Hey, Miss J!

I’m trying to figure out how to word this…

Hmm…

~Loving

~Cuddly

~Warm

~Affectionate

~Charming

~Innocent

~Trusting

~Emotional

~Easily hurt

~Self-conscious

~Nervous

~Paranoid

~Fearful

~Suspicious

~Regretful

~Needy

~Clingy

All of these and a few more are good descriptions of how my mother was. She was all of these things, wrapped up in one person. A person… who was very sick.

She suffered with severe mental illnesses that only worsened with age. And by severe, I mean two monthly antipsychotic injections along with daily oral antipsychotics. That’s not all of the medication she took for the other problems she had.

Just some.

For many years, we did not get along at all. She saw me as competition for my grandfather’s attention… and I saw a woman who was callously rude and only interested in herself.

Growing up, my mom was mean to me. Violent too. Often, I found her presence annoying. When I was growing up, I didn’t understand why she was like that.

At times, the feelings I had were ones of hatred. I did not like her at all.

I didn’t know any better.

My grandfather knew to a small degree.

What I learned from my mother was to really pay attention to others when you speak to them. See them as more than just the surface. People are always more complex than they seem at first.

After she got away from her second husband, her entire personality changed.

And I knew then… that he’d been a negative influence on her. The longer we spoke, the more I saw and the angrier I became with him.

She was so desperate, wanted someone to love her and care for her so much that she willingly stayed in a terrible relationship with a man who was a predator.

So the way I was treated by her… mind, my grandparents raised me. Her treatment was more due to her, as she called it, “selfish want” for someone to want her.

What it really was… was that while she was with her second husband, he was messing around with her meds, didn’t like taking her to get her meds on time or to her appointments. So she was constantly destabilizing.

I found out that the medication he was giving her, that he was supposed to do properly… some of the stuff was actually old.

And yes, he gave her the medication, because her mind was too scrambled for her to do it properly on her own.

But he did it so poorly on purpose. The more messed up she was, the less likely she’d leave him.

How on earth could you ever safely “ration” the medication of someone mentally ill??

Well…

My mother was easily manipulated, used, verbally belittled, chastised, forced into situations she didn’t want to be in. She was unstable, upset over the relationship she had with my father… her feelings for him transferred to me.

Her feelings were at the heart of their problems. A failure to communicate properly, exacerbated by severe and undiagnosed mental illness… while she was with him.

It makes me sad to review it in my mind.

Didn’t help that I looked a lot like his sister. And my mom. It’s weird, but my features are between them. My mother and aunt did not get along like they should–primarily due to the latter believing herself smarter and more important than the prior.

However, I explained to my aunt in a disagreement recently that she is just my aunt… my father is my parent and the one I worry over.

Our conversation went like this:

Her: “What about loyalty to me?”

Me: “I’m referring to my father, not you. You aren’t my father and you most certainly are not my mother.”

Her: “Your mother was a lot stupider than me.”

Me: “She might have been in your eyes, but she was my mother and therefore ranks OVER you.“

Her: “I knew your mother before you were born!”

Me: “Do you want a gold sticker for being over three decades older than me? I wouldn’t brag about that.”

Since my conversations with my aunt have become primarily toxic, I avoid contact with her. And because she reads my dad’s text messages and has at times used his phone to call me, I had to cut contact with him.

… And that’s not fair to either one of us.

My aunt recently told me that since I didn’t want to speak with her, that it obviously meant that when my dad died… that she wouldn’t contact me because I didn’t want to talk to her.

This is why this blog post is for my mom.

My mother. My Rex. She got upset if I didn’t call her Rex.

I’m so glad our relationship was on the mend and we were communicating with each other without anger when she died.

And something I noticed with both of my parents… is that despite the problems they had, they still tried to contact each other and still loved each other very much.

There was just too much damage between them.

Later on, my dad told me that he wish they had stayed together. He would have taken care of her.

He’s still heartbroken over losing her. I don’t think he’ll ever recover from that.

And unlike machines… we can’t hit a reboot button to try and fix it.

~J. Lyst