Feels like the first time

So maybe I’ll take time to write a real first entry rather than a “testing, testing” type entry.

Rewind four years to where we last left this story.

We were soon to head out to North Carolina (hence the CarolinaBound). We boarded a train in Tacoma and a few hours later I cried as the train pulled out of the Portland station. I begged Chuck that we get off there. I knew moving to North Carolina was a bad idea. I just felt it in me. The tears and pain were unbearable but we were on our way.

I knew my mom’s boyfriend had been arrested for manufacturing meth in their home. I knew that the cops told her it was likely her stroke was caused by it. What I didn’t know was that when she told me she had no idea he was doing that and it was a complete surprise to me that she was lying to me. What I didn’t know was that the November prior he was arrested for possession of meth and she bailed him out. What I didn’t know was that when we were still in WA and we told her that if she went back to him we would have to cut ties. She had been with him for over ten years and this was not the first time he did shit like this. He was selling cocaine on her dad’s land and she didn’t leave. We found a bag with a rock in it (that we now know is meth) in a load of his laundry at my grandma’s house. My mom blamed my brother for it. We all knew it was her boyfriend’s but she blamed my brother and never left. She promised us she was done with him. What we didn’t know is that she was never planning to leave him. She told me he was moving out and that because he was on the lease she couldn’t just kick him out. She said she had a plan to move out. And then when she would visit us in our apartment in NC she would bring gifts from him to the girls after we said NO connection to him ever. Shortly after she was bringing gifts from there our youngest daughter had a seizure. No one knows why and I have to wonder if something that my mom had brought had meth residue on it and that’s what caused it. Well fast forward to August 2014 and we find out that my mom is not moving and out and she’s not leaving her boyfriend. They are in fact back together. When she realizes we know she realizes we told her we would be cutting ties. We told her that in February before we even moved.

In nearly 4 years I have not talked to my mom.

She blames me for everything. She thinks it all has to do with her relationship with him but it’s a culmination. She lied. She always lied. She would lie to my daughters. She was yet again putting a drug dealing asshole before her family. It was the same as when I was growing up and I didn’t want that for my girls. How was I to break the cycle if I gave the cycle maker a pass?

Do I miss her?

Not anymore. There are times I ache for the fact that my girls don’t have my mother in their life as their grandmother but then I realize that it was toxic. Children do not deserve that kind of toxicity.

I have never once bad mouthed her to family. I’ve never once gone into the details of why this all happened. They know what it had to do with but I haven’t called them and ranted. I haven’t objected when they rail me for the lack of relationship. My brother didn’t talk to me for three months and once he finally did he yelled at me. He was angry with rage. Not so much that I wasn’t talking to her but that she went and told him some of my darkest horrors that involved his father from when I was growing up. In order to hurt me she told him how his father did terrible things to me as a child. He thought I was lying. She wanted to hurt me.

That’s the thing, I never cut ties to hurt her. I cut ties to save my girls. I had long ago been told by a great psychologist that I was seeing that my relationship with my mom was toxic and that if things didn’t change that it would be best to part ways. I listened to what she had to say but maintained the relationship for another ten years. I was willing to put up with it because I felt I had no choice.

There was no way that it was going to be easy or that it wouldn’t hurt but as Mae West put it “I never said it would be easy, I only said it would be worth it.”

And yet that’s not even the gist of the big things that have gone on since we last left but I’ll get to that soon enough!

For now, homework is calling my name.