JOURNAL: January 2019

In December 2018, after two years of living on our own, my husband and I had to move back in with my mother. It was a symbiotic arrangement. We had no money, and she couldn't work or drive, and needed someone to be home with her in case she had another seizure. We would work on the house to get it ready to sell, and whatever came of the sale, we would get a newer house that we could all live in together. My mother could live her sunset years in comfort, and my husband and I could get a much-needed jump start in beginning our adult lives together. Everything was perfect.

Until it wasn't.

These are my journal entries for the month of January 2019.

 

JANUARY 2

That morning, the landscapers were working on the lawn. One of them was using an edger and it sent some debris flying into a sidelight on the front door, causing the glass pane to crack into a million pieces. The glass never fell out of the frame, but it was very clearly shattered. I told my husband about it, and he was understandably upset. When he came home from work, he spoke with my mother about it, saying that the landscapers should have to pay to fix it. My mother said she wasn't going to pursue it, and my husband said, "that's not gonna cut it with me."

This one sentence was going to set into motion something that had been long coming.

JANUARY 3

My mother sat me down in the TV room and said we needed to talk. Confused and a little concerned, I naturally agreed, and I immediately regretted it when she told me what it was about. She repeated their conversation from the day before, telling me that my husband had disrespected her by saying "that's not gonna cut it with me."

I immediately stopped her. The way she imitated my husband speaking sounded nothing like him. She was trying to make him sound snotty and mean, and that's not how he speaks. So, I told her that. She instantly went on the defense, accusing me of implying that she's a liar. I answered, "I'm sure that's what he said, but I know how my husband speaks, and that's not it." She was being dramatic and didn't like being told so. My husband was upset with the landscaper, but my mother managed to make the issue about her.

JANUARY 4

My mother got up early to gripe at my husband while he got ready for work about my conversation with her the previous day. She told him that I didn't trust her. It made her angry. When my husband told me about this encounter when he came home, I began to question whether or not all her dramatic stories about things that supposedly happened in her life happened the way she said they did. Was she as honest as she wanted everyone to think she was? For the first time in my life, I was doubting my own mother's sincerity in her interactions with me.

For a while after this incident, my mother made a point of telling me every time my husband did something that made her mad, but it was always dumb, minor things like him being too loud in the morning while he's getting ready for work. I think she told me this stuff because she wanted to make herself appear more sympathetic to me, and turn my husband into an antagonistic figure in the house. My mother is a game-player, and the queen of petty. I wasn't going to allow her to wedge herself between me and my husband.

JANUARY 8

It was about this time I started to figure out that because my mother couldn't find drama at a workplace anymore, she had to create it at home because she's bored without it. Conflict energized her and gave her purpose.

At this time, my cats were confined to the second floor of the house by a tall baby gate which they would become upset by any time they heard people downstairs, especially me and my husband. They wanted to be down there, too, but the presence of my mom's cat meant they had to stay upstairs because they would fight if they saw one another.

She asked me a question that morning from the first floor, and I walked out to the stairs to answer her. I didn't want to stay outside of the baby gate for too long, else my cats would start getting upset, so once I gave her an answer, I went back in, but she was still asking me questions. Hearing her downstairs, one of my cats started meowing loudly, and I said "oh my gosh!"

Suddenly, I hear my mother yell at the top of her lungs, "I was just asking a question!" I said, "whoa, why are you yelling at me?!" She answered, "I don't need your 'oh my God' when I'm just asking you a question!" Baffled, I told her, "I didn't say that to you, I said that to my cat!" I know she heard my cat whining. And I think after this, she felt stupid, because then she tried to make it about something else, saying, "well, you need to answer my questions in front of my face." She refused to own the fact that she overreacted.

Later that day, when she told me what her plans were for the week and where I would need to take her, she spoke to me with a very matter-of-fact tone and didn't make eye contact. It felt like she was speaking to me as if I were a servant.

OVERVIEW

January was an extremely confusing month for me. After spending two years away from my mother and coming back, it was like she was a totally different person. I started keeping more to myself upstairs as a means of preventing any accidental provocation, but as it would turn out, that would only make things worse. So much worse than I could ever imagine.