JOURNAL: December 2019

DECEMBER 3

This was the end. The final act. My mother's magnum opus of hatred.

The day before, my cousin broke and admitted that I was the person who told her what my mother and aunt had been saying about her. My mother confronted me, tried to get me to admit to it, but I never did. But she isn't the sort that can resist being vengeful. I'd seen it in the years of her threatening legal action over every tiny, inconsequential bad thing that happened to her. But this? This crossed into the realm of psychopathy.

I heard her on the phone saying she wanted to take one of my cats to be euthanized while I was at work.

After that, all bets were off. I decided I was done being meek. I decided my so-called family was not worth the life of my pet. It never should've have gone that far, but my sense of self-worth had been so thoroughly destroyed by her that it took her threatening something I loved to make me realize just how dire the situation was.

The next morning, I decided to begin cutting her off. I told my husband to cancel our Hulu TV package. We logged all the devices off our account and cancelled. I came home from the vet with the cat my mom secretly threatened to euthanize, newly microchipped, and my account at their office flagged if anyone tried to bring him in. Not long after, my mother sent me a text demanding the login credentials for Hulu. I simply told her we cancelled our service. She stormed through the house, slamming doors until she came up the stairs. She started berating me, calling me spiteful, saying she bet I thought it was funny to cancel without telling her. It kinda was, though. Taking something as stupid as TV from her sent her into unbridled rage. It's so pathetic, how could it not be funny?

But it stopped being funny pretty fast. She suddenly demanded I give her the keys to the gun safe. My husband and I kept our firearms in that safe, along with the pistol my mother wanted locked away so she couldn't get to it, and a few of my brother's guns. I went to the safe to open it, and began removing mine and my husband's weapons. She began screaming at me not to remove anything. I knew it was because she thought we had stolen my brother's guns.

I called my husband to help me identify his guns, but my mother was in my ear, screaming at me, screaming at my husband. I pulled out two ammo cans that belonged to us, and she tried to take them, so I yelled at her to get off. She was on the phone with my former-cop aunt, and said, "oh, did you hear that?! Did you hear her yell at me?!" As if I wasn't justified. My aunt then told her to call the police as though I was doing something illegal by removing things that belonged to me and my husband from a safe that we were about to lose access to. She had both keys, and was undoubtedly going to change the lock combination. Of course I needed to secure our firearms! She kept saying, "if you don't listen, I'm calling the cops!" I didn't listen, so she stormed away like she was going to do it.

Once everything of ours was out of the safe, I locked it all in our bedroom and went outside to wait for the police to show up. I called my dad, I called R, just to make sure they knew what was happening. I even had to call my boss and tell him that I didn't know whether or not I was going to jail that day. Well, the cops never came. But the fact that the thought even occurred to her to ENDANGER MY LIFE BY CALLING THE POLICE ABOUT US FIGHTING OVER GUNS, showed me how far gone she really was. She valued my brother's guns more than she valued my life.

I knew then that I never wanted anything to do with my "family" ever again. They feed into one another, and I can never know a healthy relationship with them.

And so began my life of no-contact.