War! What is it Good For?

And so, I am coming to terms with a life without Mom.

It has been a very long time coming and I am finding peace in the idea that it is finally all on the table, whether consumed or not.

I feel badly that Charlotte - and to some extent Joe - occupy the dangerous DMZ of this battle. I don't know what to expect exactly, but I know how Charlotte feels and will understand what she feels she has to do to try to support me in my position without compromising her relationship with Mom, however tenuous. She will likely maintain her own tentative relationship with Mom, but carefully rebuff any criticism of me, and insist on a detour around such discussions. Bring on the weather.

Joe is a different story. I have no desire to place anyone in the middle of a battle that isn't theirs to fight, and will not engage in any further banter with Joe if I can't be sure I trust him. And I don't routinely trust him. My experience has been, that if Joe feels like you have crossed the boundary into Trusting Him And Expecting Adult Mature Behavior, he panics and has to take immediate action to make you retreat from those thoughts and cast him off once again as an idiot in grown up sized clothes. The minute he feels you have placed some life-sized burden in his lap and asked him to share it, he places his dunce cap squarely on his head and resumes his role as Village Idiot. If I were to share any of my thoughts or feelings with him about this situation, he would step back, consider which side of his bread is more thickly buttered and by whom, and take the side that will benefit him personally most handsomely. And frankly, I know the result of that evaluation even from a distance. He needs my mother's guidance, support and money more than he needs anything he gets from me, and therefore, even if she were suggesting that we bring back slavery and repeal the right for women to vote, he'd take her side. He has more to gain in supporting her than in attempting to disagree with any success.

And I can truly live with all of this.

The truth of the matter is, my mother has been training us for years. Pushing us, insisting really, that we get accustomed to a life without her. She left our home when we needed her most. She dumped considerable baggage on my Dad, who really needed a partner to tackle the issues. She would opine from a distance, and pressure us to conform to her thinking by threatening more permanent abandonment if we didn't comply. She would give advice from a distance and insist that we take it, again with threats and insults about our own capabilities, only so she could stay safely in her own world, far removed from our own, and convince herself that she had Done Her Job as a parent. Met her obligations. Checked all the boxes.

When really, what screamed the loudest above the din my mother always created, was that she had checked out, did not appreciate being sucked back in, and would provide what minimal support she had to to convince herself and others that she had acted as a mother should.

It was vacant. She was absent. The pretending was infuriating.

And now after all of these years of minimal commitment, vague involvement, superficial parenting and thinly masked disinterest, she is getting what she's been pushing for all along.

My mother has been coaching us to accept a life with no need for or dependence upon her. Like my brother, she panics under the pressure. Does not want the responsibility. This finality has really been what she's sought in a distant relationship with her children all along. She does not want the pressure of traditional parental roles.

And so now that I have decided that a life that doesn't include her and her disappointments is just fine with me, she is a little unnerved.

Not by the result, mind you. But that her bluff has been called. She's pissed that she's been busted for faking it all along.