(I am depressed and this is a depressing blog post so if you aren’t into internet whingeing then you should skip this. Also there are long boring parts explaining some family logistics. Just warning you.)
My mom. She was always legendarily known among my friends as my Mean Mom. There are all kinds of stories that amaze and shock my friends and therapists about the stuff she’s done and said to me, but I’ve worked for so long to NOT tell them that I’m not going to conjure them back up to put down here. It started in high school, and got slightly better in college because I only saw her quarterly, and I only had to deal with her amazingly passive aggressive (sometimes just plain aggressive) barbs and cutdowns during holidays or family birthdays. There are so many movies about dysfunctional families and how Christmases are always so awful because your family is nuts, that I figured I’d gotten past the worst of it and could just join the rest of the human race in struggling to ignore the bad parts about my family and focus on the good parts (mostly my dad). Mom and I had a few frank discussions where she finally admitted she was horrible to me during high school (but only when she was visiting her own father on his deathbed), and I figured that was the most I would get. But that was fine, I just wanted to have a pleasant relationship even if it wasn’t deep or meaningful, it was fine with me that we’d never actually DEAL with our actual emotions about each other, as long as we could get through a dinner without someone yelling or storming out.
Then there was that trip to New York last August where she freaked out on me, the full story is here (http://www.lizcoworldwide.com/wordpress/?p=203). She was yelling at me to shut up, don’t say another word, just shut up, in the middle of a restaurant. And then I had to stay on that trip for another 2 days (of course I looked into flights to leave early but they were $800), angry and bummed and freaked out and yet also having to go to plays and dinners with her and be polite and make light conversation (and drinking glass after glass of wine) because I just didn’t want to get into it with her anymore, I just wanted the trip to end. And, when I got back from New York, my mood was really low–like the wind was taken out of my sails. Just a low-level, constant discouraged feeling. And I knew it was because of her, and seeing that fury and hate suddenly directed right at me (my sister and step-niece were at the table when it happened but the yelling was all for me). I felt an old, familiar dread of Joan Dunn the Terrible.
Growing up as a teenager, those outbursts were very common from her. She regularly told me (well, screamed at me) that she hated me, which was fine since I hated her too. She criticised me all the time, or at least it felt like all the time, I’m sure there were times where things were okay. But for example, during my sophmore year of high school, my dad rented me a room at a teacher’s house because my fighting with my mom was so intense (it started the minute I got home from school until I went to bed and I couldn’t get any homework done). I went to a high school 50 miles from my house, so ostensibly I was living at another house to be closer to school, but the reality was that my fighting with my mom was ruining the whole household. It was so isolating, being shipped off to live in this 65-year old woman’s house in Pebble Beach, all my friends were in Santa Cruz and I was just miserable. So it only lasted one semester. I would have run away from home–I fantasized about it constantly–but I knew that if I could just hold out till graduation, I could go away somewhere to college and it would all be paid for. It was what got me up in the morning.
So I was trying to forget the New York incident. I don’t want to live all full of rage and estranged from my family, I really don’t. And then, a few weeks ago I was at my parent’s house and my brother and his wife and my sister and her husband were all there and we were having dinner. And we were having the normal kind of dinner conversation, one person’s story sparks another person’s story and there is a lot of back and forth. And everyone was participating, especially my brother, my father, and me. Suddenly my mom says “Elizabeth, please be quiet, I want to hear what Hunter is saying.” Implying that I am interrupting my brother. OOOOH it made me so MAD! Because he’d been interrupting me (not that I saw it that way) as much as I’d been interrupting him. I told her that, and asked everyone at the table if they felt like I was interrupting my brother or dominating the conversation. They all said no…it took ALL MY WILL to not leave the table. SO INFURIATING! Why does she always single me out? But I poured white wine on the wound, and then one of my favorite cousins arrived at the house the next day, and I proceeded to stick to my normal plan of acting pleasant and letting the insults slide off of me.
That same weekend I went to visit my grandmother Hazel, my mom’s mother, at the nursing home in Santa Cruz. So depressing, because it’s obvious that everyone there is just waiting to die in this place, and all the crayon drawings from the local grammar schools can’t disguise that. Hazel can’t live alone because she does need a doctor/nurse nearby her (she can’t walk) and it’s too expensive to have in-home care. As it is it’s $6,000 a month at this place, and even then she has to have a roommate. Seeing her there always makes me want to kill myself when I hit 65 or 70…Hazel was so into taking vitamins to keep her health up and here she is at 92, she can’t walk, she has dementia, and she lives in this strange place and doesn’t understand why. All that worrying about your health, that’s where it gets you–healthy body, deteriorating mind, bad circumstances. I’d rather die, right? And Hazel was always mean to my mom (which probably has a lot to do with my situation with my mom), but what that means is that Hazel’s life is run by the child that likes her the least. Hazel was married her whole life (got married at 16), raised four kids, and now is going to die alone in a nursing home with the one kid she never liked visiting her once a week. That’s because all the other children moved out of California, and was the only one willing to deal with finding a nursing home and selling the house and all the moving arrangements, none of the other children felt like flying her to their home states to deal with it there, so there you have it. And I didn’t really even know her very well because my mom had a huge fight with her and my grandfather when I was about 14 years old and I didn’t see my grandma until 25 years later at my grandfather’s funeral.
(And I don’t have children and never will so that’s even MORE reason to off yourself before you hit the nursing home. Also who would pay for it all? I guess I can get more worried about that when I’m 55 or 60. Depressing as hell.)
So mom shushed me, back to the story. About a week later I got an email from her, with a passive aggressive apology saying that of course she wanted me to be my “effervescent self” but blah blah blah. Whatever. I wanted to believe that everything was okay between us and we weren’t regressing back to our old dynamic, which was super toxic. But…I couldn’t just push it down like always. So I wrote back and said, “you know, perhaps you should consider going on an anti-depressant so that instead of saying and doing things you wind up apologizing for later, you’ll be able to stop yourself before it happens. I know you’re under a lot of stress taking care of Dad and Hazel, it might help!”
That didn’t go over well, she came back and said that she just didn’t get “enough help” and that I should think about what I was going to do to help out the next time I was there.
FUCK THAT.
The whole time I am there (because I am terrified of setting her off) I’m asking how I can help, chopping vegetables, clearing the table, washing the dishes, taking out the trash. But that is so like her–she thought about what she’d said when I was long gone and then felt bad about it, sent an apology, but when push comes to shove, she really thinks it’s all my fault, it’s because I’m not doing something right. She can’t take responsibility for her flaws, and (as seen in subsequent correspondence about this issue, and in all the frank conversations I’ve ever had with her trying to get her to own up to her shitty behavior) she gets so defensive when her flaws are pointed out, again, it all just turns into an attack on me.
We’ve been emailing for two weeks and it’s been deteriorating. For once I’m not pretending she’s not awful. She does not like that. Half the time she accuses me of being the problem and the other half she does this “well I did the best I could and I’m sorry for all the damage I caused you” which is NOT actual dialog about what is happening.
I don’t like that I’m not able to just repress it like I usually do. The way I get depressed is, I feel like nothing really is good or important. Like, my life really adds up to nothing, I have no real achievements, my relationship with Ivan is hollow and meaningless, I have no friends, etc. Everything is bleak.
Basically I think that my mom does not like me and I think that this has caused me deep emotional pain (based on how very much I do not want to think about it) and I wonder how much of my personality got shaped by this key figure in my life hating me? It had to have SOME effect, right? And that is so scary–I have all kinds of personality traits that are prickly and tough and is that how I’d be if I had a mother that was nice to me and actually really liked me? And if not, what do you even DO with that knowledge? Except be super depressed by it.
I think I might not want to have a relationship with her anymore. I don’t even know how to do that, logistically, if I ever want to see my dad again. Everything sucks but for some reason I am just not in the mood to take her belittling and I think this is probably a turning point in my relationship with my father, like, the kind of turning point where I don’t see anyone again till someone’s funeral.
SUCKS.
(as usual, since comments are turned off on my blog due to spammers, you can email me if you like at liz at lizdunn.com)