Why I haven’t written.

I’ll be honest– I’ve been neglecting this blag because I’m afraid that my mom will read it.

I’m fairly sure that I don’t have any readers who don’t know me personally. I feel like a lot of people I know are aware that I don’t want to have anything to do with my mom, but maybe it’s not as obvious as I think it is. So here it is, in case anyone wondered: I told my mom several years ago that she’s hurt me and the people that I love so badly and so often, and she’s so far from showing any true remorse or signs of getting better that I’m not going to do it anymore. I hardly ever say it out loud, because I think it confuses and unsettles people, but I don’t consider her a mother anymore. I don’t have a mom.

When I was a kid, my mom would do something awful, and it would just break my heart. Eventually I would get over it, and things would be normal for a while, and then she’d do something else, and I would be so hurt, and I’d remember all the other times I was hurt, and I’d be mad at myself for letting it happen again. But I’d always eventually let it go, until I was eighteen.

That’s when my mom decided she wanted to adopt twenty-one-year-old girl, and she deliberately lied and manipulated my whole family to do it. My sister and I didn’t compare stories until the night before the adoption, and we ended up in the living room, in the dark, crying. Dad came in, and we all found out together that she’d lied to him too. Mom came in and we confronted her. She lied that she was sorry. She lied that God wanted her to do it. She acted like it was our fault that she’d lied, and that we were being cruel for confronting her. She tried to make us feel guilty for making her upset.

That’s the last time she surprised me. While one part of me was thinking, “How could she hurt us like this?” another part of me was answering, “She’s done it before. Remember this time? And this time? This is what she does. You should have seen this coming.” So I kept my distance. It took me a couple years to figure it out, and I finally explained to her three or four years later that I wasn’t going to let her in anymore.

The problem is that I can’t avoid her. She still lives in the same house as my dad and brother, so I still see her when I’m there. For a while afterward she stayed in character, pretending to be sorry she’d hurt me and devestated that I wouldn’t let her in, but I knew she was lying. She’s amazingly selfish, to the point that I’m not sure she could really be sorry about anything, and she’s also a pretty bad actress. She kept looking after me longingly, and sulking around, and telling me that she was sorry and loved me, but I’d finally learned my lesson and I knew better. She’d ask me questions about my life, to which I’d reply, “That’s none of your business. You don’t get to know those things about me anymore.”

One Easter Sunday, and she was attacking my dad about something ridiculous, and I stood up for him. I called her a liar, because she was lying. She always lies. She snapped out of her act and went after me and started hitting me in the chest. My brother had to grab her and pull her away from me so hard that both her feet left the floor, and it’s not like she’s tiny. She screamed, “I’ve been wanting to beat on you for weeks!” She left a hand print on my chest. I told her that I KNEW she’d been lying. All those time she’d been looking at me like a sad little puppy, she’d actually been wanting to “beat on me.”

Then she made a deal with me. She said that if I really wanted to not have a relationship with her, I had to stop interrupting her for like, the rest of the day or something. I said, are you serious? So let me get this straight, if I don’t say anything else, you’ll stop asking me about things, you’ll stop standing around, waiting for a hug when I come home, you’ll stop looking at me all forlornly? And all I have to do is stop talking for a while? No talking for today, and then you give up? We’re through? “Yes.” My dad, brother, and sister were all there. I spelled out the conditions of her deal several times, and asked all of them if they understood it, and if she understood it. Then we shook on it, and I went outside. I think she realized that she shouldn’t have done it part of the way through, but she didn’t stop. Just kept saying “yes.” She never meant to keep that deal. Lying. Again.

It didn’t really hurt my feelings that time, because it didn’t surprise me. The fact that your mom would rather argue without you interfering than have a relationship with you might hurt YOUR feelings, but for her, it’s pretty typical. And it’s not like she’d  never hit me before. That happened all the time when I was a kid. Pretty much every day during the summer. She just tricked me into thinking she was allowed to do that.

My mom never held up her end of the deal, but it didn’t matter. I still shut her out. At church or school, when people asked about me, she’d just make things up. She said that I hated Seattle and couldn’t wait to move home. She told people I was buying a Mustang. She didn’t really have a clue what I was doing for a living, so she just fabricated things. Whenever I’d talk, she’d listen in for something that she could repeat to someone else, to pretend like I’d said it to her.

That’s one reason I’m hesitant to write. I don’t want her to know anything about me.

The other reason is that she’s so manipulative. She uses information and lies to her own purposes. I know this sounds paranoid, but I’m afraid it’s true. She records her phone conversations without people’s knowledge, in case she can use them. Sometimes she plays them back to other people. My dad and brother have seen her do it. She saves the texts that my sister sends her and shows them to her friends out of context, trying to hurt my sister’s reputation. She tells lies about my family, especially my dad, and tries to make her friends think he’s a bad person. When we were kids she would give us things, and then hold them over our heads, and threaten to take them away if we didn’t do what she wanted. I feel like she bribed us all the time. If I hadn’t stopped accepting presents from her, I think she’d still be doing this.

I don’t know what she would specifically do with information about my life, but I wouldn’t put anything past her.

I really want to tell all of my mom’s friends that they’re being lied to, that she’s manipulating them, that she’s using them to hurt my family, that she’s not the person they think she is, that she has no problem betraying and hurting the people she’s closest to, etc, etc… That’s why I don’t feel bad about publishing this. If everyone I know reads this, I’d still feel okay about it.

And I also wanted to explain why I haven’t been updating. I hope nobody felt neglected. I do have funny or exciting or frustrating things happening in my life, and I love keeping in touch with people. I just seems like I’ll have to figure out a different way to do it.

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