Daily Nugget

Today, for our Memory Nugget, we only venture to the recent past.
This past Christmas as a matter of fact.

Not surprisingly, it is difficult to shop for my mother. Birthdays, Mothers Day, Chistmas are all a stress nightmare of trying to find the gift she'll hate the least.

A couple months before this most recent Christmas she hinted that she thought a great gift for someone older would be a bunch of home-made meals, all frozen and ready to pop in a microwave.

"Ah HA!" I thought carelessly, "she has just told me what she wants for Christmas -- but she thinks I'll never do it! So I'll get to really surprise her!"

I spent the next 6-8 weeks planning meals for my family that I knew were HER favorites, buying extra ingredients, making the kids suffer through stuff they had never before tried, and carefully freezing them into single-servings in disposable Glad-wear type containers. After I had about a months worth of dinners collected, I made a list of all the meals and labeled them.

She didn't take them home Christmas day, but that was ok. I figured I could take them to her house sometime in the next week or so.
I kept asking when I should bring them over, when she suddenly declared that if I wanted to do that I was going to have to clean out her freezer for her -- cause there was no room for that food.

Experienced with my mother as I am, I could see where this was going (I thought). She had decided that I needed to come over, defrost, and clean out the freezer she surely hadn't bothered to clean out in a decade.
I wasn't going to do it.
So I said I didn't have time for that.
(Note that we aren't just talking about going over and spending 15 minutes tossing out expired containers and then wiping it down. Thinking on it, I recalled what she had let happen in the past, and I knew we were talking about an all-day event of defrosting 6 inches of ice with a blow dryer and trying to keep the floor from flooding.)

Weeks went by with the freezer never getting cleaned, cause she wouldn't do it.
(Although, to be honest, since she had been doing nothing but complaining for months about how she had no food in the house, I would like fo know what -- other than brick-thick ice, was taking up all that space in her never-cleaned appliance.)

Cut to: March of this year.
I have been disowned for nearly three months...but still her meals are waiting for her in my downstairs freezer.
Daring to speak to her on Facebook, I posted as much.
She wrote back -- in a post to my sister (cause she couldn't talk to me) -- that she didn't want any of my leftovers...that they didn't cost me anything and took no effort or time on my part.

Sigh.

My dad always used to say that where mother was concerned, unless a gift/favor "inconveniences you in some way, it doesn't count."

Right again, dad.
You'd think at my age I woulda learned.

And Now We Have to Obsess About,,,,

....hurricane Irene headed towards the east coast.

Thank goodness for the hurricane, though, or she would still be posting constant facebook comments about yesterday's earthquake.

Any disaster is a good distaster, in her opinion. A prime reason to get excited and obsess. Not that she wishes people ill....that is not it. It is...THE DRAMA. Drama is the best way to live. I think it is the only way she truly feels alive.

She checks all the weather forecasts, finds the one that predicts the most severe conditions -- then obsesses on the possible damage.

Out of nowhere, apparently, she suddenly has several hundred dollars ($500 to be exact) to buy a generator. And, naturally, she wants my sister or myself to go out and buy it for her.

She knows we are likely to say no (due to recent "disowning" events), so she added in that she hoped $500 could mean she could buy one for us too.

Now..it is true I'd like a generator. Losing a fridge full of food is never good. And, being an Internet junkie...I think the router might "accidentally" get plugged into it too.
But accept one from her? No. It comes with too many conditions.

If she has $500 she needs to pay a bill and stop constantly posting on Facebook that she is too poor to keep utilities on or buy food.

Shaking it up

Crap.

She is being nice.
And I think I am not disowned anymore.

In short...the earthquake scared the shit out of her.
She called minutes after it happened. And, in those moments when I was cuddling my upset 4-year-old, I would have felt truly heartless to ignore her call.
I knew she would be hysterical...and she was.

I limited the call by explaining (truthfully) that my son wanted to talk to daddy, and we were still trying to get through to him.

But now she is again responding to posts on Facebook and such.

(Uhg....I hate talking about Facebook like that. I feel like I might as well be a 14 year girl arguing about who loves Justin Bieber more.)

Crap, crap, crap.
Being disowned is so much easier when she is being a bitch.

The Irony

The ironic thing about trying to discuss life with a BPD person is that, by time the "crisis du jour" is over, you are so emotionally exhausted you lack the strength to tell the story.

Even though I apparently remain disowned by my mother, she is now asking (via my husband) that I handle all her bills for her. Now, if she were a normal person, this would not be a big deal. But I know how this would play out.
All it would take is one phone call from me saying "You can't go to McDonalds every day this week, because I just sent out your bills and you have $50" for her to go ballistic.
She would scream about her financial problems as if I caused them...and then...within weeks...would start accusing me of stealing from her.
I could patiently itemize where every single one of her dollars went -- and she would still decide I had stolen money from her bank account.

Needless to say, even though this is a task I would do for her if she treated me with a shred of decency...since she persists in referring to me as "the other daughter who won't help me" (if at all), it is fair to say I am not going to jump at the chance to interact with her on a semi-daily basis.

There are only so many times I will volunteer to get into a boxing ring and stand frozen while someone beats the shit out of me. And this ain't one of them.