Saturday morning, soon after publishing the previous post about Andrew and my phenomenal trip to Dinosaur National Monument, I got on the phone with my older brother. I was in a good mood, and spoke with him about his son’s wedding, which I won’t be attending for procedural reasons. This led to him telling me he already had heard I wasn’t coming. From Mom. Despite my estrangement from my mother, she knew about this.
Strange that she knew. She had gathered this intelligence from pumping Andrew for information while he was visiting Leo last week. She must know these things, it’s important!
The Last Straw
I haven’t spoken to Mom since Scarlett graduated from Marine officer boot camp. March 24th, 2023. On that day I received a text as I was traveling to the airport. The text told me that Mom was planning on having Leo come and stay at her house. She didn’t care if it hurt my feelings.
This was the last in a string of similar interactions and I’d had it. I blocked her phone and her texts on that day. And I haven’t spoken to her since.
The call on Saturday with my brother wasn’t good. It lasted over an hour. The upshot was he thought I was a bad person for not speaking to my mother.
He kept saying “you’ve hurt mom’s feelings.” Yet there’s no concern about the way my feelings have been hurt by her year after year. Recrimination and scapegoating when stuff like this happens is what I’m used to in this family.
Still now that we’re middle-aged, I thought at this point that I shouldn’t have to be told how I was a bad person anymore. This is my choice and no one has the right to tell me what to do. But perhaps I’m not being realistic. In this family, people have the right to tell others how to act for a long time. Basically, until they’re dead.
Just Remember, You’ll Never Get Out of This Family Alive …
After my brother and I hung up I wrote a long letter to him explaining my rationale. Basically I said that I was tired of my mother’s hurtful behavior and I had to look out for my own well-being. She has been a thorn in my side for as long as I can remember. Recently, the entire song and dance about her hanging out with Leo, talking about Leo, throwing parties for Leo, and just basically acting like he’s a superstar, was the last straw.
Over the years I maintained the relationship with Mom partly because I had to have her financial backing to deal with Leo’s foibles. But now that Leo and I are divorced I will never again need her financial help in quite the same way.
I got no response to my letter. It seemed to me there was no response my brother could make. He could not acknowledge what my mother had done or that she showed what I called “empathy deficit” but which is more generally called narcissism these days. And there was no point in denying what I said.
The Sister of a Politician Should Remain Silent
In fact, as a politician, he probably would like me to calm down about this stuff and *not* put it in writing. His worst concern might be that I write under my own name nonfiction reflections about our family.
On Sunday I felt pretty bad. All my life I wanted to have a good family and here I am. The total black sheep. Divorced and now estranged from mother and brothers. Mom for her part gets to complain about how much she’s suffering and get attention for it, and cut me off from things that might help me such as my brother’s sympathy.
On the other hand, there is a reading that calls me the shrewd one. For one thing I never have to deal with the inconvenience and drama caused by my mother as long as we’re estranged. My life is my own in a way it’s never been before. Her unwelcome advice such as “what you need is a man 15 years younger than you” and “you need some serious money so you can attract a decent husband” and “Tiara should stop having children” is gone, just like that. No more stopping by to visit on Saturday morning; my days are my own.
Her demands that I have her over for dinner or holidays? Gone. Calling me up to complain Jolene didn’t phone her? No mas. Telling me that Brian is, by turns, a good person a bad person a good person a bad person? Gone. Telling me that I must stop Scarlett from joining the Marines or else she’ll be raped? Gone. Telling me that mom will drive me to the airport and then leaving me stranded there after the return flight? Gone. Loaning money to Leo and then telling me to make the payments? Gone.
I’m Almost an Orphan
It’s never easy to be an orphan. Estranged from my mother and with my father already gone, that is what I am now. But it’s not all bad because being in my birth family wasn’t exactly a winning hand. It was more like a 50/50 proposition with some good parts and some bad parts. If you simplified it you might say my dad was the good part and my mom was the bad part. Once my father had died being in my family was a serious cost.
I did find an interesting blog post this week that said that in unfair situations, it’s better to walk away than retaliate. And I thought that was relevant in this case. By accepting estrangement from my mother I was stepping out of the cycle of attack and counter-attack, argument and cross-argument. I was saving all the energy I used to spend dealing with the drama.
Last week in the Dinosaur post I wrote that I was in the midst of reframing my thinking about who I could trust and whether I could be responsible for things on my own. I have to say that overall this development with Mom and Noah appears to bring me closer to being the person I want to be, a person who is self-sufficient and who doesn’t accept gratuitous criticism or mean-spirited comments, a person who enjoys being alone and with friends and doesn’t feel pressured to wait on her family just because they’re her family. I want to be a person who “always pays her debts” like the Lanisters. In fact being estranged from my mother might be seen “paying my debts.”
It Is Not My Job To Make My Parents Happy
One thing I thought was really important that I told my brother in the letter was that it is not our job to make our parents happy. No. He kept saying it is our job to do so but I categorically deny this. When you’re responsible for small children, on some level, you are responsible for *their* happiness but when they’re grown up they’re on their own. And your adult parents have no business telling you what to do. In particular, no business telling you what to do to make them happy.
I can’t imagine where my brother got this idea but I do remember it coming up when my father was ill. This awareness has led me to much thought this week. One thing I’m sure of is that by the end of the week I felt I made the right decision by choosing to be estranged from my mother. And I’m very relieved to think that now that she is not in my life she won’t get the opportunity to say “Susan if you do that you’re going to be sorry…” She was almost always wrong, and I learned to ignore her, but it was still unsettling.
Without her here I will have the unfettered opportunity to make a number of decisions and it seems to me that the sky’s the limit on potential success. Failures too, of course, though if I fail at least I won’t have to hear her gloat.
In this regard, the future looks bright indeed.