poking the monster within





My house at dawn

Yay, we made it to another Friday!  I always feel like Fridays are truly something to celebrate in life.  You’ve been productive all week, hopefully, and it’s time to let your hair down, take off your adult hat and have a little fun.

My husband, Rob, makes sure that our weekends always include something fun, even if it’s just a drive somewhere to look at wildlife.  We have so much beauty here that it is impossible for us to just sit around the house and watch tv or some other mundane thing.  Sure, there’s laundry to do and firewood to restack but none of that really takes long.  The house will be just fine if I wait a little to clean it.  We don’t have kids at home so it doesn’t really get that messed up except for the wafting dog hair from Thistle everywhere. I tell all my friends that if you don’t like dog hair, don’t come to my house because I just can’t keep up with a shedding Golden!

That reminds me…I just love to wear black in the winter, don’t ask me why, I just do.  It’s easy, I guess. My standard garb is black jeans and a black turtleneck which I then perk up with colored jackets or vests. The only problem is that it really shows dog hair, especially blonde dog hair! I used to be really paranoid about it but I guess as I’ve gotten older and less caring about what other think of me, I no longer notice it unless it is making me really furry.

So, this weekend we are going to be doing our usual thing. We always go to the Moose Lodge for Happy Hour on Fridays.  Rob has been diagnosed as pre-diabetic so I always have to make “party food” to take along so that the alcohol does not mess with his blood sugar.  Everyone down at the Moose has gotten quite used to it and I think expects their “treats” now. I found a most excellent recipe for red wine syrup that does not require boiling down 3 bottles of wine to make a pint. This one has a thickener so I only use 3 cups and it takes ¼ of the time! It’s awesome for dipping hard cheeses and salamis in.

I’m sure I’ll be spending a lot of time on the phone this weekend as well. As I said yesterday, my dear Great Aunt Becky died and I have been in pretty much constant contact with her daughters and my Aunt Becca.  Geez, I hate calling Becca my aunt, she’s really more of a sister as we are only 6 years apart in age. Aunt Becky would be thrilled that she’s got us all in close communication again.  It’s not that we all don’t want to be in each others lives, it’s just that we all have busy lives and we live far apart.  Well, I live far from all of them, anyway. They are all still concentrated in the South. 

Talking with Becca and Camille has stirred up a lot of memories.  Some are awesome, some not so great.  I guess every family has its skeletons and we should be thankful for every little mistake we ever made because they have made US who we are.  I am still angry with my mother, though, for what she did to us when I got diagnosed with AIDS.  I did not even know this thing had occurred until much time had passed.

My mother is very difficult to figure out. I know she loves me with all her heart but she has some “southernisms” in her that I have trouble with.  She doesn’t like anyone to know anything personal about her life unless she decides it’s okay.  Evidently, (I found out later) when I got diagnosed with AIDS, she called the whole family and told them what happened.  But here’s the kicker…she took it upon herself to tell everyone that I wanted to be left alone with this! Now, I know that SHE wanted to be left alone about it, but not me!  I actually thought my whole family abandoned me!  Now, what was I to do back then? Was I supposed to just start calling people and blurting out my problems? “Hi, this is Lisa, I’m dying, how are you?” No, I thought I’d hear from people. I had no idea she would say something like that to my family!  One of the reasons I moved to Wyoming was that my mother did not allow me to be sick around her.  If I wasn’t perky, she would say things like “You know, you really are bringing everyone down” or “You need to buck up” Excuse the &^%$ outta me!  My mother, until recently, has never been ill a day in her life and really has no compassion for those who fall ill. She considers complaining a sign of weakness or something, I don’t know, like I said, she’s a conundrum I have spent my whole life trying to figure out.

About 7 years ago she was diagnosed with Stage 4 B-cell Lymphoma, though, and called to inform me. I was devastated, of course. Being a nurse, I know all about cancer and staging and such.  Here’s another kicker….she wouldn’t let me tell anyone in the family.  I kept it to myself as long as I could but eventually I had to tell Becca. As a matter of fact, I was back in MD, taking care of her and Becca called and Mom’s standing there shaking her finger at me…just DARING me to say something….Oh, what a tangled web! Mom is doing well now, just got her 5 year check-up and no cancer is evident.

Folks, you need your relatives, don’t you? They are the ones that love you no matter what. They are the ones that you can not talk to for years and then phone them and pick up up the conversation as if it were yesterday.

I have decided after Becky’s death that I’m not living in fear of pissing off my mother anymore. I may be telling some stories that will make her very angry but frankly, they need to be told.  I know parents make some mistakes when their children are young and that they should be forgiven but to continue to try to control your adult children is just wrong. I had promised myself I wouldn’t write anything derogatory about my mother until after she had passed away but with Becky’s passing, I came to realize that this is a story that needs to be told. I will be filling more in shortly.  Hold on to your hats, it’s a wild ride and I won’t blame you if you don’t believe half of it.

Somewhere along the way, I became responsible for my mother’s self esteem. She expected me to restore her order, to restore her value, her worth and her importance as a human being. And I failed, but who could have passed? Who could have accomplished such an unreasonable demand? Surely not a child. This was not my failure. The failure is in that she expected me to be her answer. And this is the definition of dysfunctional mother daughter relationship and the false definition of love.

And because I “failed” her my mother seems to resent me; my own mother seems to hate me. Why else would she have closed the door (on me) when I asked her to stop treating me like I was nothing? And the worst thing is that I believed that I was a failure, that I deserved her disappointment in me. I believed that I should have been able to fulfill her emotional needs and prevent her mood swings. I thought that I should be able to be enough for her. This is the definition of dysfunctional mother daughter relationship and the false definition of love.

I’m going to stop here.  I have no fear of my mother reading this. She is so self-absorbed, she doesn’t even get on Facebook to check to see what I’m doing, much less bother to read my blog, although I sent her a link when I started it. I am constantly telling her that all she needs to do is log on and she can see my whole life..I am an open book.  She doesn’t bother…  And, just to let you know, I am a good daughter. I call my mother at least once a week, regardless of what she says to me, because she IS my mother and I won’t stop loving her.  You know the saying…You can’t pick your parents….

It is the weekend and I need to get my happy on. Where are my beer goggles?