I’m going to start off by saying that I have a hard time calling her ‘mother’.  I believe that title should be earned, and she lost the ability to earn it long ago.

I’m not even sure I can describe my mother in her entirety in one blog post.  For now, I’ll just give you the basics.

My mother likes to be in control.  Correction: she needs to be in control.  For 29 years, she controlled my life: where I went to school, where I worked, when and what I ate, when I went to the bathroom, what I wore, who I talked to.  Every aspect of my life was under her control.

The first time she lost control of me was when I was hospitalized last year.  For the first time, she couldn’t control me, and she lost it.  She called my doctor demanding that the staff tell her every detail of my visit.  She called the hospital, which against my wishes, told her I was admitted to the behavioral health unit.  She never stopped calling.  I didn’t want to speak to her.  Once she came to that realization, she started harassing the nurses, asking them where I was, what I was doing, who I was talking to, what was going on.  She would call more than a dozen times a day, even after she was told that it was none of her business.  I feared going back home, because I knew she would use my hospitalization as an excuse to be even more controlling…and she did.

My mother is also a pathological liar.  She doesn’t just lie about big things, she lies about the smallest, most insignificant things.  She will fight you if you confront her about it, too.  She would deny that she said or did something even though multiple people witnessed it.  She made up the most outlandish stories and spoke as if she believed them herself.  Worst of all, she made up lies about me and spread them to everyone I knew – and most believed her.  Who wouldn’t?  Why would a mother lie about her own children?

My mother has always had a need to be the star of the show.  If I had an achievement, she would turn it around to be something of her doing.  If you started to tell a story and it wasn’t about her, she would interrupt you and start talking about herself.  She would find any way to try to relate anything to her.  If in some way her ego was threatened, she would lash out.  Whenever I received recognition at work, she took it as an insult to herself and lashed out at me.

When it wasn’t about her, she threw herself a pity party – which brings me to my next description – overly dramatic.  She would turn the most insignificant occurrences into something major.  Her emotional reactions were always magnified.  If someone made a comment about the food at dinner, she would break down in tears while throwing kitchen utensils and plates across the kitchen at us.  If something happened at work, she would cry and scream at us, since she couldn’t do it at work.  She believed everyone was out to get her in one way or another.  We learned to deal with her temper tantrums by just ignoring her, as you would a temperamental child.

My mother was emotionally cold.  She was never the comforting, loving type of mother that every Hallmark card seems to depict.  She showed more affection to her cats than to her own children.  She knew how to act in public, though.  She had her caring, concerned, loving mother routine down perfect.  It’s almost scary how good of an actress she really was.  She had, and still has, everybody fooled.