I'll just put it out there, in case anyone doesn't already know: I have mommy issues.
Pretty severe ones, actually. At least a couple of times a month she'll feature prominently in a nightmare, usually the same one. I've lost my job and my friends and everything I care about, and somehow my only choice is to go back to her. And knowing what life is like under her authority, knowing the psychological and occasionally physical abuse she'll be dealing out, often for no apparent reason, and always in excess... Knowing that nothing I have will be mine, that my clothes and money and phone and books are all fair game, to be confiscated or destroyed at any time, for any reason (or none,) regardless of whether I bought them myself or not... Knowing that my life is not my own, and that I will be reminded of that fact constantly...
...that's a whole different article. Which I will write. Eventually.
Anyway. I have mommy issues.
To make a long and disgusting story short, my mother is getting married in less than three weeks, to a man who suits her perfectly. He is just as useless, empty, and cruel as she is. He has verbally abused my brother and both sisters, in front of me. He has stolen my clothes when none of his were clean, despite being a stranger in the house. In short, he's just a weaker, less threatening but still pathetic version of my mother. She's really found her other half. Most people aren't so lucky.
And I was invited to the wedding. Not merely invited, but Cordially Invited, a lovely monogrammed invitation with elegant gold scrollwork and lots of prefabricated cursive. The card is textured like papyrus, and smells vaguely of ink and irony.
Naturally I lost my cool for a moment when I found out. My Facebook status for that precise moment reads something like "ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING WAY", by way of an RSVP. A few minutes after writing it, I felt like it was a little immature, but it was also fun to look at, and I knew she'd eventually see it. Eyes everywhere. I felt just a little vindicated. I left it up.
A few days ago, I got an email from my sister Hailee. I was happy to hear from her, we have so little contact lately. I went ahead and opened it, excited to see what she had to say...
"Thanks for the RSVP - yes, I am you sainted mother and will love you no matter what. If you took sometime and a reality check, you will find that in this world, there is no one who will truly love you like your own mother. I realize you have issues and I hope you will get some help. Someday, you will regret your hurtful actions towards me, no matter what, I love you and always will. You just don't know what a parent is. I am sorry for that"
-Mom.
I can't decide what, to an outsider, this looks like. To me, in the light of everything this woman has done to me and my family, it seems delusional to the point of insanity. I really didn't know how to respond. I don't mind saying that I literally cried for a few minutes when I read this.
Why? I guess I just couldn't believe what this relationship had come to. Or maybe the letter had that precise alignment of words, ideas, ignorance, and guilt-tripping that my mother has always used to control people. (By way of an example, she once screamed at me and my brother that if we did not clean our room, she would "have a brain hemorrhage and die. Is that what you want?" I spent the rest of the day frantically cleaning and organizing and hoping it would be enough to keep her healthy. Perfectly normal thoughts for a child to have.)
It also horrified me that my sister has begun helping our mother monitor me. I knew she had eyes, but I didn't know Hailee had become one of them, to the point of sacrificing her own privacy and property (Hailee uses her private E-mail on her personal laptop) in order to let our mother see what I was up to. Of course it crossed my mind that this may have been under duress, considering how often mother would demand the use of my money and property when I lived with her, but it was unsettling all the same.
It was the proverbial straw, and I felt like I was close to breaking. Without pausing to consider the ramifications, I composed a response.
That message is shockingly delusional.
You haven't cared for me since I stopped being worth digits on the child support checks, and you made it completely obvious.
You have blatantly told me and my siblings, in plain English, that "it's not about us anymore, and that we're not going to ruin your relationship with Paul". You have finally done the one thing I always believed you'd never do, and put a man before your children. And you didn't even try to hide it. You didn't even put the effort into pretending we still came first. You just flat out said it.
You have allowed that man, a stranger, to shout at my brother and sisters as he pleases. I have heard it myself. There was a time when you would not allow my father to speak that way to us, and now you allow it from a stranger.
You love to talk up my skills as a writer whenever you get the chance, to whoever will listen, despite the fact that you are the only person in the world who has ever hindered my aspirations as a writer in any way. You have torn my notebooks apart because you thought my villain resembled you.
You have beaten me across the face for refusing to surrender my paycheck to you, all while secretly forcing me to pay the vast majority of our shared phone bill.
You have given my clothes to your new boyfriend and shouted me down for protesting.
You have let strangers dance and sing and drink at all hours of the night while your children, meaning me, waited in the basement. The basement where I slept, on a cold corner of a cement floor, when there were empty bedrooms, to teach me a lesson. I don't remember the lesson. I remember the floor.
You are in my nightmares. You torment me as I sleep, often. You are nothing to me but a source of fear and confusion. There are good memories but they are completely poisoned by what you have become.
Tell me, then, what is a parent?
I will be a father someday. I will have children of my own. My great fear is that I will somehow treat them the way you have treated me. I will protect them and place them before anyone else in the world, before my own comfort and my own safety. I will know how to raise them simply by never doing what you have done.
And the only way I will ever feel that they are safe is that you are never within a mile of them. If it was within my power, you would never even know their names.
I will love my children and I will ACT like I love them, instead of just insisting that I love them after they're good and traumatized.
I hate you so passionately it makes me sick.
Marry your stranger. No I will not be there. I have kept this to myself for these years because I figure you'll take it out on the girls if I speak up, but since you're apparently ready to make their miserable situation permanent I can't make things much worse.
-Me
Extreme? Possibly. But for a long time, as I mentioned in the letter, I had kept all these outrages to myself. I had refrained from saying anything because I knew that she would punish the girls somehow. (My brother and I are free, but both girls still live with mother.)
And wouldn't you know it, my father called me only hours later to tell me that mom "said I was writing threatening things all over the internet and she isn't going to let the girls spend any time with me because all I do is make up lies about her so people will not like her".
I guess that's what I get for speaking my mind. And there are those who tell me I made a mistake, that I shouldn't have provoked her and I should have known what she'd do. They are cowards. The same kind of people who condemned that newspaper for running Mohammad cartoons, "knowing what the response from angered Muslims could be".
A major problem I have with religion, with our criminal justice system, and especially with my family, is that they all like to blame the victim. "You should have known what would be done to you. It's your own fault you were raped/sued/disowned. You know better than to walk outside without a man/defend your home/speak your mind to your mother." The evil person in the equation, the rapist/burglar/mother, can't be held responsible. Everyone KNEW that's how they were going to react. It's YOUR fault for provoking them.
Madness.
But that's another family trait, if you really think about it.
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