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First off, I'm stuck living at home for the moment. I was going to move out, but then my job became unpaid after the sequester took all of the money out of our grant. I can still work, but I can't be paid until we find another way to pay me, and so here we are.
It really doesn't help that less competent, less productive people than me are being paid, but they can't work without it and I theoretically can -- and I'd rather they be able to feed their children than I be able to get an apartment. As arrogant as it is to judge my boss's payroll/personnel decisions, I at least agree with them.
Regardless, that's just kind of the icing on the cruddy cake. The deep, creamy filling of concentrated crud is my mother.
See, when I was little she was frankly a horrible person; she never hit me, but she'd come find me and yell at me for random things whenever anything went wrong in her life. I could tell when she'd gotten off the phone with creditors; suddenly straight A's weren't trying hard enough, or my cup of pencils was "a mess clear across your desk you stupid brat." If my dad had to work late or had hung up after a half-hour rant about him working late, I got the balance of it, usually concerning the state of my shoes. As far as I can tell, she's only ever really happy being the victim, so she'll find things that are perfectly innocuous and harp on them until she gets attention, at which point she will perceive an insult and react accordingly until she's out of breath for ranting. She used to yell at someone or other for eight hours a day.
I'm much smarter; I rant by typing, as you can see.
College was a huge escape from years of screeching and harping and threatening. Dear sweet FSM, the threatening. Every day she'd try to find something I liked and threaten to destroy it unless I complied with...something. It would be comical if it weren't so repetitive. She'd threaten to break the braces I used to write with for school; she'd threaten to burn my room. She ended up threatening to crash my car, and now I sleep curled around a backpack containing everything tangible that I value -- except the car but it's not parked where she can find it. I loved dorms; filthy, cramped, and crowded they might be, but SHE was a thousand miles away.
And then some frankly unanticipatable things went wrong with the grad school application process. They weren't anyone's fault, really. I waited a tad longer than I should have, the school processed everything late, there was a bursar hold on submitting my transcripts at the worst possible time...a lot of small things coincided to keep me from applying anywhere I really wanted to go. So now I'm home and getting apps ready for next year, and in the meantime I'm working at a nearby university doing awesome science. They make fun of me for never wanting to go home, but that's all right by me.
The trouble is twofold. First, I'm doing what my mother never got to do. In her words, she "gave up a promising career in chemistry to have [me]"; according to my father, she never got into grad school and used me to justify leaving a job she hated at a water treatment plant. He's been a huge help through all this, but he's also the only person with a paying job at the moment so he's never here when she's on her rants. But I'll get to that. So whether or not she liked her job, the fact remains that I'm doing what she wanted to do, only at a more prestigious institution and with a more promising career -- and there's every indication that I'll end up exactly where she wanted to be. When she's drunk enough "in order to be able to sleep", she sometimes accuses me of cheating to get "her career." I've never quite understood that.
Far, far worse is that she's getting mentally worse. It's almost like selective senility as an analogue to selective hearing. She will forget, no matter what, anything she has agreed to do or anything she's told how to do. You can sit down with her for hours and talk her through how, say, her turn signals work, and she'll just sit there and sigh theatrically about how "these modern Japanese cars are nothing like my good old American car." The one she crashed into a dump truck because she tried driving when she was delusional and frazzled to the point of irate screaming. (She wanted to drive my car while I was at college. My father hid my keys, for which he was screamed at nightly as soon as she got home from the hospital. I am forever in his debt.) She's convinced she has PTSD from that now -- and when she's sitting bawling about being unable to quilt like she used to because sewing needles are hard, she will swear up and down she's going to get therapy. Come the next day, she will claim she never said that and anyway what about all the times you said you'd get therapy and you never did? Regardless of her actual diagnosis, her memory problems mean she's freer than ever to outright make up slights against her, and she still doesn't believe she has memory problems.
To be fair about the car thing, she has always been deeply mistrustful of electronics. Bioinformatics is a career for me and "fiddly little unhealthy nerd garbage" to her; on a more local level, she's convinced everyone is ignoring her cell phone calls. Her cell phone has been dead for two years but we can't "try to change the subject by talking over her like we're so smart." Of course we can't fix it for her; we're forbidden from touching her things and "doing things to them so they don't work right anymore."
I honestly think she willingly forgets what people tell her. She used to do it with comprehension. If something wasn't nice or fun, "I don't understand" over and over until the problem went away; she lived in a world of candyfloss, compliments, and incomprehensible troubles for other people to deal with. Now, "I don't remember" over and over until someone fixes her life for her -- and yet she still insists there is nothing wrong with herself, only mean people lying to her and playing mind games. When she's sad, I'm bawled at and screamed at; when she's calm, I'm being threatened with being kicked out or arrested for being "so cruel." Her latest tack is to threaten to call the police and falsely claim I've done something horrible so they'll jail me and she'll be rid of me. Even without a conviction, that will rob me of valuable time I need to achieve enough to finally escape.
And I worry, because she's never had the firmest grip on the truth even when she was fully sane; she always preferred to mix willful delusion with stupidity and generate rants and unhappiness, and once an idea is in her head she refuses to believe she only imagined it. Once she dreamed that she had a red purse. She still looks for that purse every once in a while and will accuse you, sometimes violently, of making fun of her if you try to explain.
All she does, now, is talk on the phone with her mother (my maternal grandmother) about which old family friends have died and who has what incurable disease. And then she feels the need to tell us. I get obituaries recited to me by the dozen for people I've never met, and if I'm less than distraught on cue I'm a heartless, ungrateful son who ruined her life for nothing.
We can't afford a home for her and she steadfastly refuses therapy, although I can't help but think she needs both. Mostly I just wanted to explain all that so I can say this:
I do not love my mother, and part of me wants to be free and quit of this place forever so I can finally tell her so, because I am a horrible person.