It would be nice to blog about some nonsense topic like what graces the Xanga sign in page: My awkward almost kiss; You drive like a girl; so you wanna be a nerd?. Such is not my life. I'm at work drugged against a headache that makes me feel like the side of my head was bashed in, the emerging side effects of said drug cause an over-stimulated caffeine high, which is a toss up from the headache itself. Work, thankfully, has not truly begun yet, because there is no one here and I can't quite function, so I don't. And all of this brought on by my mother.
One conversation, if you could call it that, last night while I was comfortably in bed. We had attended the high school orientation with our daughter and had been planning in general terms the next four years of her life. And it was good. When the phone rings, I have my mother on the line, hysterical, alone, sick in multiple definitions, and trying to figure out how to use the carpet scrubber because she had projectile vomited all over the place and is now losing her mind.
I could crawl in a hole.
And while you could go all judgmental on me, and let me first tell you how much I really don't give a shit, there is a reason that I live 150 miles away from her. And it's because of this. This is not an isolated incident. This isn't rational. This isn't a lot of things except preventable and not under my control. This forces me to use every defense mechanism I've ever created in order to stay functional, except that I've had to break down those mechanisms in order to heal. All that is left is pain and hopelessness and acceptance.
I have spent my life from age ten being the parent to this woman. She's my mother. I love her. I can't be anywhere near her for my own sanity. It's taken close to fifteen years to get to the point where I have forgiven her for the crap she put me through. Do you want to know the definition of forgiveness? It the ability to let that person go from any obligation they have toward you. And she is forgiven. That doesn't mean that everything is fine or that what happened is now OK or even that things have changed. It means that for whatever reason I came to, she is free from debt to me.
And because of that, it is likely that she will be driving up here or I will be picking her up, to host her here for the next week. She needs to get away. She needs to be back on her meds. She needs a lot of things that I can't be, and certainly can't be from 150 miles away.
There are probably five people who are aware of what I went through those fifteen years. Five more than I ever thought I needed. Five more than, some days, I really want. I want to sit under the covers and be in the dark until it all goes away and the sun shines bright again. I want to be alone with it because sometimes it just seems easier.
But I get reprieve. The past years I have had a nice window of my mother turning to my sister, or a closer cousin, or some of her friends. It's that window that gave me the ability to heal to the degree that I have. And then she comes screaming back into my life again. My life, my husbands, my children's. My carefully created and maintained world that all to quickly I realize isn't real. It's too isolated. It's too unbalanced. It's too artificial.
And so here I am, typing at work, trying to get myself in some semblance of order before my boss comes in and I have to be functional. I won't be but I can fake it really well. And the drugs will keep me unsettled for most of the day. And I will wonder which is worse, the headache or the side effect, while I understand that the cause is not likely to ever be fixed; so I don't bother to think about it, except for those undefined emotional flits that force me to stop, breathe and swallow hard.
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