Going No Contact

A massive document I typed up right after this happened, a few days after my 42nd birthday. This repeats a couple of things I’ve mentioned elsewhere, but I didn’t want to mess with it, because I wrote it on the day. I have cleaned up a few things, anonymised names, and changed the year to my age, because I think age makes more sense when reading rather than decade.

Age 0-20

So, a bit of backstory, I’m 42, my dad died when I was 9, and I’m an only child, and while I have no official diagnosis on my mother, she certainly ticks a lot of NParent boxes.

She is the kind of parent that you cannot win with. As a child, I could do the same thing eight times in a row and get a different outcome each time. Once I broke a glass while washing up, and got screamed at for being stupid and careless and deliberately costing her money, etc. The screaming raged for literally hours, she smashed my bedside lamp (after chasing me upstairs to continue the fight) and didn’t talk to me for several days. The next time I dropped a plate and broke something, I immediately started crying, remembering how it went last time, and she just gave me a hug and said, “Oh, don’t be silly, I know you didn’t do it on purpose.”

She constantly accused me of being stupid – everything I liked was stupid, “Are you going out with your stupid friends?”, “You’re not reading that stupid book, are you?”, “Oh, not that stupid movie again!” etc. – but she actually had no interest in my intelligence. She didn’t go to parent teacher night at school, and it only occurred to me recently that she never once asked what marks I got in my GCSEs – even when she was still seeing other mums of kids of the same age, and would need that information to fit in. I suppose she just lied if it came up.

She also endlessly skirted around me being fat. I can only assume she thinks she did really well for never calling me fat in a hateful way. But believe it or not, the average primary school child who is constantly being bullied for their weight, can read the magnificently complex subtext of “lazing around like a useless lump” and “lumbering around like a stupid lump”.

She endlessly gaslit me. For example, going back to the glass/plate thing, if I’d have said to her, “I was scared because last time you were so angry”, her face would scrunch up in hatred, and with thick venom in her tone, she’d spit out, “You’re such a liar.” I’m sorry if I’m over-selling how she said it, but it’s one of those things that is completely burned into me. Her eyes kind of go dark, and there’s this dead kind of loathing in them. She’s in her eighties now, and I am taller, less able bodied but stronger, and she did that look at me the day I wrote this down originally – the day of non-contact – and it scared me.

As I grew older the fights would get so much worse. They would rage long and loud for hours, and it really could be over nothing. I’m certain that I must have done stupid stuff – I remember breaking a window once, and I can’t even justify that one. I was angry. But other times it was over nothing. One time she went out and left the VCR set up to record her favourite show. It wasn’t on until late, so I turned it off, and watched a movie before the show came on. After the movie, I set the VCR back up to record it, but I didn’t notice that the channel had switched over, so I diligently recorded the right period of time, but the wrong channel. And she was livid. I apologised, I told her it was a mistake, but nothing calmed her down. And she of course accused me of not loving her, that’s why I did it. Because I didn’t love her enough. And it was around this time she started threatening to call Social Services and have me taken away. Sometimes she would even go to the phone and start dialling.

This always had the desired response, I would cry and plead and beg and tell her that she was the greatest mother of all time, and that I loved her so so so much.

And here is the hypocrisy of my mother. If I ever said something like, “My friends have done stuff like that, and they’re not being thrown out.” My mother would seethe and rage. “If you love them so much, go and live with your stupid friends’ parents then!” But she saw no problem in trotting out, “Other people love their mothers.”

It never once occurred to me to clap back with, “Well go and adopt them, if you love them so much!”

Even if it had, I wouldn’t have had the nerve.

She hit me a few times. Not often. But enough for me to remember. One time she slapped me so hard that my lip ripped open on her wedding ring. I cannot for the life of me remember why. Another time she chased me around with a walking stick, hitting me with it and screaming to get out of her house.

She threw me out a lot. I would come back a few days later and the cycle would repeat.

Age 21

Growing older didn’t help much. I agreed to marry the first person who showed interest in me. A functioning alcoholic three years older than me, who I’ll call Kevin for the sake of this story.

A side note about Kevin: he is sober now. He is happily married with kids. He has worked on himself. Let’s not hate Kevin, ok? He and his wife sent me a get-well card after I had my hip replaced. The Kevin I lived with is not the same Kevin that is enjoying life with his family now. That Kevin is gone.

Kevin and I were car wrecks separately. Together we were just the worst. I think we were fond of each other in our own ways, maybe even a little bit of love, but not in-love love. He was a nasty drunk who wasn’t opposed to throwing things around and yelling. I was someone with no conflict resolution skills, who knew that arguments only existed to hurt the other person the most. And thanks to the excellent guidance of my mother, I knew how to hurt people in an argument.

This was not a good combination. But at least Kevin didn’t throw me out on a regular basis, so all things considered, this was an actual improvement in my living conditions.

My mother hated it. She hated that I now had another priority. I now had two needy abusers that required endless tip-toeing about. And I’ll put my hands up here, if Kevin says I was abusive, I won’t deny it. I will say that I never trapped him – I didn’t look for fights, or engineer situations that would cause a fight, and I didn’t take out my frustrations from elsewhere out on him. But if he picked a fight, I went hard and spiteful, and if he hit me, I had no problem hitting back.

Like I said: we were the absolute worst.

One time, my mother drove over to the flat we shared together at 1am to throw frozen chicken at my head. Now, that’s a really good story, so I’ll tell it in full one day, but for now, it’s just there to highlight the nonsense that was going on.

To summarise my relationship with Kevin: it was awful, then it got worse when he cheated on me. And kept cheating on me. And kept lying about it.

This culminated with him chasing me around with a tire iron while a violent argument raged. I called my mum halfway through. Kevin ripped the phone out of the wall, cutting off the call. My mother paused long enough to call the police before setting off. My mother was three miles away, the police were a mile away. She arrived first. I’ll give her that. That was appreciated.

Anyway, Kevin and I ended things that night – which was great, because I’d been trying to leave for months, but he kept asking for one more chance, and I really didn’t want to move in with my mother again.

In a chain of events too long to recount, around the same time, Mother and I moved north. And after a month or so of living with her, I moved in with a very handsome chap, who I’ve spent nearly 20 years with. If you know me from recapping, you’ll know him as Raven.

Age 24

Raven taught me conflict resolution, and it’s the greatest things I’ve ever been taught. Our first argument was horrific, because to my knowledge, the rules of arguments were: cut deep, cut often, and, if all else fails, break out the chainsaw. After being educated, our arguments tend to be a brief flare-up, followed by very robotic statements like, “When you do X, it makes me feel Y.”

Mum loathes Raven. Particularly because he was the one who pointed out that having a frozen chicken lobbed at your head at 1am for no reason – while absurdly funny – is not fucking normal. And the pattern of behaviour my mother exhibited was certainly emotional abuse.

At first I was all, “You don’t get it. I’m an only child and her husband’s dead. You’ve got a big family, you wouldn’t understand.” But as time ticked on, and I started reading stuff online, I realised that he did get it. He understood far more than me.

And then I started re-examining my entire childhood.

And about four or five years later, I finally believed him.

It just clicked one day. I was lying in bed, unable to sleep, and it suddenly just plinked into my brain. No big revelation, no re-examining old events with emotionally mature context, nope. Just one day my brain went, “He’s right, you know, Mum’s emotionally abusive.”

And this was only solidified when my mother said to Raven’s mother, “You know, Raven is the worst thing that ever happened to my daughter.” And Raven’s mother, sadly, did not knock her out. She just silently and furiously left my mother’s life forever.

Raven’s mother, by the way, is someone I talk to when we visit. Raven always gives us time to have mother/daughter-in-law chats. So she knows that my dad died when I was nine, that my mother is… “difficult”, and that my ex tried to brain me with a tire iron. So even without being Raven’s mother, she was aware that that the exact opposite was true. Especially since for 18 months I’d been unable to work, and Raven supported me. That he’s washed my hair and cut my toenails – love, right? – because I couldn’t do these things for myself.

Raven is without question my favourite human being of all time. The worst complaint I have about him is that sometimes he per-twangs his pants into the washing basket and sometimes they miss. But I do that too. So… we’re kind of perfect for each other.

Age 31

We went no contact after Eddie’s funeral. Eddie was, according to my mother as of the day of originally writing this, not her boyfriend. But he was. And he was in my life from the early-to-mid nineties onwards. He was another alcoholic, and he didn’t manage to beat it. It beat him.

We had to drive down to my home town, which was a four hour drive. Naturally there was drama beforehand because mother wanted us to drive to her first, and then travel in convoy, and we didn’t want to, because we’d have to drive an hour out of our way and then deal with her nonsense every time she lost sight of us. It would have been like a 6-7+ hour journey if she had her way.

Then she wanted to stay overnight with us – we didn’t have a spare room – and travel in the car with us. I could not face that, at the time the Kindle was a fairly new and expensive product I couldn’t attain, so if I couldn’t sleep, I’d be on the computer reading, which means that the living room can be in use to up 5am if I’m having a bad time sleeping. My mother offered to sleep on the sofa, but I could already anticipate the strops that we didn’t buy a camping bed or something – regardless of the fact our house was teeny and overflowing with unwanted furniture, provided by a landlord with more chairs than sense. (No shade, he was the best landlord ever. But that house was teeny. And there was so much goddamn furniture in it.)

It just wasn’t practical on any level. And we didn’t want to go to her house the night before because – aside from obvious reason – we had two cats who needed care.

And also, we’re fucking grownups. We don’t need to have an impractical slumber party before driving somewhere.

So, we get to my home town and book in to the B&B – there were no hotels in my home town. It’s that fucking small and pointless. The town sign says “picturesque”, which is exactly the same thing. About two hours later my mother phones to complain that the sat nav took her the wrong way and she was lost. Raven had to go look for her in a completely unfamiliar town. When he finally found her, the sat nav was working perfectly and was trying to get her to the B&B.

I was lying down because my bones were killing me. I’m disabled. My hips are the problem.

The funeral was fine, except my mother was 15 minutes late because she was faffing around in the car. I didn’t have the patience to go find out what she was doing, but if you pushed me to guess, I’d say she was organising her handbag or cleaning rubbish out of the glove box.

Whichever one that caused her to be late for the funeral, she did the other one the next day when Raven and I were wating for her for breakfast. We parked side by side, Raven and I got out. And then smoked our way through half a packet of cigarettes as my mother just faffed her way through about half an hour. (We’ve both since quit that habit, except we always buy a pack when visiting mother. Always.)

I again didn’t have the patience to ask what she was doing, but Raven did. Mum just went, “Oh?” pause that reads like she’s just parsed his question. “Uhm.” (in a tone that conveyed she had answered). That’s quite often her response. She says it’s because she’s hard of hearing, but I’ve seen her do it when there has been no background noise and the question has been loud and clear. If she doesn’t want to answer, or she’s not interested in the topic, she’ll just zone out.

After this, we drove home separately. Raven and I made it in a very respectable 3.5 hours. The road was completely empty and we had a lovely drive. Except it was a heat wave and I was in agony from my hips. When we got home that evening, I texted mum to say we’d got home safe, I was going to get a shower, watch TV and fall asleep on the sofa.

While eating dinner in front of the TV, the phone rang. I didn’t get there in time because my bones were all locked up and painful. I rang her back and her tone was off. I could just tell.

The quotes are from my livejournal made at the time (now locked and under Russian control):

(Note: real names have been changed to the names we use for recapping.)

Me: You alright?

Her: I’ve had a horrible journey.

Me: Oh? (and I have to be honest, this “Oh?” was very disinterested because we were eating and watching burly men throw each other around in WWE)

Her: Don’t you want to talk to me?

Me: It’s just that we’re eating and watching something.

Her: Oh, fine, if you don’t want to talk to me, then!

*click, dial tone*

Minutes later, I received a text, which read as follows:

I have always been there for you and your problems it would be nice if just once if you were there for me

I drafted multiple replies, but deleted every single one because it would have been fuel on the fire. No receipts I’m afraid, this was a billion phones ago, and pre-iPhone for me.

After a quick discussion, Raven rang my mother. Her home phone was engaged – off the hook, we assume. He called her mobile number and she answered it, but did not speak, there was just rustling, as if it was in her bag. It went on for awhile, then she spoke. This is classic behaviour of my family, whenever there’s a row anonymous phone calls are par for the course, so this is a prelude of what’s to come.

Raven and mum had an exchange of words, Raven’s side: that text was insulting after this weekend; Mum’s side: Dove’s tone of voice was insulting.

Then everything spilled forth, Mum accused Raven of often shouting at her and being rude to her. Raven has only ever shouted her down once before, and this was on the holiday with Wing, when Wing and I had both hidden in our respective rooms because the atmosphere was so unpleasant and Raven was frustrated with the situation, we had got to the bottom of the problem, and every time we were close to the resolve, Mum would suddenly back up and try to start the argument again. She didn’t want a resolve, she didn’t want the fight to stop, she didn’t want anything except to keep telling us what bad people we were.

The short version of their exchange is that Mum made it clear that she doesn’t like Raven, never has and likely never will.

I drew up a will to ensure that if the worst happened to me, the money would go to Raven, because without a will, the estate of an unmarried person goes to direct family.

If you go non-contact and you’re not married, make sure you look into this if you want to protect your chosen family against your blood family. Obviously, this does not represent actual legal advice and more like a friendly suggestion that you go see a qualified solicitor who can actually advise you of the legalities.

And for a few years, all was quiet. The mum called and acted as if everything was normal. And I felt obligated to continue the charade, since she was all alone. She has no other children and for the most part her family is just as toxic as her – where do you think she learned this nonsense?

Things possibly got better. But they didn’t ever get good.

Age 40-42

By the time this year rolled around, I was boiling with rage against my mother. The more time went by, the more angry I was that she never once had to answer for her bullshit.

There were small annoyances. For example, one time there was leftover pizza in the fridge. I texted Raven to say, “Pizza’s all yours!”, meaning I’d had some, and the rest I’d left for him. As I was doing this, mum texted me, and in a moment of multitasking thoughtlessness, I sent the text meant for Raven to her instead. I noticed and immediately followed it up with “Never mind! Sorry, that was meant for Raven!” and what followed was about an hour of harassment as she interrogated me to get the bottom of what I’d meant. She simply would not accept that I’d sent a text to the wrong place, and seemed to feel that she was entitled to know precisely what I meant, even if it had no bearing on her life. If pushed to explain why she did this, my feeling is she thought I was… insulting her, maybe? And she wanted me to back down or something? Shrug. I honestly don’t know, but her response was so intense that it felt like she’d taken the pizza comment, and me trying to explain it, as a personal insult.

There was a ridiculous drama over my car. During lockdown my car’s battery died – a quick check of Facebook around the same time showed the same story over and over and over. The only person without a dead battery was Ostrich, who is such a grownup I can’t even.

Since we were still in lockdown, I saw no point in rushing to get it fixed. We couldn’t drive anywhere. If anything, it was a guarantee that nobody could steal my car. It was a public service my dead battery was doing. I made the same joke to my mother, and hell fucking unleashed. Days and days of angry texts, telling me that I was a fool and only an idiot would just let their car rot. How dare I waste her money (I’ll come back to that) with such laziness?

Context: At the time I made that joke, I was just about to follow it up with, “But the AA are coming round next week to sort it.” But of course she hit the roof and I was tired of her bullshit.

Secondary context: The car is in her name. She has not paid a penny for it. I put down the deposit, I have made payments above the required amount to mum, who has then paid to the credit company. The car is technically and legally hers. How much has she paid for it? Absolutely zero. There wasn’t even a moment where she had to put a token £1 into it. It was all me. Honestly, if I’d have known how good my credit score was, I needn’t have bothered with all this extra faff, but I’m so used to being hopeless that I never even considered my own credit might be good enough. And Raven’s much the same.

Anyway, I was done with her nonsense. So I just let her rage herself back into a good mood.

If she’d just waited for me to finish my sentence instead of indulging her hair-trigger temper, she could have saved herself a big fat headache. And the cost of eight billion angry texts.

I haven’t said this before, by my mother never acknowledges her bad behaviour, she just calls me in a good mood and pretends it all never happened. And guess what happens if you do raise it?

Well, actually, there are two options: 1) that never happened, you’re a liar; or 2) HOW DARE YOU LIE! MOMMY GO NUCLEAR!

Actually… they’re the same option. But one of them is followed up with petulant texts or letters, informing me how hurt she was by my lies. Sometimes anonymous phone calls with heavy breathing. But honestly, the reception is so shit at my current house that she’s had to stop that one.

But that was the main recent drama. Mostly I was a bit worried about her. I bought her a Kindle because I thought she’d be bored without going out while lockdown happened. I was anticipating a billion tech support calls and her saying that I didn’t love her and was just fobbing her off with technology instead of actual love and all that. So imagine my surprise when she fucking loved the Kindle.

That one still baffles me. She even managed to join Kindle Unlimited.

We invited her up for Christmas 2021 for two reasons: 1) she’s a terrible cook who’s given me food poisoning three times; 2) we have a bigger house and more space. She agreed. Then sent a text on Christmas morning saying that the weather looked too bad to risk it. (It was clear and dry in Leeds, but let’s give her the benefit of the doubt and say it was miserable where she lives.)

Since then she has demanded that we come over to visit her because she has something important to say. Twice. She’s had nothing to say. She asked me if I’ll help her get her will sorted (I used to work in Wills, Trusts and Probate). I’ve already helped her once, but she wouldn’t listen. I went with her to the solicitor, and tried to explain what she wanted, but she just kept harping on about the fucking elephants and how awful poachers were. She came out of the thing with a very standard will, with a vague clause about how some money would go to a charity to be chosen later, preferably elephant based, because my mother couldn’t stop talking about them long enough to pick an actual elephant charity.

And I get it. If I was the solicitor and I saw a vague woman who was just there to talk elephants, and her on-the-ball daughter tried to steer the conversation towards trusts, rather than a standard will, I’d be concerned for my client too. That was good lawyering. So she paid £250 for a will that doesn’t do what she wants, and thinks that solicitor is awful. Sigh.

But we went over again, and the big announcements were, “I’m thinking of leaving the elephants something in my will…” and the next one was… I have no idea. She didn’t say.

She asked me about wills again, and the minute I started talking, she affected a silly look on her face of faked deep concentration (remember Cher in Clueless when she’s being told off during a driving test? That. But imagine an ugly Imelda Staunton at the age of 82 doing it), and started repeating what I said. If I said, “The sky is blue,” she would then nod super seriously and say, “Oh yes, very blue.” And if I tried to keep my temper and add, “Grass is green,” she would dig Raven in the ribs and say, “Green, Raven, you hear that? Green.”

Note: The reason I’m not using what I actually said is because I’m leary of writing down anything that could be constituted as legal advice when I have no relevant qualifications, I just worked in that area for a long time and learned by experience. And I wasn’t telling her exactly what to do, I was telling her the key words she needed to use when she went to visit a solicitor so they could advise her about the things she had specifically asked me about. I’m aware this could be read as skeevy, that it could read that I’m fleecing an old woman out of her money, but honestly, I just wanted her to visit a solicitor. And not talk about the fucking elephants.

She got bored of that and rudely changed the subject when I was mid-sentence. It was one of her blinders, something really ugly like, “Wasn’t it terrible when that three year old got murdered?” She loves to say stuff like that.

My personal theory is that it’s performative empathy. She loves to be angry and offended about things. And she knows that humans don’t like it when small children are hurt. Ergo, find a news story that contains a hurt child, valid anger that we have to agree with, while she looks like such a caring person.

She loves to watch pet rescue shows – and that’s fine, plenty of people do. But she’ll start telling us about it. “Did you hear about…” and we’ll quickly say, “No! We don’t want to know. We hate hearing about animals in pain or distress.” (We give to animal charities, she does not.) And then she’ll fire up the TV and start showing us the episode that shows something utterly horrific.

Believe me, I get very angry about animal cruelty or neglect. There is something fucking wrong with anyone who hurts anyone or anything. But it particularly cuts deep when it’s an animal or small child. I don’t want to see graphic depictions of it. But she doesn’t care. She wants us to see.

And sometimes it’s not even about something horrible. Sometimes it’s just irrelevant. She’ll open a conversation with “Did you see [movie title] where the murderer was the gardener?” And we will either sigh because we wanted to see it, but now there’s no point, or we’ve got no interest in it. Of course, you can’t tell her that she’s just ruined the movie, so the answer is always, “No, it’s not our cup of tea.” And then she’ll tell the whole plot. A woman who can’t ever get my name right will reel off every single scene in the movie she watched last week.

And there’s nothing to do but listen, because she’s not interested in hearing any feedback – and how can we give any, we haven’t seen the movie – she just wants to talk about it. She’s not even giving her thoughts, I’m honestly not sure she has any reaction to media, she’s just reciting what happens.

Example:

My mother describing the iconic twins scene from The Shining:

Now, there’s this little boy on a bike… or is a trike? It’s a bike. And he’s riding down the hallways and there’s a blue carpet runner, like at your grandad’s house, and he turns a corner, and sees identical twins with blue dresses and brown hair. And they ask him to come and play.

My bestie describing the iconic twins scene from The Shining:

So, this little kid is in the hotel, and you know me, right? I’m bricking it. Scary place. Kid in danger. Proper shitting it. And then, OMG, turn the corner and there’s the creepiest twins I’ve ever seen in my life. Nightmare fuel. And I’m like, “Right, sleeping with the light on tonight.”

I’m not sure my mother or my bestie have seen The Shining, actually, but it’s an example of how they both talk. But you can see the difference: one is recounting as much as they can remember with zero feeling. The other is recounting her reaction. Because she had one.

Occasionally she will accidentally wade into a topic we have an interest in, she usually avoids them, because it makes us talk. One of us will say something, and we’ll be halfway through a sentence when she rudely changes the subject. She’ll just talk over us until we shut up.

And all of these slights have been building to a crescendo. Death from a thousand paper cuts is very real.

The next drama was over a Shark Vacuum. Raven and I had the week off, but we didn’t tell her that, because she’d want us to visit. (Side note: she seemed genuinely surprised that we take the same holidays from work. I honestly don’t think it occurred to her that we like each other. Or perhaps it’s more that it never occurred to her that we exist when she’s not looking at us.)

I got a text in the morning asking if I was willing to buy her a Shark vacuum cleaner and she would give me the money due to some kind of error when she was paying. She put in the wrong number (house or card???) and now the site won’t accept her card and she needs a new one.

The answer was a firm no. If anyone else had asked me to do so, I would have, but my mother is never happy. She has a history of asking me and/or Raven to do something for her, claims that it’s all good and sorted. Then spends the next few years complaining to us and asking us to complain on her behalf when she has already signed off on it being good. Or she has used it to the limit, and is pissed off that it won’t last another dozen years. Or she’s broken a part of it through clumsiness or not paying attention, and now wants to complain that it was easy to break. Even if it’s several years old.

I told her to contact customer support, because I found it impossible to believe that you could be blocked from making purchases of the most popular vac in the UK if you type something in wrong. She came back saying that she keeps getting a message to use another card. I hid behind that and said that if it was a Visa problem, then I’d have the same issue, and so would Raven. (This was when Visa was having its kerfuffle with various online retailers about their charges.)

Next came the claim that she had spoken to someone who said she’d have to order a new card, so would I order it or not. I said no, saying I didn’t have enough money (untrue), and that I didn’t want to be responsible if she changed her mind/needed a replacement/wanted to complain (very very true).

“I will remember that next time you need help.”

Then she immediately followed that threat with a promise that she would transfer the money immediately or drive it to my house. Well, my old house. She likes to drive there and for me to collect her. Which – you know what, this is 5k words already, I’m not going into that bullshit.

Let me remind you that she dropped out of Christmas day on very day because she didn’t want to make the drive. The same drive she was perfectly willing to make now in order to buy a vacuum cleaner.

I had no time for this nonsense, and handed her over to Raven, who has infinitely more patience for her than I have. This is because 1) he didn’t grow up with her, so doesn’t have the years of baggage I have accrued; 2) he’s one of those people who just works through his trauma and lets it go. So every time she does something rude, he just deletes it from his emotional reserve. He remembers the action, but refuses to keep the accompanying emotions. I wish I could do this.

He called her, because it was easier than dealing with her texts.

Raven asked the question that I had wanted to ask, and I’m sure any reasonable person would be asking at this point: if you’re willing to drive two hours to drop off some money to have someone buy a vac for you, why don’t you just drive 20 minutes to the nearest store?

They were out of stock. Ok, well, we looked it up on Amazon, and they have it in stock for the same price as the Shark website, so why not use them? Because the delivery is free on the Shark website.

All of this nonsense was to save £5. She was willing to put petrol in her car and do a 100 mile round trip to save £5.

We offered to pay for overnight shipping. After her getting upset that she didn’t have a vacuum cleaner and she needed one right now, and looping back several times to all the times she helped us out, etc., she finally grudgingly agreed to ordering it herself from Amazon and we would send her some money to cover overnight delivery.

At which point she snottily said, “I’m not so hard up I need £5 off you.”

For balance, Raven said she sounded embarrassed about the whole thing. I can’t force myself to be kind.

And then came my birthday. She sent me a card covered in high heeled shoes. I’m mobility impaired and if it gives you any idea how much I hate shopping for shoes, I own Crocs. I’m not proud of this fact, but we are where we are. [Note from the future: I am so goddamned proud of my Crocs. I have four pairs.] And if I have trouble putting on shoes by myself, I’m going to find a way around it. Even if it is garish ugly plastic.

She asked me if I liked the card, and even before I answered, she defensively added, “I don’t know what you’re into nowadays.”

I gave up trying to tell her about five years ago, because it’s just tiring and insulting to be talking and have someone interrupt you and change the subject because they demonstrably have no interest in you. But on the other hand, if you stay too silent, having learned she has no interest in you, she will accuse you of being “surly”.

We planned to visit her on the Monday of our week off (my birthday was on Friday). Mum said no, she had errands to run. I asked when else she could do. Saturday. Only Saturday.

Fine.

So we drove down to see her. Before we set off, we set up our mental bingo card. The average visit with my mother will contain:

• “Isn’t it terrible about that three year old getting murdered?” or some variant of performative empathy.
• “I’m a good cook, aren’t I?” after eating something she did not cook (take-out, cookies from store, etc.). She will wait expectantly for laughter.
• She will burp and say, “Pardon me, I don’t often do that.” She will wait expectantly for laughter.
• She will stop listening when we talk / interrupt and talk over us until we give up talking.
• She will require tech support and will give almost no details of what’s wrong. “I have a virus” or “It won’t do letters”, but with no follow-through. That’s all the information you’ll get. And if you ask for more, all you’ll get is why she wanted to write a letter or what BT (her phone supplier) said when she called them.
• Did you watch that thing that you have no interest in? Here, let me explain every second of it.

Thankfully, because she doesn’t listen, Raven and I could say “Bingo!” to each other every time it happened. We hit all of the multiple times.

I’ll admit, I was making little to no effort. In fact, I’d sat there playing on my phone when Raven was out of the room, because I just didn’t want her to talk to me. I have been angry for years. The kind of anger that hits when you’re in a meeting at work, trying to find a way to track the attrition rates, when you’re making a cup of tea, while you’re having a wee – any goddamned time my brain stopped actively doing something, it would immediately revert to rage. It was like having a very angry screensaver go off in my brain constantly. I would lie in bed, unable to sleep, furious about things that happened years ago. I would wake up, the sun would pour in through the window, the cat would be purring delightedly as he slept on my chest, and I would be angry that she never once acknowledged what happened.

She’s 82. I started to worry that she would die without ever once being told that she was an awful parent. I never thought that it would do any good. Of course she wouldn’t say sorry. But it was very important to me that one day someone – and it had to be me – would tell her exactly how much damage she’d done. She needed to hear that I live in constant worry about “the secret rules” – something I first explained to Wing in 2001, before either of us were versed in mental health enough to realise it was actually anxiety. Crippling* anxiety that I would do something that seemed perfectly reasonable, and then suddenly someone would shout at me, because everyone else knows that of course you don’t do that. Only stupid people do that.

(* It’s ok, I can use the word “crippling” in that context. It’s not ableist. I’m physically disabled. I can wear the word “cripple”. I wore it on every sports day at school.)

We went out to lunch at a carvery, and she paid. As we were getting ready to go home, Mum said, “I’d better get your money.” Because I was boiling with rage at this point I didn’t want her money. She’d taken me out to lunch, and that was a lot more than she’d bothered with the last couple of birthdays and Christmases.

She always promises to send money, but she doesn’t do it. She says things like, “I’ll have to go to the bank,” (meaning in person), then adds something like, “Of course, it’ll be busy on the weekend, and I have to do the shopping on Monday, and I wanted to go to the library on Tuesday…” and it never materialises. And that’s fine. I don’t need her money. I’d rather she just didn’t say anything, better that than making it clear: 1) she’s lying; or 2) she forgot.

One year she absolutely refused to acknowledge my birthday. Raven turned it into a game, literally everything she said he turned into an anecdote about my birthday, no matter how unrelated.

“I shall have to mow the grass,” says mum.

“Someone was mowing the grass on Dove’s birthday. I still sang Happy Birthday to her! Shall we sing it now?” Rarely is my husband an overt asshat to my mother, so this was beautiful to behold.

“It might rain, so I’ll do it on Tuesday,” she says, ignoring him.

“Tuesday is four days after Dove’s birthday!” he says gleefully.

*a song plays on the jukebox*

“Oh. Music. Dove loves music. We listened to it on her birthday.”

These are not exact examples, but they were just as ridiculous. Give my husband a game, and he will win it. He’s like John Cena that way.

So, back to this visit. I said there was no need, she’d taken us out to lunch, and everything, and both of our tones were snippy. I said something like, “I didn’t realise you were giving me money, I thought the gift was lunch.”

“Well you don’t have to be so stroppy about it!” Mum snapped.

“I’m not being stroppy!” I snapped back. Even Raven replied at the same time, “She’s not being stroppy, Jackie.”

“Oh maybe you’d be happier if you left and never came back!” my mother yelled.

And that was when I lost it. I have been holding back four decades of rage. “See, this is exactly the problem! You immediately escalate to that!”

After that, it’s hard to remember what the back and forth was. But I laid everything out. The years of emotional abuse. The Christmas she went out with Eddie and didn’t come back until the day after Boxing Day with no explanation at all. That she hit me. That she threw me out. That she’s awful. She doesn’t love me. She doesn’t even care about me. She said that I keep her at arm’s length and I said this is the very best I can do. This is all I can manage after the years of abuse.

And she called me a liar. She said I was making everything up and there was something really wrong with me. That I was sick and twisted and I was making things up.

I yelled, “So I suppose you’ll say you never hit me.”

And for half a second, she flinched. There was something. Then she straightened up and said. “You’re a liar.”

Then she countered. “I fell out with Christine* three times after she said you were nasty. I defended you.” *[my primary school best friend’s mum, so I would’ve been between 5-10 years old when this happened.]

And I said, “Well done for doing the absolute barest minimum for the child you gave birth to.”

I feel like I said that on behalf of every child of an NParent. And I want you all to know that it feels exactly as good to say as you imagine it. Maybe even better. But you have to be aware that it’s a no coming back statement. Bridges aren’t just burned, but the docks are destroyed, boats are un-invented, and walls are erected. You’re done.

Then she went on to tell a story. Something like, “Do you remember when Kevin said to you that if you got pregnant by him and your child had the same hip thing as you, he’d make you get an abortion and then leave you, and then you’d be all alone, and you said, ‘I’ll never be alone’,” she paused and looked at me triumphantly. “‘I’ll never be alone. Not as long as I’ve got my mum.’”

So, this may possibly have happened. I have no recollection of it happening. And it doesn’t sound like something I’d say. And being brutally honest, I’m not even sure that Kevin was ever aware that my disability – which was only mild when we were together – was genetic or that it would get worse. Also, we never really talked about children, beyond those vague conversations you have when you’re just dating someone and you vaguely feel them out regarding the future. And you’re both imagining a gorgeous future where somehow you’ve managed to own a detached cottage in Cornwall, with a thatched roof and climbing roses up the wall that overlooks the sea, and you and your faceless partner are beautifully slender and healthy, and the kids are on a swing and laughing.

That might be an advert I once saw.

Anyway, during that conversation, he said he wanted a boy to play football with and I said I wanted a girl to buy toys for.

But I was 21 at the time and was not interested in actually having children at any point in our relationship. We never talked about it.

Also, why would he force me into an abortion and then leave? Why not just leave if he was that concerned with having kids with me?

So… I’ve got no fucking clue where that came from. I’m tempted to ask Kevin if he can remember any of this nonsense, but honestly, what’s the point? That’s just my curiosity as to how she got to that story, rather than whether it’s true. And he was drinking a lot back then, so he probably wouldn’t remember anyway.

When I mentioned the Christmas thing – which I haven’t covered in here yet – she hit back with, “Eddie said to me, ‘If Dove’s there, I don’t want to come over.’ So you’re not as popular as you think you are!” She said that she never abandoned me over Christmas. And then she added that before she left me alone, she checked I was ok with it.

So to summarise, my mother’s response to 42 years of abuse was:

• That never happened
• I defended you three times in the 1980s
• At some point, though I did nothing, I claim you said that I won’t be alone because “I have my mum”.
• My boyfriend (who isn’t my boyfriend) didn’t like you

At this point, Raven waded in and asked if I needed help. He walked off the minute voices were raised. I thought he didn’t want to be around the fight, but he said it was because he wanted me to be able to get it out of my system without interference.

When I said yes, he pointed out that mum wasn’t saying anything helpful. She was just being cruel. She had no idea what he was talking about. He pointed to the line about Eddie. Her counter was that I was being cruel.

Things kind of dissolved after that. As we were leaving, she made some kind of comment – I honestly don’t know what, something about me being sick or my dad being ashamed or something. And I turned around for one last hit, saying I didn’t know if Dad was a monster who knew what he married and was fine with it, or if she was a monster and he’d be ashamed of her.

Then we left.

And now it’s done.

Note from several months later: We weren’t done. She called me, acting as if nothing had happened.