Divorcing Mother: When your mother lets you down

What do you do when your mother is a disappointment? It’s not especially something you see covered in blogs or writing. Mothers are supposed to be practically perfect. Hold on, that’s Mary Poppins…
Sadly, I’m at the point where I’ve had to throw my hands up and admit that my mother has been a disappointment. This is not new information. In fact, when I left home for university back in 1995, it was mostly to escape her and the small town mentality that she represented.

When I was a child, she was quite wicked. Nothing I could do was ever good enough. She frequently compared me to a cousin (who ultimately ended up mostly failing at life), and had an endearing habit of beating us with wooden spoons when we got out of line. I distinctly remember wooden spoons actually breaking as the blows rained down on me.

Things changed after I went to university. It wasn’t commonplace in the extended family to go to uni, so it was a matter of pride that I’d got in. But not so much the notion that I’d moved away from home.

And eventually my mother effected an image shift from being bitingly cruel to being this dotty old grandmother figure. If you’d met her after I went to university, you’d have encountered a slightly vacant woman who seemed to thrive on embarrassing her son. And that was fine for many, many years.

The serious bit

Everything changed last year within a couple of months of my father dying. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll be familiar with the story.

Sadly, things quickly turned to crap. In hindsight, if I was able to go back to the graveside and tell myself one thing, it would be “Run. Run like hell.”

I’m not gonna go into the whole mess of a situation that arose. A family member (my sister) began acting out in a big way and caused a whole lot of trouble. I spoke to my mother and other sister about this, and urged them to deal with her behaviour. They didn’t, and she continued to cause problems.
The bottom line is that the person in question was becoming dangerous, and for the protection and safety of my family, we decided that we couldn’t visit my parents’ house in future. I’m not saying this lightly – ‘loose cannon’ doesn’t even begin to describe my sister. I could tell some horror stories, but that’s not the point of this post.

This decision – corroborated by doctors, solicitors and even a bereavement counselor I briefly consulted with – was not taken lightly. But it was met with hostility from my mother, who had slowly reverted to the bitter, sharp tongued woman I knew growing up. She alternated between feeling sorry for herself and being hostile towards me for taking this decision.

I’m painting a very vague picture here, but that’s a deliberate decision on my part. I couldn’t convey in a handful of paragraphs the pain and frustration my mother and sisters caused in the wake of my father’s death. It made an already sad situation needlessly worse.

The letter

So I wrote her a letter. She – and my younger sister – had taken to filling up my answerphone with messages asking us to get in touch. For the last fortnight. But the damage had long since been done.
Tellingly, these were not messages to say “We messed up. Sit down and talk with us and we’ll try and work this out.” They were “Poor us, how did we end up with this awful schism in our family?” And my answer – delivered in glowering mutters to the answering machine – was “Because you did nothing to stop a bad situation becoming worse. You simply pretended it wasn’t happening and then allowed the troublemaker back into your life without dealing with her.

I decided to write a letter. That letter said we can’t be a family anymore. You let us down. You let me down. And somehow you still don’t acknowledge your own part in the events leading up to this. You’ve let someone disrupt your family for 20 years. Someone who actually pushed my wife down stairs when she was pregnant and punched her own sister in front of two toddlers over a remote control.

I won’t expose my children to that ever again. And I can’t forgive my family for allowing those events to unfold and cause the pain that they did. You know what it is? I can’t look my mother in the face again for the betrayal and hurt that she caused. And yet she still perceives herself as a victim of circumstance, which makes me even angrier.

Why I’m writing this post

I’m sorry this post is so frustratingly vague. My reason for writing it is that the vastness of this episode in my life overshadowed everything else.

There have been events in my life that I want to write about, but I needed to get past this. Bloggers out there will understand that I needed to exorcise the demon before I could move on. This was a horrible, stressful, painful time in my life, and it hurt me more than I could ever express in one post. There’s a book’s worth of material in this. One post could never do the last year justice.
So I’m writing this to draw a line under a horrible chapter in my life. It’s over. It might seem harsh and melodramatic to tell your own mother never to call you again, but sadly it’s necessary.
On the plus side, there’s nothing like nastiness and adversity in others to make you realize how much you love your wife and children. They’re really been the most supportive and loving people over the last year, and I’m so glad to have them around me. The next post will be a glowing post about the children, I promise…