There was a ‘last straw’ incident with my NMom back on her birthday, in September. Here is the email I wrote to my MIL about it:

‘Yes Saturday night/Sunday morning was not a great time. I keep kicking myself for not leaving sooner than I did–we all drank a lot, and after dinner at the restaurant, we sat on mom’s patio and drank more. I kept my head, so I recall a lot of what was said…it’s possible that my sister does not (she has never been able to hold liquor well). I should have had an exit plan going in, to skip the patio drinks, or to leave after an hour–there were multiple times I could have left, but I didn’t. 

We had fun for a couple hours, listening to music and talking, but then they started asking questions, challenging me again about moving back to NY. It was like a continuation of the previous weekend’s “discussion.” I finally mentioned something about wanting to move to a state that protect’s women’s rights, and so then we got onto abortion, and I think my mom said something like, ‘well I didn’t have an abortion’ like she deserves some kind of award for having me, and then it escalated from there. I said something about most abortions being done to save the life of the mother, or when the baby dies in utero, and that politicians are not doctors and have no business inserting themselves into that decision, blah blah blah, and then it ended with my mom looking me DEAD in the eyes, with the most vile look of hatred, “No one cares what you think.”  No effort to understand or even hear my point of view, period, discussion over.

I never get really, out of control mad, but the few times I have, it is always at my mother–and this was one of those times, I think it’s been 4 times total since moving back here. I told her she was in a cult, and in my haste to get out of there, the wineglass fell and broke on the iron table, I threw it away, got my stuff, wished her a ‘happy fucking birthday’ and walked out.

That’s it. I’m not proud of it, but there it is. I got home and started sobbing uncontrollably. As I said we’ve had other fights in the last 6 years, but this time was different. It reminded me way too much of fights we’d had when I was a teenager still living at home. There has been no progression, we basically have the same relationship we did when I was 17/18 years old. It confirmed to me that there is no hope, I was/am better off AWAY from her, away from her nasty comments and judgments about me and my life choices, her cruel lack of empathy, her complete disinterest in understanding me at all.‘

That incident was two months ago now, and since that time, I have seen my mother twice, once on Halloween, and most recently on Thanksgiving day. She does not call me, I do not call her, I am cordial to her at these social events, but there is zero relationship between us now. My husband has flat-out stopped greeting her, he cannot stand the sight of her at this point. He knows better than anyone the emotional mindgames that woman has put me through over the years, and he’s had enough.

Something inside me died that day, and I cannot go back to pretending it didn’t happen. The day after the incident I texted my sister that I would not be going to mom’s again for a long time. She has a habit of dropping in to visit my mom with her two kids and staying the weekend, and texts me to come down and visit, so I wanted to be clear that I would not be doing that any longer. So then my mom texted me ‘what did I do? I don’t remember, I’d like to know what I did’ all innocent like. I replied that we would have to talk about it sometime, that I wasn’t going to text about it. Then later, since my sister didn’t recall any of it, my mom joined in, saying she also ‘didn’t remember what happened,’ to which I replied, ‘that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.’ She has always tried to gaslight my injured feelings, saying I’m too sensitive, or that I remember things that didn’t happen, so I felt like she was doing it again BECAUSE SHE FUCKING REMEMBERS WHAT SHE SAID. When I left in a rage that night, I heard her shouting on the patio, ‘Are we just going to let your sister leave like that??’ all frantic; she remembers. And she has not once reached out to discuss it with me, so here we are.

Living with the choice to go low-contact is hard, but it does get easier over time. Moving out of state again will definitely help the situation for me. Living six doors down from her was certainly a mistake; perhaps things would not have gotten so dire so quickly if we’d lived further out. But the fact remains that the woman is a large child, and has never treated me well, has always resented me, has never been a mother to me, will never be the type of mother I wish I’d had all these years. It’s time for me to give up on her and live my life surrounded by people who love me and don’t treat me like garbage. I’m too old for this crap, and I have my own daughter to focus on.

Inevitably I’m the scapegoat for it all, I’m sure now she has compartmentalized her lack of relationship with me as my fault, because I’m choosing to be stubborn, besides she doesn’t even remember what she said, so I’m just too sensitive, blah blah blah. She has to come out the winner in every circumstance. That’s fine, she can spin whatever lies she needs to, but ultimately I will win when I leave this god-awful state in 6 months, never to return.

I need a do-over. I started this blog on the wrong foot, so I deleted my original post and am reclaiming the right to start over.

As my profile states, I recently moved back to South Louisiana after living in upstate NY for 15 years. What’s that like? You might ask, and many have. I have no good answer for that anymore. At least, not without cursing. What’s that like, indeed. It is literally THE SUBJECT of this blog, so stay fucking tuned and hold onto your fucking hat.

Consider this your warning: this isn’t going to be some feel-good mommy blog with puppies and crock pot recipes, hell naw. Since moving back “home”, I have felt increasingly cut off, isolated, ostracized, and SILENT, nay, SILENCED by everyone around me. Here at “home” I am not free to be myself, I have to hide who I am because who I am is DIFFERENT. You see I have always been different, I just left and went someplace where my difference was closer to the norm for 15 years. I am not gay or black or punk or anything interesting–I am a plain, 42-year old, married, college-educated white woman with one child. On paper, you can’t get much more boring than that.

Why am I having so much trouble adjusting to the Land of my Birth? Well you see, I’m not a red-blooded racist, I’m a pro-choice feminist, I have been married to the same man for 15+ years, I’m not religious, and I identify as a moderate Democrat. By upstate New York standards, that’s a pretty typical description; it’s when you add ‘and currently living in South Louisiana’ that it gets…interesting.

“And now the state line felt like the Berlin Wall”

Yes I’m quoting lines from “Crooked Teeth” by Death Cab for Cutie for dramatic effect. I hadn’t listened to this particular song in oh, maybe 10 years, and the line inspired me to restart this blog tonight. I’m not punk but I am into indie rock. Maybe I should have mentioned. Moving on.

Why am I silenced? When you find yourself living among people you spent most of your adult life defining yourself against, when you find yourself surrounded by self-righteous and hypocritical religiosity at every turn, when you find yourself surrounded by secret racism in your family and community, and you realize that southern charm is a simple cover for assholery, and you meet almost no one who self-identifies as a free-thinker, or is even capable of having a connected thought of their own much less participating in a reasoned argument, somewhere along the way you just stop talking and engaging and yes it’s like I’m in hiding now.

My husband and I find the situation we’re in strangely bonding. We feel like we are a secret society of two, forced into hiding because if They find us, They will make our lives a living hell. Because in Trump’s America, reasonable people who want to live and let live are anathema, we are an Enemy of the People down here. And I prize nothing more than peace in my life. It’s definitely an ‘us against them’ vibe.  I had tons of friends in New York; here I’ve managed to make maybe two friends I see eye to eye with on things and trust generally. It’s not as easy to assume affinity with people here, because they can be perfectly lovely and then suddenly say some racist bullshit and I’m like NOOOOOO it’s over.

“You can’t find nothing at all if there was nothing there all along”

Why did you move back? you’re surely wondering. Didn’t you realize what South Louisiana was and how different it was going to be from Upstate NY? The answer is, yes and no. I left my hometown of Baton Rouge when I was 14 and ended up finishing high school in New Orleans and went on to college there as well. So I finished out my ‘time’ in Louisiana in New Orleans, a very metropolitan city, especially as compared to where I live now (Baton Rouge). I did visit home when I lived away, and I somehow got hoodwinked by nostalgia for family interactions I was missing out on (extreme #familyfomo). Kids would grow up in a blink to me; a baby cousin would suddenly be in elementary school over the course of 5 or 6 well-spaced visits. Then when I had a child of my own, the longing to move home grew stronger: I wanted her to know of my people. I was growing disenchanted with my then-career of 12 years in NY, and then there was a job offer here and BOOM–we moved back.

The biggest joke of all? The family togetherness I moved back for doesn’t exist, at least not the way that I thought it did. Time and circumstance has created a distance between my mom and her brother and his family that I never thought possible. I moved back and discovered that the family togetherness I was missing all those years was gone, just like that. Maybe it did exist, maybe it didn’t; but even if it did, it’s unattainable to me now.

But you have your mother right?  Oh, bless your heart, kind reader, that will have to wait for a future post. If you stick around.