Just another girl with mommy issues

This post of mine was originally a guest post at Slouching Past 40. Before she took her site down, I captured the text.

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6.25.2008
Guest Post #3: Just another girl with mommy issues

When I started blogging, it was purely as an outlet for the random flotsam and jetsam that gathered in the corners of my mind and on scraps of paper around the house. It wasn't meant to be a place for whining about my family, my job, my husband, my in-laws – especially because all of those people were readers, nearly from the get go.

But there are times that I long to whine. Oh, how I long to whine. So much so that I've thought of starting another blog, under the radar, just to have a place to focus my whining. Slouchy, forgive me. You said that we "could write about anything at all -- no holds barred."

My mother is so difficult. But here she is, dying of lung cancer. How does one strike a balance between gently caring for someone who needs that help and coming to terms with the fact that she is, simply, a hard person to be with?

She's been divorced for more than 30 years. And she's never gotten over it. And what's more? She professes to have had a terrible marriage. Somehow, she manages to have it both ways – both bad: a lousy marriage and an unwanted divorce.

She's a narcissist. It's one of the useful things I learned in therapy, that and "depression is anger turned inward." Years after my wedding, the priest, who is a friend, said to me, "the saddest thing about your wedding was that your mother was jealous."

She pretends to helplessness. When I was in the lead-up to the egg retrieval before our third IVF, my husband realized that the likely retrieval day was a really bad day for him to take off and he asked if my mother could be the one to escort me home from the hospital. I called and put the question to her. Dead silence. Then, "how would I do that?" Um, you take the train into the city, take a cab to the hospital, and come find me. How hard is that?

She lacks generosity. She has an ingrained miserliness born out of the early years of her divorce, when she was figuring out how to survive on her alimony. For any number of years now, she's had enough money to do what she pleases, but she'll still buy margarine instead of butter, 'cause it's cheaper.

And she resents having been frugal. Not long ago, she said to me, "well, you won't have to worry about putting M. through college, because I never spent any money on myself." Of course, the flip side to that is "if you hadn't smoked cigarettes for more than 50 years, you wouldn't be dying of lung cancer and you'd need that money to live on into your 90s like your mother did."

My mother doesn't get along with my husband, or my sister's husband. She stopped speaking to her brother years ago (justifiably – he’s a hostile incompetent), and stopped speaking to her mother at some point after her mother was moved into an assisted living facility. We've never figured out what her mother did to provoke the estrangement, but she alludes to a miserable childhood. She's cut off other long term friends – again, we've never figured out why.

I feel that the moment for illumination is past – my mother's mental status is as fragile as her physical one. So, what will happen when she's dead? Am I going to be able to let go of the baggage handed over by my difficult mother? Or will it follow me to my own grave? I suppose I'll find out if time heals all wounds.