blah blah fear and insecurities blah blah

Hi darlings,

Well, I was just about to think my mom had been less crazy than usual this summer but this week I realized she was just delayed.
If I were in a relationship like this with anyone else, even my dad, I'd have snapped my ties, changed my address, and run like hell. But you just can't do that to your own mother. Over and over again, I remind myself that this is an exception, that women who act like me in relationships like this end up dead, and that it really isn't as bad as my unfortunately-still-teenage ass sees it.
This week has been fairly busy--the deadline for my internship Fulbright is next Wednesday and there's still an itinerary to be planned and recommendations to get in order. My boss has been all stressful and I've got to go in Mon./Tues./Weds. next week. Full disclosure, I also really wanted to go to Jersey this weekend.
But I haven't been calling Mom much lately, in fact I've been really lazy about it. When she wanted me to come up in the middle of the week to care for our cat who won't stop licking all her fur off, I felt super trapped between getting my work done in NY and doing stuff for my family that also needed to get done, and which I felt like I owed her. I'm really tired tonight and there's been this massive downpour and lightning storm. Plus I don't get my check till tomorrow and I literally can't get to CT and back. Not that this would stop my mom from coming down here, which terrifies me.
So when I didn't come tonight, she called and was FURIOUS, like last-July furious, and kept talking about how far I pushed her, how I did not want to see how far she would take this, how she wanted me up there NOW--which meant getting to New Haven, not my fave place anymore, at 1 or 2am.
I'm exhausted, I'm scared, and as I tell myself every year, I am too old for this shit. Last time I had to deal with her arrest and both of us being humiliated and crying like a bitch for nearly a week straight. I came thisclose to stealing my dad's car because she wouldn't leave me alone otherwise, but I'd hidden my set of keys. I've been picked up by friends in the middle of the night, dropped off again, seen that nothing has changed, and walked across town at 2am to wait at my aunt's house until dawn, when she gets up, so I could call my dad, who even then isn't always willing to come down and get me. I've hidden in closets, run through parking lots and busy streets and woods with nothing in my pockets and not even my watch, done all manner of crazy, unbelievable, probably very immature shit to get away from these situations. I've been woken up by police officers late at night as my mom walks around my dad's house screaming at me to come out on school nights and gone to my guidance counselor's office the next morning saying I couldn't go to class because everything I have is at home and my mom won't let me in. Whenever I try talking to my dad, he lapses into saying insulting things about her--taking my frustrations and using them as examples to justify his own lowly view of her, which I hate just as much as I hate her manipulations. It's as if the only two other people who witness this shit are too caught up in self-serving vitriol to realize the damage they're doing to us as a family.


 It's worse every year, and I can see the effects of these horrible Julys manifest in the next 11 months. My everyday relationship with mom gets weaker, more dishonest and pathetic: I will tell her almost anything if it will keep her temporarily happy. I don't even recognize our old, HS, Gilmore Girls-like relationship anymore. I can barely talk for weeks afterward, and little things that remind me of an incident fill me with terror, like a purse or clothing I remember wearing the day it happened. I don't even wear those clothes anymore--they make me so nervous I threw out or burned most of them. 


The older I get, the more I realize I'm too old to rely on other family members, much less adult strangers, to do anything for me, which is a logical and reasonable chain of events. I thought this summer, in NY, I'd be a little safer, and that getting away would be my means of safeguarding myself. I never wanted to feel that ice-cold knot of fear creep over me again or feel dizzy and faint as I realize I have dug myself in too deep and there is nothing I can do now but watch my humiliation and hope that it's over soon. that I'm still such an immature little shit, and that as much as my mom has problems I could be helping more. And that I never, ever seem to learn. I have no idea what's going to happen tomorrow, or this weekend--I'm going to go to work and maybe try to take the afternoon off to go in the city and disappear for a few hours and think. I told my roommates not to let my mom in if she comes down, but I don't want to think about how embarassed I'll be if she came to work or my place so angry. Still, if she cools it a bit, I'll probs go up there to check on the cats and actually do the things I'm responsible for this weekend. I just...I know that she keeps trying to manipulate me with these problems and disasters. I hardly know when something is an urgent responsibility she has to depend on me for, and when she just wants me to do something for her or buy her something. When she comes back up from this anger, the amount of relief--not happiness--that I feel makes me almost sick at myself, knowing that I used to be so much stronger. Many summers later, I've been worn down to a simpering mush, trying to do anything just to please people.