it ain't all problems here. i swear. ugh, left shift is harboring a crumb and not capping. i vent here instead of on my loved ones. i love you guys too but you have your own worlds that protect you from getting overly involved in mine....

but the issue i have now is with my mom. she is evil. i mean it. her thinking is a cancer that is powerful enough to spread to others, namely my sister and i. and i don't know what to do. her lack of presence over the past 15 years (probably always, but i know things i didn't used to know) had me taking much of it personally. at half my age my mom's divorce made me the ears for all her dumping ... not about my dad but about her anxiety and phobia and lack of funds: shit that's absolutely not a kid's business. so what happened to me? i quit my job and took to my bed for about a year. she didn't push me in an inappropriate way. no. in fact i think she relished the pain i was in. i don't hold a grudge. i learned a lot from the episode of depression. i have it in me to get depressed; it's part of what makes me me. i've learned wonderful ways to bounce back.

and when i say lack of presence i mean lack of Presence. i've watched her addiction to bingo progress over 15 years. in that time, and because of bingo, she's lost my childhood home, the apartment she and i needed to live in because we had nowhere else (we moved in with my sister and her family for awhile), her husband's childhood home they bought when his mom passed away, at least two cars, and most recently her husband. she denies that bingo had anything to do with the loss of these things. the other night, from bingo, she told me over the phone that bingo relaxed her. i haven't talked to her since. that day she left work early because she couldn't breath, or was spinning, or some story about a wolf. the "not feeling good" that my sister and i have heard her moan practically all of our adult lives was her excuse for not babysitting the one hour for me between my having to leave for work and my husband coming home. one hour.

i know how she works. inside her addiction things went like this. well, backtracking a little, she starts a new job next week. she purposely asked for 2nd shift to try and keep herself out of bingo, she said, and to see her grandkids during the day--my sister's will all be in school come fall, mine might be in daycare. she left work sick on payday, didn't give them two weeks, and didn't go in the next day, friday. sometimes my husband works late on thursdays so she has to stay here instead of go to bingo. you should see her in this instance. angry. vicious. dangerous around my kids. my husband and i haven't trusted her with them ever since we kicked her out for breaking our rule of no bingo and she went ballistic on me (she needed a place to stay when her husband and her were fighting over her bingo). she snaps. when she doesn't have bingo she implodes and explodes all at once. bingo helps her relax all right. so thursday, our last conversation, i accused her of choosing bingo over my kids. it seemed to me, and based on my experience with her, that she wanted to ensure herself some bingo time before starting her new job. she got real defensive and denied the accusation. either way, i had to go to work late (during my final two weeks, leaving my coworkers to cover me, and making me walk in to the busy dinner crowd) and my husband had to bring his work home and work on it while watching the kids, which brought some mini disasters of its own. all this so she, a person who left work that day sick, could go to bingo.

i sound angry. really it's frustration. i'm frustrated because every time i talk to her i wind up feeling bad. and she needs me feeling bad! her sickness needs it anyway. the worse she feels, knowing she's made her daughters feel bad, the more justification her ego has for continuing the madness that is her current state. i want to not feel bad, but she's nasty to my kids too often and constantly gushing negativity of me, me, poor me, with tears! Which effectively makes me want to give her another chance. Also symbolic is her neglect of my now old, rusty request to fix my sewing machine so i can finish the obviously unfinished curtains in my kitchen. she abuses the mother-daughter and every other one of her relationships for her own self-indulgence. earlier thursday i said, "mom, you are how old and you haven't learned that the world doesn't revolve around you?"

i say, well, the woman had terrible parents. my grandpa was an alcoholic who would bring his drunk ass home to six kids and a wife, sit in his chair, and talk to himself about how shitty life was. my grandma hid the kids in a bedroom to protect them in case he got violent. in the bedroom, they could hear every word and were afraid. my grandma was a loon. she never once hugged us or said she loved anyone, at least not when i was around. she was a gentle woman, but seriously birthed evil in six ways. all the kids are fucked up ... evil because they harm others. it's what they know how to do. my mom is affectionate with us but empty too, which to me almost negates the gestures. there is no warmth behind them ... no compassion at all.

i'm at a fork in the road where on the right is her poison dosing and at the left is abstaining from the harmful relationship. there is no middle prong right now. the middle, the place to be, will come with her recovery. it may never come. she doesn't know about the fork. she only knows about the spoon--that which continues to feed herself and us the bullshit.