The kind of crying that will start back up during any quiet moment in the day and will once again bring you to your knees.

Having lost a parent the last thing I ever wanted to do was cut one off intentionally but at this point I don't have a choice.  Bringing my dad up, publicly, shows me that she is beyond help.  I've told my sisters not to talk to her about be or my kids.  She is to know nothing about me.  She has lost any claim to me.  Done.

With everything else going wrong in my life I have to admit, this one really shocked me.  I know I said I knew it would come someday but never did I think it would happen now, the way it did. 

1 comment:

  1. I'm sorry to here, especially given the other stresses in your world right now.

    I don't know if it is something about a generation (or two) of people, but I sure know a lot of people who's parents are varying degrees of narcissistic, to the point of personality disordered. It *(#$(*&#$ sucks when it is a (or both!) parents.

    The death of a parent, functional or not, is really difficult to survive and move past. But there is something about a parent repeatedly failing and marring a child that is, I don't know, just #$()*#$ heinous. I had two parents with mental illnesses, the most narcissistic one is still alive. It doesn't matter what the status of our relationship is at any given time, it is one of endless devastation, even during the best of visits, even when I haven't spoken to him for 5 years.

    I have had to find ways of looking out for myself more, both for my own survival but also so that my kids are not affected by me trying to figure out how to survive. I am finding that this is the only way the whole thing eases up in any way, shape or form for me (and therefore us).

    So I'm sending hugs of support, and a knowing that only comes from being right there beside you in this particular form of hell.

    I'm sorry it hurts so bad right now. xox

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