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I know what she's doing right now.  She's cooking, baking, and gathering ingredients for tomorrow's feast.  The feast she will be having with my replacement, BM.  She'll be baking pies, cooking turkey, putting together a disgusting stuffing.  My mother's cooking was well known for her blandness and poop-inducing properties (for real, after you eat a big meal of hers, you have to take a big ol' poop, sometimes with nasty side effects!), but she was also known for her massive amounts of food she would cook, even when just for two people. 

Growing up, my oldest cousin would come into the kitchen each year and yell "Damn, Aunt K, you cooked enough to feed an army!"  And he was right.  She always cooked enough food so we'd have leftover for a freaking month.  And then she'd bitch it always cost her so much money and how nobody pitched in.  But nobody ever asked her to cook that much, and nobody ever took leftovers home.  Ever.  But that's the way things are with narcs.  They create situations to bitch about.  If you notice in your own life with your mother, you'll see she does exactly that.  Practically everything they complain about is their own doing.  Not always, but a lot.  I mean, they have to keep a steady line of narcissistic supply, so they create it themselves.

And she has a strict schedule she sticks to when she cooks for holidays.  Hell, she has a strict schedule she sticks to every single day.  I personally feel that's due to her anxiety (which she denies having).  I think she NEEDS her schedule (even though she has nobody to come home to anymore) in order to feel sane.  I think she actually has pretty severe anxiety, but pretends that she doesn't (just so she can make fun of me for mine). 

Not me, when I cook, I cook and when it's done, it's done.  I don't give two shits how late it is, or what time it is.  I think part of that is due to the fact of growing up with such insane strict schedules (we literally ate dinner at 6pm every single night growing up, ON THE DOT).  I am not a schedule person.  Never have been.  So now, as a grown up, I am a little too lax on stuff when it comes to that.  But my family could care less and we ate Thanksgiving at 8pm this year.  Though my kids did a huge amount of the cooking (who would have thought THAT could happen??  They are really, really good cooks!). 

It was so nice, so relaxed, nobody yelling, nobody getting annoyed, just good food and awesome company (though we did have a mishap that we're still dealing with days later--the ham leaked it's sugar glaze on the bottom of the oven and there was smoke everywhere!  Still smells in here! haha).

I thought about her.  I thought about how she's hanging out with my replacement, and how she probably complained about us.  But it was a fleeting thought.  And for the rest of the day & night, I didn't think about her at all.  Until after dinner we all sat around talking about what we're grateful for and everyone started talking about how grateful we were to not have her in our lives anymore and then it became a conversation about how awful my mother was and all the awful things she did to us.  My kids started the conversation, and I let them talk as much as they wanted to, knowing they needed to get out how much they were hurt by her.  Even my youngest, who's 16 and was her golden child, reminisced about how she tried to pit him and his brother against each other and how she'd only buy him things to buy his obedience. 

So the holidays are here, and whereas once I thought I couldn't live without my mother, now I couldn't imagine having to live with her in our lives.  Narcissists leave a trail of hurt and pain wherever they go.  But at least when you go no contact you have control over that hurt and pain and you can choose to never have to ever have that in your life again.  When they are in our lives, we have no control over what they can do to us.  When you choose no contact, you can finally get that control back and never allow them to do anything to you again. 

I loved my Narc-Free Thanksgiving ♡  Even if the house was full of smoke, and I was sick with an ear infection, and we didn't eat until 8pm.  Some may see that as a bust.  But not me.  It was still perfect and awesome and wonderful!

All because my mother (and my narc in-laws) weren't a part of it.