Mommy Dearest

I've held on to a relationship that has never been good because the adage "You only have one mother. You have to be good to her" echoes in my mind.

I can't imagine that at this advanced age I'm about to confess to...Mother Issues. And I don't mean my own ability to parent.

Doug insists that no woman has a decent relationship with her mother. How trivializing. This from a man who has great relationships primarily due to the fact that he ignores most people. Thus overlooks their flaws. He's a favorite.

Sigh. Hope sprung eternal until several weeks ago. I think the camels back broke. No one wants to read a treatise on what, why and how. I think Barnes & Noble has a section devoted to it.

Doug says that my mother, given every opportunity, will always take the low road. Not by design, she just will naturally complicate the issue.

My mother would argue that it's me. That she can do no right in my eyes.

For the longest time I believed her. I must be too hard on her, I thought. I should try seeing her side. She'd manage to do something wildly inappropriate and yet I'd be chastised for taking offense. So I'd look at it from her point of view. I mean, really, if you are Very Good and Very Smart, you can actually justify almost any behavior as acceptable. Which I did. (Much to my detriment I might add because I also learned to justify OTHERS bad behavior towards me.) I didn't always agree but I always defended. Then about 5 years ago, I started talking to her about changing the pattern. I assumed because we were close that our relationship had room for honestly and truth. Certainly after years of "Going along to get along" we could disagree? But we really couldn't. As it turns out, she didn't want a relationship, she wanted validation. Unswerving.

Ok, I thought. We'll do this slowly. Using all the tools in my counseling arsenal, tried inching over the line a toe at a time. Fights ensued.

She begs to differ but then, consider the source.

As brilliant as I am, she's no dummy either. And for her every action, there was an argument, a validation. Her actions were a direct result of her feelings, and her feelings were, after all, The Facts. Like all lies, sure, her feelings had elements of truth threading through them. But the motivations she ascribed to things?! Completely mythological. Follow my bad analogy here...it's as if her mind was a garden with polluted soil. So even the best planted seeds metamorphisized into something bastardized, something tainted. Left to long as the architect, keeping her own counsel and cultivating her own garden; her mind and her operating system became too tangled, and too dense to cut through anymore.

So time passed and we were at an impasse. I kept trying because I truly would never want to hurt someone else. And I knew the day I stopped trying would be a Very Sad Day. I'm unwilling to have a false relationship at this level so it's either real, or over.

The last year and a half has been the worst ever. She's been beyond awful. I thought about telling her that only someone who still had hope would bother to argue. That I continued to try to negotiate a relationship with her because I didn't want to give up. I thought about asking her to write down her definition of what a good relationship is then seeing if we could build it.

But suddenly, sadly, I've decided to give up. I equated trying with loving. And now I'm quitting. I'm not calling, not visiting, not inviting. I'm not cultivating, defending, ignoring, manipulating. I'm not doing anything. I am Giving Up. You can't be good to someone who believes that no one is ever good to her.

It's a tremendously sad day for me because I'll cross the street to help load a grocery carriage for a complete stranger. I'll stop and talk to an old woman 35 minutes so she's less alone. I visit the cobbler just to say hello. The fact that I'm going to withdraw my attention and treat her as I would treat anyone else who behaves the way she does is painful. She's going to have to earn my affection and trust.

It breaks my heart because I don't think she's capable of it.