I want to share a slightly lighter, comical story about my utterly batshit crazy mother and my family's holiday experience at her house.
As a background, we have in the past been NC or VLC and currently riding at low-ish contact and mostly faked friendliness. I stay in touch because she's the only link I have to my low-functioning autistic brother and she isn't actively hurting me or my loved ones -- right now. But she has always hated my now husband and has only very recently regularly acknowledged that he or my stepchildren exist and aren't going away. This probably has something to do with the fact that we are now married and expecting our first child, and my mother's first grandchild.
So I threw her a bone and offered to do a belated christmas at her place with my whole little family and my brother. She was so excited and asked what she should get for the kids. I said, you know mom... presents. Just go to Kmart and get a few trucks and books and puzzles, they'll be happy. I could tell she was already pawing through boxes in her basement in excitement for what she could pass along.
I'm wondering if this is a narcissistic trait or just a trait of my crazy baby boomer generation mother. But my ENTIRE life she has been incredibly attached to THINGS. She isn't quite a hoarder but her home looks like a museum dedicated to our family history. She has weird oriental art, mismatched 1800s furniture, oriental rugs in every room, and every odd and end from whatever family member you can name. All these sets of china, silver she is always polishing, old clothes. She saved her mother's wedding dress and tried to get me to wear it at my wedding. It was atrocious. And my entire life she has expected me to inherit both her love of old shit and all of the old shit during her lifetime or when she dies. Before I broke my ties with her one of the many times, she had already managed to pass along a number of basement furniture items that I was being forced to move from place to place for pretty much no reason. When I got married, I said no more and started moving/dumping/selling everything we didn't want or need.
When she found out she was FURIOUS. Her main dumping ground, her only adult child with a home big enough to store the shit SHE didn't want to store, was getting rid of her precious things. The fundamental concept that if you give someone a gift, they can do whatever they want with it is lost on her.
And yet, more shit kept coming. Every phone call was "Oh you said you guys are looking for a bunk bed for the kids? I have the queen bed you were conceived in in the basement, you can have that! It's very nice it was made by the Amish... what do you mean you don't want it?? It's very nice! We paid a lot of money for it!" This would inevitably lead to anger and a pouting fit from her for a while.
So our Christmas rolls around. I drag my poor nervous family over to her house/museum. The kids are confused that they can't touch the giant marble elephants on the tables. They have to use coasters or get dirty looks. She's put the youngest toddler in a high chair from the 1800s that looks like it's about to knock him over and he's terrified. She draped a towel over the 8-year-old's dining room chair to protect the sacred chair and caused much offense in the process. I'm having flashbacks to my own childhood where I could never put my feet up on the sofa, the area under my dining chair would be inspected for crumbs, and I could only use certain towels in the bathroom because most of them were "decorative" only.
But then ladies and gentlemen, it's time for presents. We gave her nice, thoughtful gifts. An ornament with our baby's ultrasound image. A fancy sous vide. And she has given us enormous piles of garbage. My stepdaughter was such a trooper. She put on her sunniest face and performed the best display of acting I have ever fucking seen. Upon receiving my 30 year old American girl doll with raggedy hair and a dirty face she grinned and pretended to love it. The creepy paper dolls my grandmother painted decades ago, squirreled away in a corner of my mom's basement, now wrapped and presented to this poor child. An Operation game with a taped up box that my mom admitted "has a lot of missing pieces". More creepy dolls, where in god's name has she been keeping all these creepy dolls? My stepdaughter hasn't touched a doll in years and these little horrors certainly aren't going to get her back into the doll game.
For my three year old stepson? Old, stinky books with old stinky book smell. Piles of them. It could be worse, I suppose.
For me: baby clothes. Oh, that's nice, you might think. Maybe she actually went to a baby store and picked out some cute onesies for her new grandson? That's what my in-laws did. But of COURSE NOT. She gave me multiple sealed plastic packs of my brother's baby clothes from the 1980s. 30 year old baby clothes. Not just one or two special items, but nearly ALL of his baby clothes. So if I ever want to dress my son in a vintage sailor apron with matching hat, I have that covered. Oh wait, I don't, because we tossed them in a dumpster on the way home. And if she ever finds out there will be hell to pay.
But the crowning jewel this whole evening is what she gifted my husband. We have been together 5 years. In that time his parents have showered me with thousand dollar vacations, piles of holiday presents with everything I could have ever asked for, and more dinners out and in than I can possibly count. My mother has never given my life partner a damn fucking thing. His first EVER gift from her was... a used mini refrigerator. She bought it 11 years ago, used it for a bit, stuck it back in its box in a corner of her basement and then finally thought yes, that would be an adequate gift for my only son-in-law as he prepares to be the father to my only grandchild. She even bothered to wrap it and put a bow on it. Isn't that incredible?
Submitted January 03, 2018 at 03:07AM by Lepidopteria http://ift.tt/2qfe6nv raisedbynarcissists
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