I avoid my mother like the pandemic.  I mean, I check on her, I watch her when she's outside to make sure she's  not doing anything crazy or falling.  But I do hide out in my room most of the day, with my door locked.  I've also been to the point lately that I just don't anything to do with her.  I've been to this point many times before.  I never understood this feeling.  I mean, I get it.  She's mean and annoying (today she was rude to me over leaving a door open and it was very cold and she refused to shut it, even though I asked her several times to shut it, and then got angry with me because I asked so many times--she was blocking the door, so I couldn't go around her and shut it myself) and acts like a toddler.  But I never understood this all encompassing feeling of sick apathy (the best way I can describe it) that I get periodically with her.  Everything she says pisses me off.  Everything she does makes me want to crawl out of my skin.  The sound of her being anywhere near me sends me into a panic and I will literally run to get into a place in the house just so I don't have to have her address me (because when she does, it's always to a) bitch, b) ask for something she knows she can't have or do, or c) get into my business).  So I will avoid her any cost.  I used to get this way when we lived above her in the apartments that we lived in right before we moved here.  I also used to get this way when she lived a block away from me (which is why I went no contact with her to begin with).  And I know when I get this way, it's a sign I need a break from her.  Even so, I still never realized what exactly it was I was feeling.  It's not like she did anything hugely wrong that sets it off.  It's the day in and day out drudgery of lies that spill from her mouth like an erupting volcano.  It's the screaming (at nothing in particular, she just LOVES being loud--yet today my son and I were singing "Jack and Diane" with the radio while cooking dinner and she got pissed).  It's the baby voice she does.  It's the hillbilly voice she does.  It's the strange noises she makes when nobody is paying her attention (like shaking her head back and forth like a dog while her lips slap around making noise).  It's everything.  But mostly, it's the blatant lies.  

The other day she said "I told God that back when you and your ex were having all your problems, that if he brought you home, I'd quit smoking."  Mr. Brooks and I started laughing.  She said "What?"  I said "Last month, you told me that you quit smoking back then because you were going on the cruise with Beth (our old next door neighbor) and you weren't allowed to smoke.  And anyways, I had been living with you for almost three years by then, remember?  I just hadn't officially moved out.  AND, my ex and I were not 'having issues', not anymore than usual.  I just decided to leave him permanently because our entire marriage was bad.  You didn't quit smoking for me.  You'd never have done anything like that for me and never will."  All she replied with was a wistful look and said "Oh yeah, I forgot about the cruise.  Yeah, I was allowed to smoke on there, but I didn't want to."  I've heard that story more than once, about her quitting smoking for me.  But now I know the truth.  It never had anything to do with me.  She just told herself that and made that the new truth.  But her dementia has been making her slip with more truths.  But also not quite. 

Most of her stories are still laced with lies.  The other day she said  "I quit working because back in the day, I came home and found our table littered with beer cans, and your father was on the phone talking to his sister, and you weren't changed.  After that day, I never worked again."  Now, I always wondered what made her quit working.  And this could have happened in some way, shape, or form.  I know my father and his sister liked to get drunk on the phone together and cry.  It used to piss my mother off so badly she'd always walk into the room and hang up on my aunt (or so she says...she said she did that this time, too).  Now, as an adult, I wonder what they were mourning together?  I wonder what happened that was so bad in their childhood that they hardly ever saw each other and only spoke on the phone with each other every few years.  But I do know that I was not in diapers, as my mother stated here.  Saying I was running around with a dirty diaper.  I know for a fact that I was three or four when she quit.  I remember she worked at this place that served the best broasted chicken and she'd always bring some home and give me some.  And I have zero memories before age three.  And I KNOW I do not remember being in diapers.  Now, you could say "This is her dementia talking, she's mixing stuff up."  True.  That very well could be.  But what else is true that she ALWAYS mixes things up, always has, and tells stories that are full of non-truths (if we don't want to call them flat out lies).  

But some things are just lies.  Like her pretending we are one big happy family.  Or that she loves me.  Or that she cares one damn bit about anything other than herself.  Because if she didn't have dementia, or need my help?  Or if I wasn't in charge of her?  I'd be kicked to curb along with the garbage in a moment's notice, as soon as something or someone better came along.  Her not pressing me to have my cousins visit, or to tell me what they say, is not her respecting my boundaries.  Even though I tell her all the time that I do not want to hear about what is going on in their lives (they are the reason all hell broke loose and why I started this blog to begin with), she still would tell me.  But recently, she's quit.  Not because she respects me, but because she's scared of being put in a home.  The ONLY reason she's good to me at all (when she's good), is out of fear.  As a child, I feared my parents.  I feared they'd hurt me.  I feared they didn't love me.  I feared they hated me.  I feared their reactions, responses, everything.  But my mother doesn't fear me (which there is no reason to).  She fears the power I have over her.  

Recently, she kept bringing up making BIG changes to the house.  New picture window.  New driveway.  Tearing out the half-dead pine tree.  Putting in a deck or patio out back.  Shit like that.  Shit that is not only expensive, but also stupid.  Why?  Because we are not planning on staying here.  Once she's in a home, we're going to buy our own land.  And I told her this.  MISTAKE.  I know better than to tell her about our plans.  But yet I also could not find a reason why to say no to her demands for fixing up the house.  She kept saying "Well, what if I am alive another ten years?"  I said "Well, most likely you won't be sane (meaning her dementia), and you'll probably be in diapers.  Either way, you won't be living here."  She got angry and said "You mean you're not taking care of me until the end?  But you promised!"  I replied "I said no such thing.   I never told you I was taking care of you.  Not once."  So my power lies in this with her.  My power lies in the fact that I am not her nurse.  And I refuse to be one.  And she knows it.  So she stopped doing some of the things I've been on her about (she usually never quits, even if I ask her a thousand times to quit something) and this is why.  Because I have the power to put her in a home.  

I don't want this power.  I wish I had a sibling who wanted to take care of her.  I would be more than happy to let them.  But I am an only child.  So I'm stuck with the job (well, not really, but more so I chose to do it because I know she's a stubborn old bat and would not listen to one thing a doctor or nurse would tell her to do--she's defiant as FUCK, so she can't live alone).  I mean, one would think that having your mother have all the power she could over you for your entire life, that you'd be happy to have that power over her one day.  But I just don't.  She's not my child.  And I didn't ask for this.  She's the reason I am here.  So even by giving me the power over her, she still has power over me, because I'm stuck here doing this for her.  

Which is what I'm getting at.  Have you ever gotten divorced or left a long-term relationship?  There's a point when everything that person does or says makes you want to rip their faces off.  It makes you want to avoid them at all costs and makes you feel angry, yet numb inside.  It's like you're on the verge of running away.  It's how you feel right before you end things with someone.  But I can't end things with her.  So it's a perpetual cycle of feeling numb and angry and then trying to find your way out of feeling that way, just to eventually go back to it again.  Imagine being in a relationship with someone you didn't like but you aren't allowed to leave.   It's also how I felt with my ex every time he took the kids for the weekend after we divorced (the kids HATED him and hated going with him).  But eventually, he gave up his rights and we were rid of him (five entire years of silence from him! what a relief it was back then).  So I know this too shall pass.  That eventually, she'll be in a home.  

And I know I am torturing myself by letting myself get caught up in her lies.  By letting them bother me.  But how do you let it go when you see them every single day?  It would be different if I didn't live with her.  I could blame it on the dementia or not even care anymore.  But living here with her is just so toxic to me, and I don't get how to just move past it.  I though I could.  More than once.  But it never sticks.  Sometimes even in the same day I feel like shit again.  I got better while she was in the home in February.  Not at first, and definitely not during the last two days.  But for a few weeks, I was finally happy again.  I could let go of all the stress and just enjoy it.  I long for that feeling again.  Sigh.  

I'm also scared of moving on.  I'm scared of what the future will bring.  We've lived in poverty for so long and we always were depending financially on her.  Now we don't, but I know from past experience that can be taken away very quickly.  And we aren't living a life that would allow for poverty without her paying for her part of the bills.  So we need to build a new life that won't require as much money as it does here to live.  And we're working on it.  But it's scary.  It's one thing to dream about something, it's quite another to say "Oh, let's actually start working towards it".  Which I don't get why it's so scary, we've started over a thousand times and moved a thousand times, so why is this any different?  It just feels like it is for some reason.  

Anyways, I need to get out of my...what would be the word for it?  There really should be a word for this.  That "I'm so sick of you I am emotionally distancing myself from you" feeling.  Oh, I think it's similar to "emotional blunting".  But rather than feeling it all the time, I only feel it with her.  Can we call this "relationship blunting"?  Because that's what it feels like.  It's numb, yet with an underlying anger and sadness.  It's like being covered in something goopy and gross and you just want to get it off.  You need to "shed" this person from your mind, body, and soul and get their gross goop off you.  And when you can't, you go numb.  

I need some fucking friends.  I hate having friends because I'm annoying and get annoyed with others easily.  But it's better than feeling this way.  Having friends would give me something to do besides worry about what's going on in my home.  Okay, off to go find some friends or something.  Actually, I need to entertain my dog, because he is staring at me right now really intently and making some noises that I can't quite make out what he's asking me to do for him.  He's been staring at me for like ten entire minutes.  So I must go figure it out. 

Anyways, I wrote too much, once again LOL  So I'm going to go do something else now.