Terrible

This is not so much written to make sense. I just want to remember.

My mom was wasted for the third night in a row since she started drinking again this past week. And M was crying about bed. She shouted up from the bottom of the stairs, all slurred, do I want her to "take care of him," meaning have him fall asleep watching tv with her on the couch, which to me is NOT a reasonable or healthy bedtime routine, and no, I don’t like when he cries either, but I am doing the best that I can and I DO love him. And so I said no, and she starts muttering downstairs that I don’t deserve him.

Hearing this, I went down to the landing and said, "If you’re going to be drinking so much, please just leave us alone. Even if I did want your help with bedtime, how could I trust you when you’re wasted?"

And she said these things, maybe not in this order: "Shut up, you’re such a god damned bitch. Fuck you. I’m a thousand times the mother that you are!"

Perhaps stupidly, I said, "Yeah, ask your three children." I am the only one of us who talks to her. M is the only grandchild, out of seven, that she is allowed contact with.

At this point I was scared she was going to take him or something and I sat down outside M’s bedroom door. He was still crying. It’s not that I don’t care about him or want him out of my hair at night. It’s that  I don’t WANT him to need to sleep with me. It’s not normal. I slept with her, my mom, until I was 14. It was weird and humiliating and a secret.

And then, oh god, it got worse. M quieted down to sleep within a couple of minutes and my mom started jovially ushering her dogs up the stairs and past his room, yelling in that drunk, jolly, I-am-so-nice-even-though-I-just-said-awful-things-to-my-daughter-because-look-at-how-much-I-love-my-dogs way of hers, which makes my blood boil. And M woke up and started crying again. So, again stupidly, from my post by his door, I said, "Gee, thank you for being as quiet about that as possible," and she turned to pure rage. She started yelling and pushed past me into the bedroom and tried to grab M out of his crib. We had physical contact, just forearms I guess, as I was repeating "Stop, oh my god, stop, stop," and it was just… bad. Traumatic-style bad that I never wanted my son to be around.

She screamed at me while I held him. While I held him.

Screamed that I am a horrible mother. Yelled and swore about how sick she is of me accusing her of nothing (drinking) and about how I have been abusive to her for years, and she has done nothing but HELP me, and how I am SO fucked up and M deserves SO much more, and "Who does he look up to and love? Who gives him support and consistency?! ME! Not you!" And "I don’t make him cry, YOU do!" And then she screamed "Shame on you!" at least three times.

I wish I could remember everything. I know the screaming went on longer than what would have come  from what I just typed. I know she drew attention to how fucked up I am twice, which is a silly thing for her to be highlighting… considering, I mean… how does she think I GOT this way?

I took M into my room and put him back to sleep, hugging him while trying to reassure him and listening to the heartbreaking things coming out of his mouth… "Mama sad? Hug? Jiddah (my mom) bye-bye? All done. Okay?" in response to my explanations of the brief bout of total sobbing I couldn’t really hold back. 

Since then I have spent the past three hours on alert and totally freaked out. In my head I have planned our "escape" down to every last detail, and I am too afraid to leave the bedroom to use the bathroom, too nervous to leave M alone in here, even though I may actually wet my pants. She had crazy eyes as she was yelling at me over his crib. I can’t believe she would go in and try to take him like that. Have him wake up to her screaming at me. Call me names and say horrible things that won’t ever go away for me. They’ll go away for her. If she was not so drunk that she doesn’t remember, her mind will erase the parts that she is ashamed of anyway. That’s what always seems to happen. She sees her role in everything as just well-meaning victim. Martyr. Loving fucking mother with three ungrateful bitches as offspring, somehow.

It is so bizarre. And it scares me. We’re leaving tomorrow.

And it hurts. The barbs of possible truth sting. My friends and the rest of my family would say that there isn’t any truth to what she said about me as a mom. But I don’t know. I am single and struggling and pretty fucking depressed a lot of the time and I don’t always parent the way I want to. But I have NEVER been as out of line as a mother as she was toward me tonight. As she usually is towards me.