Kaye's Days

Last night, my mom called me. We very rarely speak to each other because 1) I can never get ahold of her and 2) she’s bitter about my dad’s side of the family and likes to take it out on me. Anyway, unsurprisingly, she didn’t want anything. She only called to tell me she knows I dropped out of school. Okay, and…?

My mom has a habit of doing this, really. Not just trying to antagonize people she doesn’t like, but behaving in ways merely to spite people. She’s done this since I was kid, when I was still young enough to be a bargaining tool.

In short, it’s been twenty years and she still sucks at being a mother.

You’d think I cut her out of my life, at least temporarily, with the way she acts, but I can never bring myself to. I have tried to fix our relationship and all of my attempts fail. I know she won’t change. Why would she? She typically gets what she wants through manipulation. She can’t deal with someone who doesn’t think she’s always right or her word is law. She doesn’t like to admit when she’s wrong either. That’s not to say people haven’t done wrong to her. In fact, her own mother was actually worse to her than she was to me (cycle of abuse, basically).

Years ago, my mom once mentioned how she said she’d never treat her kids the way her mom treated her. Unfortunately, she only got it half-right. She may not have treated my sister and I as badly as her mom did, but her parenting was still abysmal. The only reason my sister is still in her good graces is she follows my mom around like a shadow and rarely questions a word out of her mouth.

I posted about this in a Facebook group and everyone who replied basically told me the same thing: I have to accept she will never be mother I need. And I want to accept that, yet I feel I can’t. The guilt that results from even considering cutting her out is crushing. I have no idea what the guilt is even for, but I feel bound and chained by it. But eventually, I’m going to have to figure out how to break those chains. I’m only 20 now, but soon enough, I will be 21, 22, 25, 30, and so on. I’ve already spent about two decades under her thumb. I do not want to spend the rest of my life feeling guilty and unsuccessfully trying to fix my relationship with her.

Being over eighteen is supposed to mean you’re free from your parents’ control. I don’t even live with her, nor have I for the past four years, and I don’t feel free. I feel like a caged rat.