And then it goes down again...

After all my self-empowered speech in my last post, it’s all come crumbling down. It seems unfair to have two posts in the same day when I started out so well. My mother-in-law called me because we are doing our family portraits this weekend which was our anniversary gift to them. As readers of this blog know, my sister-in-law, their daughter, refuses to take pictures with us because…everything is pretty much about her. My mother-in-law and I were talking about this and other matters and she started in on my husband’s lack of a relationship with his sister. She started really pushing me about it but in a kind of whiny passive manner. I told her that I’ve spoken to him about it and that I agree that it would be nice if they were closer. However, my husband is a grown man! I can’t make him do anything and she kept hawking at me over and over and over about it. What am I supposed to do. He doesn’t feel close to his sister, that’s the way it is. Wanting something to be a certain way doesn’t make it so. In truth he has good reasons of his own and his family doesn’t seem to understand how very busy he really is. And how annoying his sister is for that matter. The problem was that she was hawking at me about it like it’s my job to fix it, to make him call his sister more often. Guess what? It’s not my job. I give him my opinion and I leave it alone. She just wouldn’t stop and she kept me on the phone for over an hour. What gets me is that she talks about his sister (she’s bipolar like me) and she acts like I don’t know what it’s like to have a mental illness. She said things like “Well you know you just have to take it into account when someone isn’t doing well.” but she says it like I don’t have the same problems. She’s always asking me what I’ve been cooking, “Have you been cooking up anything good?” What have I been up to? Blah, blah, blah. What have I been up to? What have I been cooking? Nothing and nothing. I’ve been in bed for weeks because of depression.  I’ve got freaking alters coming out of my ass. I don’t have the time or the energy to listen to her complain. Ah yes, the complaining! After she gets on me about this, she has to do her usual routine of complaining about her ailments. It gets better, while she’s talking my caller ID shows that my mother is calling me! Great! After I hang up with my mother-in-law I listen to my mother’s voicemail, yea I know stupid, duh. My mother sounds like she’s falling apart because she hasn’t seen me in a long time. But she sounded really bad which made me feel responsible. She said “I need to see my child. You need to make this happen”. I chafed at that last bit but I felt like I was being cruel when I wouldn’t let someone be in pain because of me if I could help. I wouldn’t do that to a person I don’t really like, so how could I do that to her. Yea stupid question, how about because she didn’t protect me from a child molesting relative, how about because she beat me until I moved out, how about because for years she left me in a house, at night, in the dark alone, when I was a little girl, by myself not knowing where she was or when she was coming back? How about because she is a mean- spirited, jealous, back-stabber? I guess that doesn’t matter because I agreed to see her two weekends from now. Yep, I’m an idiot. After I got off the phone with her I just lost it. I turned the shower on, got in and just sat there crying. My voice sounded like a child and it just got louder and louder until I was howling. I kept saying “I don’t wanna go.” but I sounded like a child. I realized that I was scared. I’m in my 30′s, how am I scared? I don’t know. I sat in the shower rocking back and forth until I was able to get up. Then I played Halo on my Xbox, so I could shoot things lol! I told my husband about my double mother whammy and he was actually great, I was kind of surprised, so at least that was one thing. I realized that part of my fear came from feeling that I had no control over seeing my mother. Her emotional state made me respond even though I didn’t want to, I felt I had to. No control, even though it was my choice, it felt like I didn’t have a choice. Fear and a feeling of no control, bad things for people like me. Like us.