New Year's Day, 2019
It's New Years Day, 2019, so start at the beginning: what do I want?
I want my mother to move out of my house. I want to no longer have responsibility for my mother's life. Twelve years ago, a month or two before my twins were born far too early -- with just a four percent chance at life, a chance one tried at and failed, while the other merely clung to for six long months in the NICU -- my mother's husband, my stepfather, a man fifteen years her junior and only seven years older than me, left her for another woman he met online. The details are not necessarily interesting and probably fit most of what internet dating has wrought. I think if anything my sister Jaime and I were surprised that he had stayed as long as he had.
Matt showed up on our scene when I was just thirteen years old. He was twenty; my mother, thirty-five. This is an embarrassing detail, but she met him because I was playing D&D - Dungeons and Dragons - at a local community center with his friends. The night he walked in to join us, I remember actually checking him out, giving him the once over, up and down. I was at that particular phase of early teen life when boys, any boy, was a potential flirt, a phase that ended swiftly two years later when I met my first girlfriend and for all intents and purposes, became gay. Luckily, I did not find Matt attractive, but instead preferred (for one brief moment) his friend John, a thick-lipped headbanger with heavy black bangs that hung on and obstructed his somewhat Stamosian blue eyes. Those eyes were all he had going for him. He smelled always of something rotting and unwashed. He clearly still needed his mother.
John was nineteen, and though it seems implausible, he and I "went out" on a few dates, even made out, all because my mother found Matt attractive, and the two of them began to date. I was a convenient third wheel, an add on, a wing man. It was in essence the reason I was born. As my mother has said so many times, before she left my father, she knew she didn't want to get married again and so "needed and wanted a friend". This was the reason I was conceived: to be my mothers companion and friend. Later an astrologer who read my birth chart told me that it was in my very stars. My mother had pulled me into this life to serve as her protector. And so here I am, thirty-five years later, fulfilling her aims.
Just before Christmas this year, my mother told me that Queen Elizabeth has never had to so much as dress herself. Hook her own bra. Button her own fly. This is the woman my mother idolizes, and dreams of being. On Facebook, she calls out into the void that a bot has determined in her past life her identity was most certainly "king or queen". That explains a lot, she says. She is satisfied with this evaluation, the answer suits her.
Angry and agitated, remembering our Catholic past from which we are both now most definitely lapsed, I sneer, "What about Mother Theresa? She gave her life to others. She did way more than dress herself." I'm aiming low, below the belt. My mother also considers herself to be a very spiritual person, one who intimately understands the workings of the universe without help of religion or ethos. One who tells me, confidently, the Holocaust was "supposed to happen", which to her is some proof that God has a plan, and thus, is some proof of God. To me, the Holocaust is the opposite. The antithesis. The reason God has never, and can't possibly ever, exist. The world runs abundant with too much cruelty. Too much harm. There is not enough Superman, here. Certainly no savior.
I am no Catholic anymore. I invoke Mother Theresa because I know it has a chance of wounding my mother, of causing her to self-reflect. I have been a practicing Buddhist for twenty-five years. My religion is predicated on self-reflection. Every day I sit in front of my Gohonzon, and chant for an hour to two hours a day, looking deep into my own causes and effects. But my mother went to the Harmonic Convergence. My mother paid copious amounts of money to psychic Sylvia Brown to receive personal insights. Only my mother never got to speak to Sylvia, only her second rate son. She's read all her books though, and perhaps this is where she has received her insight into the Holocaust. Sylvia, I should say, is now dead. An act she clearly didn't see coming.
"Of course she didn't," my mother says, as if that is as understandable as the small problem of reconciling in a good, paternal universe six million tragic deaths.
But I am small-minded and dumb.
Also this: I am a lesbian, and this is something my mother can barely tolerate, along with the fact of my Buddhist practice. These are two things I am inherently wrong to be. The third is: overall: myself.
There is something about my mother and being in her presence that has always assured me that I am unloved and wrong. She doesn't like me, that much is clear. I think I have also always known that she doesn't love me, either. It's not that much of a stretch to consider. My mother is - as many therapists on my payroll have pointed out - a Narcissist. To her, love does not come easy or often. In the true definition of "narcissist", provided just this minute by Dictionary.com, my mother derives "erotic gratification from admiration of his or her own physical or mental attributes". In essence, like the Greek myth of Narcissus, she is so involved in staring at her own image, she can love nothing or no one else.
But I think she can "love" something else. She seems to love her two grandchildren: my daughter, Emily, and my sister's daughter, Chloe. These two gemlike children reign supreme. However, she does consistently find fault with them. Emily, who has Cerebral Palsy and autism, and speaks only with the help of an iPad, is too silent. Chloe, a preternatural genius at age nine, far ahead of everyone in her class, is too verbose, talking off the Royal Ear. And so, like Goldilocks, nothing is ever quite right or fitting. The Queen wears an uncomfortable crown, and sits on a troublesome throne.
Surely, Matt could only take so much of this, and twenty years or so was plenty. Bless him. I'm glad he was here as long as he was. He gave it the old college try.
But after he left, for a woman from Texas no less, my mother had no place to go. They were a military couple, with no property or savings. In her grief and anxiety, my mother lost sixty pounds in just a few months. Her blood pressure skyrocketed. She got off her plane at LAX looking like a thin, wan ghost in dark Audrey Hepburn glasses. As the oldest - as the Buddhist - as the one so often put in charge - hell, as the one she "pulled" into this world to be her friend, I took her in to my small apartment near Fairfax and Venice. I took her in because I was her "savior". I was raised to be. I was trained to be. And now, twelve years later, I am fully, completely done. I told her yesterday and again today, she had to go. You think it would be no big deal, this telling, this going. So many healthy (which she is) 69 year old parents live on their own. But to my mother, I was asking the ultimate. I was asking her to care for herself. Take responsibility for herself. Cook meals for herself. Earn money for herself. To be her own person, and not just the Queen.
All I desired was to be alone in my own home and in my own head. Without her hatred of me, void of evidence of her ongoing disdain. The burden just suddenly felt way too much to bear. I asked her to go. But in my heart I know, she will fight every step of the way. Like my stepfather, I must divorce her - in whatever way that will mean - if I ever hope to be free.
I want my mother to move out of my house. I want to no longer have responsibility for my mother's life. Twelve years ago, a month or two before my twins were born far too early -- with just a four percent chance at life, a chance one tried at and failed, while the other merely clung to for six long months in the NICU -- my mother's husband, my stepfather, a man fifteen years her junior and only seven years older than me, left her for another woman he met online. The details are not necessarily interesting and probably fit most of what internet dating has wrought. I think if anything my sister Jaime and I were surprised that he had stayed as long as he had.
Matt showed up on our scene when I was just thirteen years old. He was twenty; my mother, thirty-five. This is an embarrassing detail, but she met him because I was playing D&D - Dungeons and Dragons - at a local community center with his friends. The night he walked in to join us, I remember actually checking him out, giving him the once over, up and down. I was at that particular phase of early teen life when boys, any boy, was a potential flirt, a phase that ended swiftly two years later when I met my first girlfriend and for all intents and purposes, became gay. Luckily, I did not find Matt attractive, but instead preferred (for one brief moment) his friend John, a thick-lipped headbanger with heavy black bangs that hung on and obstructed his somewhat Stamosian blue eyes. Those eyes were all he had going for him. He smelled always of something rotting and unwashed. He clearly still needed his mother.
John was nineteen, and though it seems implausible, he and I "went out" on a few dates, even made out, all because my mother found Matt attractive, and the two of them began to date. I was a convenient third wheel, an add on, a wing man. It was in essence the reason I was born. As my mother has said so many times, before she left my father, she knew she didn't want to get married again and so "needed and wanted a friend". This was the reason I was conceived: to be my mothers companion and friend. Later an astrologer who read my birth chart told me that it was in my very stars. My mother had pulled me into this life to serve as her protector. And so here I am, thirty-five years later, fulfilling her aims.
Just before Christmas this year, my mother told me that Queen Elizabeth has never had to so much as dress herself. Hook her own bra. Button her own fly. This is the woman my mother idolizes, and dreams of being. On Facebook, she calls out into the void that a bot has determined in her past life her identity was most certainly "king or queen". That explains a lot, she says. She is satisfied with this evaluation, the answer suits her.
Angry and agitated, remembering our Catholic past from which we are both now most definitely lapsed, I sneer, "What about Mother Theresa? She gave her life to others. She did way more than dress herself." I'm aiming low, below the belt. My mother also considers herself to be a very spiritual person, one who intimately understands the workings of the universe without help of religion or ethos. One who tells me, confidently, the Holocaust was "supposed to happen", which to her is some proof that God has a plan, and thus, is some proof of God. To me, the Holocaust is the opposite. The antithesis. The reason God has never, and can't possibly ever, exist. The world runs abundant with too much cruelty. Too much harm. There is not enough Superman, here. Certainly no savior.
I am no Catholic anymore. I invoke Mother Theresa because I know it has a chance of wounding my mother, of causing her to self-reflect. I have been a practicing Buddhist for twenty-five years. My religion is predicated on self-reflection. Every day I sit in front of my Gohonzon, and chant for an hour to two hours a day, looking deep into my own causes and effects. But my mother went to the Harmonic Convergence. My mother paid copious amounts of money to psychic Sylvia Brown to receive personal insights. Only my mother never got to speak to Sylvia, only her second rate son. She's read all her books though, and perhaps this is where she has received her insight into the Holocaust. Sylvia, I should say, is now dead. An act she clearly didn't see coming.
"Of course she didn't," my mother says, as if that is as understandable as the small problem of reconciling in a good, paternal universe six million tragic deaths.
But I am small-minded and dumb.
Also this: I am a lesbian, and this is something my mother can barely tolerate, along with the fact of my Buddhist practice. These are two things I am inherently wrong to be. The third is: overall: myself.
There is something about my mother and being in her presence that has always assured me that I am unloved and wrong. She doesn't like me, that much is clear. I think I have also always known that she doesn't love me, either. It's not that much of a stretch to consider. My mother is - as many therapists on my payroll have pointed out - a Narcissist. To her, love does not come easy or often. In the true definition of "narcissist", provided just this minute by Dictionary.com, my mother derives "erotic gratification from admiration of his or her own physical or mental attributes". In essence, like the Greek myth of Narcissus, she is so involved in staring at her own image, she can love nothing or no one else.
But I think she can "love" something else. She seems to love her two grandchildren: my daughter, Emily, and my sister's daughter, Chloe. These two gemlike children reign supreme. However, she does consistently find fault with them. Emily, who has Cerebral Palsy and autism, and speaks only with the help of an iPad, is too silent. Chloe, a preternatural genius at age nine, far ahead of everyone in her class, is too verbose, talking off the Royal Ear. And so, like Goldilocks, nothing is ever quite right or fitting. The Queen wears an uncomfortable crown, and sits on a troublesome throne.
Surely, Matt could only take so much of this, and twenty years or so was plenty. Bless him. I'm glad he was here as long as he was. He gave it the old college try.
But after he left, for a woman from Texas no less, my mother had no place to go. They were a military couple, with no property or savings. In her grief and anxiety, my mother lost sixty pounds in just a few months. Her blood pressure skyrocketed. She got off her plane at LAX looking like a thin, wan ghost in dark Audrey Hepburn glasses. As the oldest - as the Buddhist - as the one so often put in charge - hell, as the one she "pulled" into this world to be her friend, I took her in to my small apartment near Fairfax and Venice. I took her in because I was her "savior". I was raised to be. I was trained to be. And now, twelve years later, I am fully, completely done. I told her yesterday and again today, she had to go. You think it would be no big deal, this telling, this going. So many healthy (which she is) 69 year old parents live on their own. But to my mother, I was asking the ultimate. I was asking her to care for herself. Take responsibility for herself. Cook meals for herself. Earn money for herself. To be her own person, and not just the Queen.
All I desired was to be alone in my own home and in my own head. Without her hatred of me, void of evidence of her ongoing disdain. The burden just suddenly felt way too much to bear. I asked her to go. But in my heart I know, she will fight every step of the way. Like my stepfather, I must divorce her - in whatever way that will mean - if I ever hope to be free.
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