Lineage
My mom tries. God knows she tries. All she wants is for everyone to be happy.
Grandma was always the glue in our family. She was the one that kept in touch with everyone, organized all the family reunions and brought everyone together. Mom looked up to her. She always viewed grandma as an example of what a good woman should be. I don’t blame her for it, grandma was a pretty good role model for anyone to follow. She was kind, nurturing, supportive, entertaining and funny. So when she died of cancer, my mom was devastated. Just like any child would be. But I guess that, when she died, the rest of the family looked to her to fill the role my grandma had. And that includes grandpa and our uncles.
She’s become sort of the hub of the family. If there’s some kind of family event, she’s usually the one planning it. She cooks for everyone during the holidays and she remembers everyone’s birthdays. Sometimes it’s stressful for her, having to deal with all of that plus me and my brother. Actually, it’s more like all the time. There’s rarely a time when she’s not stressed out about something. She doesn’t deal well with stress. She’ll get frustrated with something as small as logging in to a website and walk away from it in a huff. If I’m trying to tell her something and she can’t understand me she’ll just ask if it’s important and walk away muttering, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I can’t understand you.” if I say no. Sometimes she just blows up and has disproportionate reactions to dumb things.
Like last December when Rodrigo was visiting. I was trying to convince him and Pedro to go out, They didn’t really want to because I had lost my ID and it was 10:00 pm on a Sunday. She had gone to bed and she overheard us arguing about it. None of us were yelling or angry , maybe annoyed at worst. She flys out of her room like an angry tornado and starts yelling at both of them. Before you know it, she has Rodrigo by his shirt collar and is telling him he’s an opportunistic friend and ungrateful. The same Rodrigo that’s been flying here and spending either Christmas or New Year’s with us for over a decade. Saying she has a short temper is like saying Hitler wasn’t very fond of the Jews.
It’s hard for me to empathize with her when she does stuff like that. Even when she realizes that she was wrong and apologizes, I know she’s going to do it again. I’ve asked her to get help in the past. She tried seeing a psychologist for a little bit, but she stopped a while ago.
I’m obviously not the only one that notices this, my sister had to deal with it a lot as a kid. She was expected to help take care of us at a very early age. She was often a sort of emotional tackling dummy, especially for my mom. She knows better than anyone how scary she can be. How she can be calling you the most horrible names one day and tearfully apologize the next. We both think that she’s bipolar at the very least and has some sort of personality disorder at worst.
It’s not surprising, really. She got pregnant with my sister when she was really young. Her and my dad got pressured into marriage by their families and then I popped out. Dealing with one handicapped kid is hard enough, but she also got my brother. It was too much, they were too young. My dad couldn’t handle it, he drank a lot. It’s not that he wasn’t a good dad, he tried very hard. He just wasn’t emotionally available for her. Some of their most vicious fights were when he came home drunk and plopped down in bed and watched TV. She almost broke his finger once.
I don’t think I ever saw them actually happy. By the time I actually became conscious of what was going on they were already staying together for us. They were very distant, they only ever kissed each other on the cheek. Their distance only grew as our conditions deteriorated. My mom dealt with most of it, my dad didn’t really know what to do. She had to deal with all of our emotional baggage plus her own baggage. I understand how she got this way, even empathize. But at some point you’ve got to take responsibility for your own problems, and she hasn’t.
I don’t think she realizes that she has issues. The other day she told me she loved me, but only because she had to. She said she wouldn’t if she didn’t have to and then she laughed. She didn’t see anything wrong with what she said, I just stared in disbelief and resisted the urge to tell her to go fuck herself. Then a few days ago I told her to shut up. I probably shouldn’t have said it, but I’d barely woken up and she was already yelling about not being able to understand me. The look on her face said, “I will eat you and shit on your brains”, it scared the shit out of me so when she told me to repeat myself I just told her not to talk to me that way.
That’s how she is, though. She’s driven by her emotions and reacts in the moment. That leads her to say really hateful shit. Like when I told her I didn’t like when she took care of me because of her temper. I said this calmly and said that I could find another person to take care of me. Admittedly, she’s calmed down a bit, but not nearly enough. She may say she doesn’t mean it, but she does. And I’m sick of it.
I can’t live with that and I can’t have a relationship that uses taking care of me as leverage. Frankly, I don’t want to.
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