Guilt and the Death of The Monster
I didn’t always call her The Monster. There was a time when she was just Mom. But as I got older and could see what was at the core of her being, everything changed. To say that I led a sheltered life was an understatement. I was allowed to do nothing, and that made me want to do everything.
As a girl my mom was my world. The person I always wanted to be with. I followed her everywhere, and I’m sure it got annoying that she couldn’t even go to the bathroom without me. But there I was, and she didn’t seem bothered at all. As I got a little older and had friends aside from her, she became jealous, and would tell me that these girls weren’t my friends, and that she was my only true friend. It only made me try harder to get them to like me. So I started exaggerating things to seem more interesting. I was lousy at it, and so lost friends because of it. So my mom was right, she was my only friend.
In grade school I was kept out of sex ed. What I found out later is that she was an extremely promiscuous individual, having kids out of wedlock and being forced by her own mother to give them up. Keeping me out of these classes was a way for her to keep me oblivious and in the dark regarding sex. I knew nothing, even in high school.
She picked all my clothes. Whether she bought them or made them. She made me her Mini Me. She dressed me like she wanted to dress. I couldn’t dress cool, or have the things the other girls had. So that led me to stealing what I wanted to fit in, but I was still an outcast. I found friends once I got to high school and of course she didn’t approve. I started to grow and stretch, and was getting out of her grasp. I always had bangs (or fringe, depending on where you live). I wanted to grow them out and part my hair down the middle like my friends, but she told me girls who didn’t have bangs were pigs, or the more common word, sluts. So no, I wasn’t allowed to grow out my bangs. I also wasn’t allowed to pierce my ears due to the same thing, so I ditched school one day, went to one of my friend’s houses and we did the ice, potato, and needle thing to pierce my ears. That hurt, and the holes were misplaced, but it showed her that I wanted my ears pierced so badly that I would resort to other means so she relented and took me to the mall to get them done the right way.
In high school I was pushing my boundaries. Because I couldn’t do anything when I asked if I could, I started to sneak to do them anyway. I would leave school in the middle of the school day and go to the beach. I wasn’t allowed to go to the beach with my friends on the weekend unless a parent was going (honestly, whose parents went to the beach with them on the weekend to supervise? None back then!), so this way I avoided all the begging and pleading and just went. I never started smoking like my friends did, but I did start drinking and doing the random drug here and there. By my senior year all of my classes were in the industrial arts building, as was my locker. I had drafting classes and was also my drafting teacher’s TA. I would pimp alcohol in the morning on my way into school, asking strangers to buy Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill or Ripple Red which I kept in my locker and poured into a cup from the Pup ‘n Taco next to the liquor store. Nobody knew except for my drafting teacher, who had a cup of his own. We’d sit up at his desk sipping cheap wine all during the day. I did acid a couple of times during the school day, which had its own set of problems, but I was a free spirit, and really didn’t care about anything but just forgetting about my shitty home life.
I grew up with one of my mom’s illegitimates, the one she kept, and that was no bed of roses either. He was horrible, beat the shit out of me when no one was looking and never really got in trouble for it. He broke my arm when I was eight. I had to beg to go the the hospital. At eight years old. I told her I thought my arm was broken and she told me I was being dramatic. Sure enough, my arm was broken. I wanted to call the police, but she said “you don’t call the cops on family”. Even when I had to go to the ER with a concussion (on more than one occasion), I was forbidden to tell the ER doctor just how I was injured. Because that would get reported. As it should have been. I ran away at 18. Who does that at 18? Me. Because I was brainwashed into thinking that I wasn’t an adult until I was 21. When I came back she tried to have me sent to juvenile hall because I was incorrigible, but they said I was an adult and she had no right to rule my life. She took me to a therapist. After interviewing me and then my parents, the therapist concluded that my mom was the one that needed therapy. That did not go over well, and she didn’t take his advice. I ended up taking myself to therapy later, and still go to this day.
There is so much more I can write about her, and eventually will. I started calling her The Monster in 2013. Not to her face, but to everyone else. Even my asshole brother got tired of her shit. One of her out-of-wedlock children ended up finding her with the help of a PI. She called me one day to confess. I just said, ok. She wondered why that was all I had to say and I told her that I just didn’t care. He and I have connected, and I tell him he got lucky. I wished that I was adopted out of my shitty family. Got a new family. But nope.
Her equally shitty sister called me some time in 2016 and told me to “Call your mother”, because she had been trying to get a hold of me and I had blocked her and just deleted her messages. I didn’t even want to hear her voice. So I called. She said she had taken me out of the trust. She wanted to put me back in but there were strings. I told her no. More phone calls and pathetic apologies and excuses, and I relented. She needed help and my brother wouldn’t help. So I put everything aside and became her helper. It quickly became apparent that she had developed some pretty severe memory issues. An extremely long story cut short, I put her in a memory care facility in September of 2017. Her dementia had gotten so bad she was a danger to herself. I sold the house to pay for her care.
She was in memory care until August of 2020. Covid had run through her facility at that point and was taking the memory care residents. A doctor in the ER called me one day after she had received a negative test result. She collapsed in the shower and was transported to the hospital. They were waiting on a rapid test and did I want to come visit her. I hadn’t seen her in over 2 years. She had only become more difficult and mean and insulting as her dementia took hold that I couldn’t be in the same room with her. Too much history and bad blood. My brother and his wife never visited her one time while she was there, so there was that…
I initially told them yes, but once they called back to say she was positive I couldn’t take any chances. That was Saturday. The ER doc told me she was being ravaged, and the best thing to do was to just let her go and decline treatment. I agreed to that. Once she was admitted, the attending physician called with a rosier picture that she could pull through with intervention. They wanted to do a battery of tests and scans. I told him that her brain was already mostly gone, so why prolong her suffering? He pretty much told me that I was a horrible human being and that this was my mother. The guilt that I felt for most of my life came screaming back. I started having an immediate panic attack, and told the doctor that I couldn’t make the decision and needed to call my brother. My brother was pretty much on the same page as me but with more colorful language. So I called the doctor back and told him we are declining treatment, just keep her out of pain and comfortable. That was Sunday.
By Monday she was in a coma. I hadn’t slept since that first call on Saturday. The pain of guilt is massive. My body ached. I wondered if I was making the right decision and not doing it out of the hate I had for this person. This thing. The monster that made me think and do horrible things. I called my brother and he told me I was doing the right thing for her. Even if she pulled through what would be her fate? She was at her expiration date. I called Tuesday morning for an update. I was on hold for quite a long time. When someone finally came back to the phone they told me that they were very sorry but that my mom was gone. When I hung up the phone I couldn’t talk. No words could come out. I only cried. I called my boss and still couldn’t talk. She knew automatically what had happened and told me to take care of myself. The job can wait. Was I crying because my mom was gone? She’d been gone for a long time already mentally and I was done with her for longer than that. It had to be from the guilt. The guilt and shame she made me feel every day from a very early age. The loss I felt was mourning for the relationship I should have had with her. The one she was incapable of giving me. I had forgiven her so many times only to see that she lied and only cared about herself and what she could get me to do for her. It got increasingly more difficult for her to manipulate me as the dementia took hold, but she still tried no matter how transparent she was. She thought she still had it. That hold.
This is the first I’ve been able to get something out and finish it. It may seem disjointed, but there is so much more in the beginning, middle, and end that I need to get out. And I will, it will just take me a little time to sort things out in a way that makes sense. It’s still a jumbled mess right now. Thank you for reading...
