AHA! she cried, deep into the night.

I'm dropping in from the busy moving front to share with you something big that happened to me this weekend. 

It's no secret that I'm the daughter of a crazy woman. It's a huge part of my life, whether I like it or not. I have to explain why I don't celebrate mother's day or my aversion to Hoarders or a million other things. People want to know and it gets old explaining.

But more than that, my mother's (and my father's) behavior has had a huge influence on who I am and what I do. I grew up in the ideals of not blaming your parents for your mistakes. You take responsibility for your own actions. And I believe that to an extent. Yes, I am an adult with free will and no one is twisting my arm to do anything. And yes, I have worked very hard to fix myself and my own issues and make myself a whole person. I'm continually learnin and it's something I work hard at every single day.

But it would be naive to think that my parents didn't have a huge influence on my life. Everything I learned from watching them is apart of me.

And I had a HUGE AHA! moment the other night. The kind of epiphany that changes everything. Hopefully, anyway.  I'm sorry that I can't share the details of said epiphany, mostly because it would expose very intimate feelings I have as well as details about others. And my goal with this blog has always been to not let me blog hurt those I love.

But this epiphany is huge indeed. It involves a family pattern that's been carried out for generations, passed down from my grandmother to my father to me. Who knows how further back it goes.

Hopefully this recognition helps me break it.

It's about something that I've been naively yet uncontrollably hanging onto. Something I didn't actually want and consciously knew was fruitless, but something I didn't possess the ability to let go of. No matter how hard I tried, it floated there just below my conscious, taunting me in my sleep, reminding me at every turn. It tinged all my interactions.

I think that now I know why it was hanging on despite my best efforts, I think I can finally let it go.

This isn't the first pattern I've broken, but it is the first that's an heirloom.

For instance, as far as relationships go, I was always on the lookout for daddy issues, being that I'm a girl and that's usually what girls have to look out for. I never realized that for years, I was dating people like my mother. I realized this in therapy several years ago. It's still easy for me to do, but at least now I'm more aware and can see it coming.

So parentage does, in fact, influence.

Though I think in the grand scheme of things, I've gotten off easy. I could be a lot worse off and I think what helps is my stubborn determination to figure it out and be happy.

I joke about being crazy, but I am not insane. I don't have a personality disorder. My issues tend to be of the neurotic variety. I'm quirky and odd, but I function. I feel like love repellent a good portion of my love life, but I love myself and most of the time that's enough.

My mom is a hoarder and I have a great fear of hoarding, but I do have my emotional attachments to certain things. I've kept any anthology or textbook that I've found important over my 6 or so years I spent in college. I have all my old notebooks and essays and portfolios. I have an attachment to anything I've learned or created. 

My mom has narcissistic personality disorder. If anything, I struggle with the opposite. This is directly because of her. My whole life was an effort in pleasing a woman that couldn't be pleased. Therefore my adulthood has been an effort in learning how to be more selfish. How to please myself. I would add "within reason," but anyone who is a doormat knows that that's never an issue. Reason has nothing to do with it. Once I learn to stop pleasing others first, then I can worry about keeping it in check.  

My dad is a doormat and, I think, part of why I was choosing partners like my mom is that I was repeating my father's behaviors. When really I should have been looking for partners more like him. Not doormats (I don't want that), but giving people who are super smart and witty and loyal.

Something I used to lament in therapy was being like my mother when I am a mother, or swinging too far opposite. I obviously don't want to be a narcissistic parent, but I also don't want to be too permissive. My therapist was always reassuring, naturally. She knew as I knew deep down that my concern alone for this behavior is what will make me a great mom.  I'll always be alert to it.

My mom is a drug addict. I really can't say that I've inherited this and I'm grateful for that. I'm not genetically related to her. I know people joke about being addicted to chocolate or a TV show or whatever and I laugh, but truthfully, it's bullshit. That's just enjoyment.

People are appallingly lax about prescription drug addiction. It's the somehow acceptable addiction. At least she's not shooting heroine right? Except it's really just as bad.

Until you've had a parent passed out for several days on end strung out on who-knows-what combination of pills. Until you've had to ride with your mom in the middle of the night, while her whole body shakes because she's coming off some pill, to the pharmacist's home, the pharmacist who is illegally filling her prescription because she's convinced him she'll die if she doesn't have it. Until you have to walk away from someone because they will pull you down with them, you just don't understand.

I hadn't intended this post to once again be about my mom's addiction and her insanity, but it took me there. Because it always leads there. 

So back to my epiphany. I think it will also help me take even more steps away from my mother as well.

Every piece of the puzzle helps me become a more whole person.

I can't wait to email my therapist and tell her about this. She'll be so proud!

I had to shine

I talk a lot about my dad here on the blog. My dad and I are close and so I have good stories to tell. And I like to tell the good stories. The funny stories. The sweet stories. I do. Because they make me happy. And who doesn't like to be happy?

well, besides Grumpy Bear?

But I don't talk much about my mom. Because I'm estranged from my mother. Because any good memories I have of her are inescapably entwined with many more bad ones. Because it's easier for me to set it aside and not think about her.

Because it's not funny. The stories about my mom. And I prefer the funny.

But look, I'd like to get something straight right away. I don't buy the whole, "but she's your mother" argument. Yes, she is. But mother love isn't universal. Not all mothers give their children the love they need. Some mothers are toxic. And some children need to push their mothers off in order to breathe.

And that's what I did.

So there's no discussion here. I don't speak to my mom. That's non-negotiable.

There were some good times though.

My mom taught me to swim and to love the water. She taught me to teach others to swim.

She encouraged my love of books and of dance. She and my father imbued in me an appreciation of the arts and theater.

My mom was an excellent cook. She never taught me to cook, but I've spent the better part of my adulthood replicating her garlic bread recipe. I think I've even improved it.

Sometimes she'd pull out her old records and teach me Sixties dances in the living room.

At Christmas, she'd read me stories about how other cultures celebrate the holidays. She was religious and unyielding in many ways, but she valued other cultures and taught me to learn about them.

She used to write me notes on my napkins that she packed in my lunches.

But make no mistake, my mother was a fearsome woman. It would take a volume of books to unpack my mom's neuroses, but there are many and they are complicated.

And there are two moms. There's the mom of my childhood: terrifying and narcissistic. There's the mom of my teens and after: addicted to prescription drugs and completely out of her mind. Both moms were controlling and abusive.

I don't exist as a separate person to my mom. I am simply an extension of her and exist as a subset of her existence. Suffice to say, she was controlling. Controlling is putting it mildly.

I was her little star.

If my mom had discovered pageants, I would have been a child beauty queen. So picture that. Only a child model (at the mall, but I was shy and hated it) and a child actress (on stage). I was in acting lessons and voice lessons and choirs and six dance classes. Not to mention violin lessons and soccer and horse shows and girl scouts and cheer leading and swim (of course).

Before you laugh and say I was spoiled and privileged, let me just say that I had no choice in any of this and that we were poor. My mom would go to any length to finance all of that because when I was out there shining, it meant she was shining.

My parents were in debt up to their eyeballs and often didn't know where gas money or food money would come from. When our water was shut off, we showered at my dad's fire station and used the bathroom at the Carl's Jr down the street. All for her little girl.

Never mind that I would have been happy with one ballet class and to spend most nights at home with a book.

But I had to shine. I was expected to be perfect.

A story: I'm 9. It's winter. And cold. I've angered her. I don't remember why, but it had something to do with the shirt I'd chosen to wear because she ripped it off of me and told me to go hide. I knew I had to hide because if she found me, she'd kill me. That was the implication. The understanding between us. So I hide in our family room/garage. I have no shirt on and no shoes. Just my purple sweatpants with the pink piping down the leg and my bare feet on the cold, hard floor. I stayed there for hours. Shivering and crying silently.

Perfect would never be achieved.

As I got older, as I began to achieve and travel and do things she'd never done, and she descended further into insanity, she became jealous. And cruel.

But that's a story for another day.

My Mother the Banshee Hag

Oh, Internet.  Yesterday was a train wreck. Which I didn't need, of course (I mean who needs that anyway?). I'd been dealing with a pretty full plate anyway, feeling hurt by some things someone said to me not long ago, worrying about everything I need to get done in the next couple of months, and still not feeling okay with the discovery that I have a tipped uterus.

So yesterday, at work (and it had been a good work day, chuggin' along, getting everything done that needed to get done), when I received a phone call with some pretty insane news pertaining to my useless mother, it through me for a loop. I really and truly cannot discuss it (mostly for legal reasons) on here, but I can say that my mother is a pathetic excuse for a human being and, despite our estrangement, I now have to clean up her mess. Once again.

But, being at work, I dealt with it. It made my day insanely stressful, but I mostly held it together. I vented to a couple of coworkers and a friend that I met for tea, but I didn't lose it. I had it all under control.

Until I got in the car to go home.

That's when I started sobbing. I sobbed all the way home, loudly, my tears running down my neck and soaking my shirt. And of course, when I got home, that's when my young neighbor decides to tell me that she's having a party that night and I should come by (as I pretended my red eyes and nose were a result of allergies) while I politely congratulated her but declined because I wasn't feeling well. Last night I spent the evening feeling like I'd been hit by a bus, wavering between tears and anger, self pity and more self pity.

I think it's because I hadn't really finished grieving. See, when I started therapy, I went through a grieving process for the mother I never had. Because my mom isn't a mother. She's a non-mother. Instead of support and nurturing, I had a constant stream of emotional and physical abuse. For anyone who's known my mother, I'm sure you're thinking, yeah she's odd and irritating, but really? Abusive? I'm here to tell you that she's insane and she privately beat the shit out of me ever since I can remember. I'm not joking when I say that she is insane.

And I'd thought I completed that process. I'd certainly gone through the stages and I've been feeling pretty good for a while now. But yesterday's bombshell threw me right back to childhood and I realized that I'd grieved for MY mom, I hadn't grieved for a mother, any mother, for the fact that I'd never really had a mother at all.

My dad didn't help things either. I'm still close with my pop and he's usually pretty supportive of my decision to not have anything to do with my mom (except I think he thinks I'm being unreasonable), but last night? He was incredibly insensitive. For him, you just buck up and power through. I shouldn't be hurt by this. I was thinking all wrong.

And that? That pissed me off. Nothing angers me more than someone telling me I'm thinking wrong or feeling wrong. That's too personal and my feelings, no matter how painful, are valid and I deserve to feel them. And the way I saw it? My mom is fucking lucky I'm taking care of this shit for her and that's one more reason that she's failed completely. I've once again stepped into the role of mother for my mom, something I've done since 14 and I'd thought I was done with.

I have a right to feel resentful and hurt and overwhelmed.

Despite my neighbor's party, I was able to finally fall asleep with the assistance of ear plugs and Tylenol PM and Benadryl and I awoke this morning feeling significantly better. I'm still angry and annoyed, but I'm done crying (at least for now). I just needed to spend an evening crying and now I'm even more resolute that even if I am picking up the pieces of a selfish banshee for the rest of my life, I will never want anything to do with her.

And that adds Mother's Day to the long list of holidays I hate.