Stop Texting Me!

Spitfire is a gynoid of few words.

We had a bit of a tiff this week. I was trying to help her, but pushed her too far, I think. I suggested that, in order to help her meditations, she should walk a labyrinth.

No, not Jared’s labyrinth. The meditative, back and forth path that has long been a meditative tool for hundreds if not thousands of years.

She snarled at me.

I retreated to a safe distance.

I’m staying at that distance.

She has to take her time mourning, and even suggestions I have to help her rebalance might be the wrong things to say.

And they were.

Everyone mourns in their own way.

As she is unreachable for me at the moment, I am dealing with an emotional roller coaster – unwanted contact from my mother.

Yes, I have been contacted by her, again. Repeatedly. She doesn’t get the hint that my kids don’t want her. Or me for that matter. I told her about the court case she had countersued, and about how she irritated the judge for not showing up, or keeping her address current with the courts. She doesn’t know that I only wanted it to end, so I signed off on her not being there. He really wanted to send the sheriffs after her to arrest her for contempt for not showing up. I wanted the case over, done, and dusted.

In the end, her counterclaims were dismissed, and she was ruled to owe me money.

What did she say about it? “Do you want  the info or do you want to make unwelcomed, ignorant  comments. If so, adieu.”

Damnit. That didn’t stop her cause she kept on texting me after I gave her a list of facts – fact 1, she lost the court case and owes me money. Fact 2, without names, I can’t be sure of the validity of her claims. Yes, I have information from other family members, and my own memory of events. Some of the stuff I can corroborate. Other stuff, not so much.

I think fact 3 threw her. “Your entire contact with me is unwelcome. The silence is preferred.”

Then she snarls at me. There’s the mother I know and love (all sarcasm intended).

“If you want medical info, you will abstain from rehashing history as you see it.  You wanted the info & I began to provide what a dr or geneticist would need. Make a decision… either you what the info or you want to colour everything with your version of (the) past & that I refuse to participate in…”

How about, go away? I know. Wishful thinking. If wishes were horses, I’d be in a stampede. So I tell her that what I am telling her is the truth without her spin on it to make me seem like the worst child in the world.

So, I end the text back to her with this:

“What sort of woman are you, anyway? Your love is conditional and full of abuse. Take a good hard look at yourself. You bring suffering and anguish to the one person in the world who should love you for being their mother. Your biological grandchildren wanted to get to know you until you talked to them. Now, they want nothing to do with you and that was the decision each one made on their own! What sort of person are you to flounce into their lives as if you are the most important thing in the world, when, in reality, you are meant to be forgotten.

“The silence was far preferred.”

I don’t know if I got through to her, but suddenly, at about 3 am for me, there was a text from her that had all the medical info. 12 hrs later, more medical info with names. Except, it was limited to her maternal line. My grandmother, her sister and brothers, and their immediate children.

In the middle of it, there was diabetes. A great uncle of mine had it, but didn’t get it till his seniority. So, two relatives, down both lines, my maternal and paternal, have diabetes, but both didn’t get it till they were 70 or something.

The other thing I noticed was that the people with cancer and other diseases like that, especially strokes, they were all smokers.

So I reply to her with trollish glee, “(N)ext time you want to drunk text, find someone else.” Now that’s an insult to her cause of her religious beliefs.

Essentially, I’m tired of her stringing me along with crumbs. I’ll have to parse all the junk she has given me to give it to my doctor so he can figure out where to go.

The text from today had me a little shocked though. “I was coded due to a severe kidney disease bout, but I survived.” The month she gives was last June, when I was having the creepy jeepies of hearing her voice and more. I am weirded out over that.

My immediate thoughts were, “damnit, she got saved again!”

Before anyone gives me flaming comments about how horrid of a person I am, she has tormented me my entire life. I’m certain my conception and birth was not because I was the wanted result of a lovefilled marriage, but a way to torture a man into submission, because she lost the ability to control him directly. Instead of him, she tortured me. I grew up beaten, abused, and more. I was the victim at least three pedophiles, one of whom was a family friend, and at least one family member who was beginning to have incestuous acts towards me, the same acts towards his own daughters.

I’m having a ptsd type reaction trying to give examples of what she did to me. Breaking wooden spoons and a brush on my arse, only to blame me for breaking them.

Yah, this is a hard post to write.

I learned from her how not to parent. I don’t open my kids’ door at o dark early to scream at them that they screwed up or throw their books at them, and home work. There’s always food here, even if they don’t want to bother to cook for themselves. I buy things they want or need and even stuff that I really don’t want to get them, but I want them to have what I didn’t have – a mother who tried to support them.

See, I was an artist type. I don’t remember her ever buying me a sketchbook growing up, or supporting my need to draw other than the basics she had to provide for elementary and junior high. Once I got to senior high school for my last three years, if she didn’t have to buy it for me, she didn’t. I have a big box full of random drawings and tracings I did growing up. My kids have had access to notebooks, pens, pencils, drawing supplies, and sketchbooks for the last ten years, ever since one of them showed a tiny inkling of being an artist. Even before then, they always had paper and crayons and more to play with.

I spent from 11 to 18 having to buy my own art supplies. I had four sketchbooks, and one is missing now. I had covered the margins of my writting books with little drawings in school and would get in trouble for it from my teachers, one in particular. No one nurtured my artistic talent until a teacher in grade 10, not even my own, saw that I had something, and tried to get me to explore and expand.

She threw out artwork, reference materials, and more. I had easily $100 of art supplies, if not more, get thrown out, because she didn’t like them. I had drawings tossed. I had stories I had written destroyed. The irony is that she was told to nurture my talents when I was 6 by a teacher.

She never did.

Instead, if my grades were below what she expected them to be – A grade… well… Once again, there goes the PTSD. I got grounded for months. I think I’m still technically grounded for failing a subject that I know she sabotaged me.

Oh yes, this woman loved to set up situations where she would rescue her poor daughter from them, and then boastfully complain about cleaning up the mess I made, all while punishing me. She did other things to, like refusing to buy me clothes, or feed me more than bare minimum, so I ended up working for a pervert who mauled me at his store just so I would have food money the next day.

Yes, I was set up to be abused by others by her. It’s a pattern that I have been trying to break.

My father’s family hates me because I’m so much like her. I can remember her crying into the phone while talking with a friend of hers about how much like my father I was.

She’s still feeding me crumbs, about health history I already know about.

Spitfire had a family that supported her growing up. I’m pretty sure that they would support her with her transitioning, if that was what she wanted to do. I’m sure they would support her with anything she wanted to do.

Me?

She never supported me unless it was what she demanded that I do: be the perfect genius daughter with perfect grades and perfect religious performance and perfect chores… See the pattern? I failed something and got punished for the attempt, and punished more for not trying. If I did get an A, if it wasn’t in an academic subject, I got punished for it.

Now, as an adult, I have taken multiple tests for autism, and it keeps on coming out that I have it. I had a genius IQ as a child, but was “bored” in school, and daydreamed a lot. There was no such thing as adaptations when I was growing up. Now, I’m able to possibly get an official diagnosis.

As for what medical issues I have been able to parse out, other than one aunt, I’m at the young side for all the things she had me freaked out about.

I’m wondering when more crumbs are going to come in.

Spitfire loves her father so much, she’s in full mourning, but also relieved that the entire struggle for this past year is finally over, even though she might not admit that yet. I loved who my mother was, but not the woman she has become, and I mourn the loss of the relationship we could have had if she had been a supportive parent, instead of what she was and still is.

This is what it is like being her daughter and only child – she wants contact with me on her terms, with only her story being the right one. I want something in the middle, and boundaries. She has already stomped all over them. I’m continuing one the way I always have.

Yes, Spitfire and I have a lot to do to reconnect. I don’t know what will happen in the next year, but I know there’s going to be a lot of changes in my life. Since August, I’ve had a ton of changes, and I expect that there will be more to come.