December 7th

I’ve never been more certain in my life than yesterday that my mother is in serious need of help and that makes it hard for me to write my true feelings. I want to say that I HATE her because she’s taking a special time in my life and making it about her. I want to say I am so sick of dealing with her and that I’m sick of feeling like the adult in our relationship. I don’t know why she can’t be happy with anything and why she can’t be my MOTHER. It’s awful. I don’t want to wake up one day to find out she has commit suicide because that is one of my greatest fears. I don’t want to say any of the above because I know it isn’t fair to treat someone who must have serious issues so unfairly. I wouldn’t want to be treated that way but at the same time it is so hard....
Outside of my being pregnant a 4 week delay in talking to each other wouldn’t be anything abnormal. My mother does this. She gets into a mood where she feels I do not love her and she stops calling to see how long it takes for me to call. The reality is that my life is busy and I’m not always paying attention to such things. It was only last weekend that I realized that it had been a while and it was only this weekend that I had actually counted the weeks. My dad was pretty furious when he found this out. My dad, the man my mother thinks doesn’t care about her, scolded me for treating her poorly and falling into her games. So I listened to my dad and I called her. What I got on the other end of the phone was EXACTLY what I thought I would get: a monotone shell of my mother with dead air between lifeless sentences. I think we were on the phone for 15 minutes. I had to ask questions like how my cousin and her baby were. Had it snowed yet? Was it cold? I’ve had these same conversations with my mother so many times over the years. It’s painful to hear us trying to talk to each other when we are so obviously NOT saying anything that matters. We said goodbye and I thought that was all there was. I wondered if I should even bother calling her when I went into labour. I wondered if she’d call before Christmas or if this would hold out longer. That’s when very surprisingly the phone rang again. D picked up and said it was my mother.
I was confused.
I took the phone. My mom said that she needed to call back to “explain herself”. I thought that was the best thing I’d ever heard since quite frankly I’m so sick of her mind games. That’s when she said to me that she doesn’t want to meet Sadie and that she feels that it is for the best if Sadie never knows she exists. WTF? She went on to say that she doesn’t want to be her grandmother. She’s cutting ties and that we can just move on and live our own lives. “Sadie deserves a family and she will have a good one with your Dad & (my step-mom), D’s mom and her Great- Grandmother”.
I didn’t know what to say. What do you say to that? I’ve never been dumped but I can imagine that this is exactly what it feels like. My own mother doesn’t want to meet her grandchild??? She doesn’t want to be in my life anymore?
She said that children pick up on everything and Sadie will hate her too and she doesn’t want to ruin another life. She went on to apologise for being a horrible mother and she admitted that I have “every reason to hate her”. She said she shouldn’t have drank when I was growing up but it was the only way to cope and that I had “such a strong personality” as a teenager that she didn’t know what to do. She said that at least she taught me “what not to be”. I would have to agree with that because it’s true. When you grow up in a household with a self-loathing drunken mother you end up taking a different path in life.
I was very abrupt with her at this point saying she was being totally irrational. I asked her if she was seeing anyone and that I thought she may have a serious issue. She said that she’s always been irrational and that won’t change which is just another reason she doesn’t want to be in my life anymore.
She started to bring up the most absurd things that I would never in a million years have remembered. Things I’d said to her when I was probably 13 years old. Things D had said to her that upset her. Things that my father said to her when they “were still married” which would be 29 years ago!! It seems as though she has held on to everything that has ever been said against her. EVERYTHING!! She’s never spoken so candidly about these feelings so I was just so shocked. I knew she was damaged but to actually hear that she really won’t let go and that these things haunt her decade after decade, it’s just frightening that someone could be so unhappy. She was bawling her eyes out throughout her call. Of course I was crying too to the point where I thought I had pink eye but apparently it’s ruptured blood vessels. I tried to reassure her by saying that she wasn’t thinking right. I asked how she could not want what her sister had (my cousin and her new baby, being a grandmother) and she said that she wants that very badly but “this is for the best” she just wanted to “explain herself”. Nothing I said could make her get off this thought of leaving our lives. I don’t know what I can do. I’m 9 months pregnant, 675 km away from her and she is clearly spinning out of control. The only thing I can even think to do is get in contact with my Aunt that lives nearby. She seems to be the most rational of the 3 sisters and hopefully she can monitor my mom and get my other Aunt on board to figure things out.
Yesterday was awful but today I’m feeling better, emotionally. The fact is that Sadie will have very limited exposure to my mother and this only proves why. Until she gets herself straightened out she is not a good person for a small child to be around. That said it makes me very sad that I am going to go through childbirth without my mother. My aunt was there to watch as my cousin gave birth to her grandchild. I deserve that special moment with my mother too but unfortunately I do not have THAT mother and I never will.
If we ever let Sadie read this blog I will be excluding this entry. I'd like to forget I've had to write this.