I Want to Understand

I read a book recently called Dreamland by Sam Quinones.  It's about the opiate epidemic in the US and how it came to be, from medical journal articles to pharmaceutical companies to pill mills and the Mexican dealers selling black tar heroin in small towns.  I don't know if my mother is/was on opiates.  But I assume so based on their being the norm at the time and the side effects I saw.

I've started reading a book about benzodiazepine use and addiction because benzos seem likely to have been prescribed to my mother too, based on her complaints and again what was common to prescribe.

I want to understand what happened with my mother.  The more I read, the more I feel unsure.  How much of her behavior was because of how she is?  And how much was because of what she was taking?  How can I find out what she was taking?  Even if I reached out to her and asked, I don't think she'd necessarily tell me.  And if she's as sedated as Dante said she was the last time he visited, who knows if she'd even remember what she has taken, or what she used to take, if she replied at all.

The only place I think I might be able to find a record of what my mother was taking is maybe in my grandmother's letters to my cousin.  But I haven't looked at them since the time I read through them for genealogical information and realized my grandmother -- the sanest, kindest, highest functioning person in my extended family -- habitually talked about me behind my back.  She judged me for not being concerned enough about my mother because I didn't come to her with my worries or tears.  I cried regularly about my mother, just not to her.  I remember sitting in my dorm room after my mom really went off the deep end, spending hours Googling her symptoms and behaviors and trying to figure out what was wrong with her.  I spent too much time on WebMD and the Mayo Clinic website because I thought it was a disease.  I feel so stupid.

It was years before I realized it was the pills, and even now as I read about opioids and benzodiazepines, I'm just now realizing just how much can be explained by the pills.  Example:  I thought when I didn't hear from my mother for days or weeks at a time (glorious breaks from her calling to yell at me, apropos of nothing) that she was going through a deep depression.  But she was probably just on pain pills.  She was probably mostly asleep.  The muscle weakness my mother insisted was some sort of progressive illness like multiple sclerosis and the doctors and I explained away as muscle atrophy from her refusal to get up and walk -- a common side effect of extended benzodiazepine use.  I should probably just do a search for most commonly prescribed pills in 2003 if I want to know what she started taking when she went well and truly off the deep end.  She had gone to the doctor to treat her sadness at the death of her brother.  I had asked her to just grieve instead -- told her her feelings were normal and wouldn't benefit from antidepressants -- but she took whatever that doctor gave her anyway.  This was six or seven years after the first time I saw her high on Soma (Carisoprodol, a muscle relaxant and non-benzodiazepine hypnotic).

I feel like an idiot.  I didn't understand anything about drugs.  I remember hearing about celebrities developing addictions to pain pills after surgery or injuries, but I didn't understand what that even meant or what that addiction looked like.  I didn't understand what being high on pills looked like.  When it came to what being high looked like, I had only seen caricatures of stoners in comedies on TV.   It seems from my grandmother's letters that everyone realized my mother was addicted to drugs but me, and I feel like an idiot.  When I was a freshman in high school, my mother had explained her behavior away with menopause (on the rare occasion she admitted it wasn't just me who was acting differently), and I was desperate to figure out what had happened that made her this way and how to prevent it taking hold of me too, since I had inherited half her DNA and assumed all of this was just happening to her and would do the same to me.  I had never seen my mother partake in so much as a glass of wine, and she was adamantly against any form of drugs.  Except the ones billed as medicine.  Then her adage of "little do good, lot do better" seemed to come into play.  Even when it came to Tylenol, she urged me to take more than the amount indicated on the bottle if the pain was "really bad," and she took god knows how many Tylenol herself everyday for as long as I can remember.  I wonder what her liver looks like.

I don't think my mother had any idea what she was getting herself into when she started with the Soma.  This all started in 1995 or 1996, around the same time doctors decided pain was "the fifth vital sign," no one should endure pain ever and, if you are in pain, you should drug yourself out of it.  Oxycontin was new to the market and a hot, highly prescribed "non-addictive" opioid (spoiler alert:  it's highly addictive and has killed a lot of people). 

The good news is I don't have to worry about inheriting any of my mother's madness, even come menopause.  The other good news is I understand more about pharmaceuticals now than at least 85% of the US population.  And I know not to take anything a doctor prescribes until I've thoroughly vetted it online and, even then, not if I can do without.  If I ever take morphine, it'll be because death is imminent because I don't want to have to try to STOP being addicted to it.  Had I been a high school athlete or gotten into a car accident that left me in pain, I probably would've been prescribed opiates and quite possibly ended up a situation like my mother's.  It happened a lot to other people at that time and for years afterward.  The only reason it didn't happen to me was luck.  But now I know at least.  Now I have information.  And I guess it's good my mother ended up in a nursing home after her last suicide attempt and her refusal to take care of herself (and our family's collective refusal to take care of  her anymore) because she might have died of an overdose by now if she were left to her own devices and dosing schedule.

My mother is the case study I teach my daughter.  They still do DARE or some variation on it in her school, but it doesn't go into enough detail if you ask me.  The "just say no" tagline implies a hit of pot and an oxycodone are equivalent, and if a kid comes to see that something like pot doesn't actually destroy their life, they might just assume the other one won't either.  Lack of nuanced understanding is dangerous when it comes to what we put in our bodies.  My mother's insistence that alcohol and sex are evil while indulging in prescription drugs and junk food multiple times a day is a good example of how black and white thinking fails us.

I wonder what she would be like if she weren't on the drugs.  I mean, she fit the criteria for borderline personality disorder before any of that.  But she started taking hypnotics and god knows what else when I was in eighth or ninth grade.  What would her non-drugged behavior even look like to adult me?  I don't know.  I don't trust my childhood memory and childhood interpretation of what she was like before the drugs.  She wasn't all bad by any means.  Sometimes she was great, and I loved her so much.  Would she still have drained my bank account?  Would she still have tried to turn my grandparents against me?  Would she still have tried to turn me against my dad?  Yes.  That started before the drugs.  Telling me he wasn't my "real" father and that I couldn't talk about it to anyone was earlier.  Telling me he'd never wanted me and had wanted to beat her into miscarrying me was earlier.  Telling me she'd let me decide if she should divorce him and that we'd be poor and have to find somewhere else to live was earlier.

I don't know what she'd be like now if not for the pills, but I trust this particular scenario has played out as well as it could for me.  Sometimes, since reading Dreamland, I think about reaching out to her.  I hadn't realized until that book just how much the deck was stacked against her NOT becoming an addict.  But I don't want her to have my phone number, and I don't want the nursing home to start demanding money from me (I'd never pay them, so it would just be frustrating for both of us).  I'd like to check in on her and see how she's doing and what she's doing, but I don't want to interact with her.  I'm not sure if it would be worse to let things go and maybe have some regrets when she dies, or to take the chance of appearing on her radar and what backlash that could prompt.  I wonder what drugs she's on now.  I wonder how she feels, or if she feels much of anything at all.

Mean Jokes in Rhyming Verse

I've mentioned before how writing mean poetry has been one of my coping mechanisms since childhood, especially for processing impotent rage.  I wrote this poem the morning after the US presidential election.  It's based on a real experience I had that day.  If you're a Trump supporter, avert your eyes now -- I can promise you won't like it.


Today an old man at the school I did spy.
He edged around trying to catch someone's eye.
When no one heeded, he blasted aloud, 
"Nice weather today."  A nod from the crowd.


Then next he said what he'd come there to do:
"Nice weather, and a nice ELECTION end too!"
This actually happened; it isn't a joke.
No one under fifty acknowledged he spoke.


"Clinton's a crook and an insider too!
Trump wants a wall -- he'll know what to do!
Bengazi and Email!  The Vietnam War!
I know what is what here!  I'm 74!


"I too ran a business; we're mostly the same.
I know he's successful 'cause I know his name.
He could have retired -- he's 70 too!
He's fighting for us though, a patriot true.


"It wasn't for me that I voted this way.
My kids and grandchildren -- they'll thank me one day.
He had a TV show.  He'll know what we need.
I like that he's rich and he can't really read."
 

The old man then nudged me.  A push to reply.
But still I said nothing.  You're low.  I go high.
I stepped to avoid him, not wanting a fight, 
But also I'm nervous -- he's old, male, and white.
 

They say to be kind to both sides of the aisle,
That we can have friends whose beliefs are quite vile.
Dear reader, I just don't see how that can be.
My friends respect women and Muslims and me.
 

If you don't respect me, or people of color,
If you're a racist or a lady-mauler,
Then you are scary, and you are wronger
And hopefully you will not be here much longer.
 

You're probably stupid and probably white.
You're probably old, and I'm probably right.
You're probably male and -- if you're a lady --
You're likely self-hating and possibly crazy.
 

You make bad decisions; don't try to deny it.
But when we're in person, I will be quiet.
I don't want to fight you, your dog, or your gun.
I don't want to hear it; he's already won.
 

YOU haven't won though, of that I am sure.
Your whiteness comes easy, but you'll still be poor.
He doesn't love you.  He wanted the crown.
Your job's still gone elsewhere; your doctor's still brown.
 

But you lit the match (and a few matching crosses),
You'll feel "great again" while the sane count our losses.
I'll tell you the truth and I won't spare my ire:
I hope you die in your own dumpster fire.

My Cousin's Half-Brother Was Murdered

My cousin Ellie's parents divorced before I was born.  Her father was my uncle who got his high school sweetheart pregnant and then dropped out of high school at age sixteen to get married and take a steady union job (the only job he ever had, as far as I know) at the local steel mill like his father before him.  He had a cocaine problem as an adult and ultimately died of a heart attack in his fifties, a few years after the steel mill laid him off.  Her mother was my uncle's high school sweetheart who got pregnant with Ellie at age seventeen.  We all went to the same shitty high school in the same small town where we all grew up, albeit decades apart.

Ellie's mother went on to remarry, and that marriage lasted for the rest of her husband's life.  I didn't know this until recently.  She had another child too -- a son -- several years older than me but a decade younger than Ellie.  I hadn't known this either.  I only know this now because Ellie started posting on Facebook last week that he was missing.  She said he was 40 but, due to a car accident and traumatic brain injury, mentally closer to 12.

His body was found in the woods yesterday; he had been murdered.  I don't know the details, but apparently someone does because the police have already arrested two young men for the crime.  Their photos are in the news.  Their faces look like they were made for punching, and I hope they get everything they deserve.  I hope they are scared.  That's the worst thing I can imagine personally -- being scared and cut off from anyone who might be able to save or comfort me.  It's what I imagine most people would experience while being murdered.  I hope they feel it through a lengthy trial and a multiyear prison sentence.  I hope they can't live with themselves but have to for a really long time.  I've looked them up on Facebook, and they're both very much poor, uneducated white trash, so at least they shouldn't be able to buy their way out.  I don't think the currency of being a white male extends far when your victim is an equally white male.

It was when I was thinking all these thoughts that I realized I did know my cousin had a younger brother.  We went to elementary school together.  I met him once, but I had forgotten.  It was the time my mother and I were watching Ellie's daughter, Wendy, for a few days.  I remembered bringing her to school one morning while my mother was dropping me off.  I remembered being approached by an older boy and girl who inexplicably knew baby Wendy.  My mother told me they were Wendy's uncle and cousin.  When I asked if they were my family too, my mother told me no.  I was confused and disappointed.  I always remembered the cousin's name because it was the same as my own, but it occurred to me today that I remembered the uncle's name too.  I think he had been in fifth grade when I was in kindergarten.  If I could go back in time and watch events unfold, these are the sorts of mundane things I'd want to see again.  I'd want to know what else I missed, who else I met without realizing.  It was an awfully small world I used to live in.

His mother doesn't know yet that he's dead.  She's in the ICU recovering from surgery.  I met her once too when I was younger.  She was really nice.  She worked as a stagehand in the costume department for the US tour of Phantom of the Opera, and she showed me around backstage as a favor to my mother, even though we weren't technically family anymore.  I hope she's okay.  Ellie is having a hell of a time.

I don't understand murdering people.  I understand the allure of committing violence -- I've been made powerless too many times not to want to do it to someone in return -- but if your life is going badly and you feel worthless, I expect you either to learn to cope or simply to internalize it as a quiet shame like the rest of us.  You don't get to kill someone just because you feel bad.  And reading these murderers' Facebook pages, one of them appears pathetic and self-pitying to the point that -- had he not been a violent criminal -- I would have simply felt sorry for him.  He battles his weight, he doesn't have many friends, and his own father doesn't seem to care much for him.  The more I learn about someone, the more I tend to relate to them and the less I can be angry, but this piece of garbage person also killed someone who could not defend himself and whose family now has to live with the fallout.  He should kill himself.  If he were to kill himself, my only regret would be that he didn't do it before murdering someone who actually had friends and family who loved him.  (I kind of want to write that to him in a letter.)  The other murderer just sounds like a really stupid sociopath who is bad at not getting caught.  I understand feeling violent and wanting to hurt someone else.  It's what I feel about these murderers, for instance.  It's what I've felt when people have physically hurt or restrained me and made me feel powerless.  It's a horrible feeling.  I get it, and it doesn't ever go away completely.  And I have zero empathy for the people who act out their violence on others.  There are too many other options for that one ever to be acceptable.  Violence is the act of a despicable coward who cannot sit with his own feelings.

Books Intended for DC Adults

There are quite a few children's books on the market geared toward telling your preschooler that s/he was conceived via donor egg or sperm, but I can't seem to find a book intended for the masses who learn they're donor conceived somewhere between adolescence and death.  Isn't that odd? 

I don't collect a lot of things, but in the last few years I have found myself collecting the few books on donor conception that take into account the perspectives of DC adults.  I only own them because my library doesn't carry them and they're typically old and sometimes out of print.  Lethal Secrets is a good one.  I'm reading Experiences of Donor Conception now, which has different sections focusing on the major players in the DC Trifecta (donors, intended parents, and offspring).  AnonymousUs has a lot of first person stories from the Trifecta too, and Alana edited together a "best of" sort of book from the site, so there's that.  But I think there should be a "how to" book, with sections on "so you just found out," and "tips for coping," and "how to search, if that's something you might be into," as well as "other resources." 

Such a book would be beneficial not only for DC offspring but also for any parents who want to tell them but think it might be too late when they reach out for resources and the closest thing they come across is The Pea That Was Me.

If you know of a book intended for DC teens and adults who are just now finding out they're donor conceived, please let me know.  And if you don't know of such a book but have ideas about what else it should contain, please let me know that too.  If there really is a void on the topic, I'd like to put something together and put it up on Amazon, even if the primary thing it says is,  

"Your feelings are valid, 
you're going to be okay, 
and you are not alone." 

I've found too many bewildered, newly discovered DC people reaching out for support on unrelated and tangentially related forums (I'm looking at you, most of Reddit) and, instead of empathy or validation, they get hammered with "you should be grateful to be alive" and "but you were WANTED" and "it doesn't CHANGE anything" and "think of the donor's PRIVACY!"  There has to be a better way.

Satirical Rhyming Verse

One of the ways I've processed my anger since childhood is through satirical rhyming verse.  This is the sort of passive-aggressive, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog coping mechanism I learned growing up with my family.  Where sharing your feelings would get you in trouble for inadvertently offending a parent or for "being too sensitive," mocking whoever upset me didn't seem to have a downside back then.  Not even my parents wanted to lash out just to be accused of "not being able to take a joke."

I remember turning in a poem in elementary school about going out to dinner with my family.  Each stanza featured a different dish my mother sent back for its unexpected imperfections.  As I recall, she was more regal in my version, but also less embarrassing.  I drew a picture of her cheeseburger and chocolate malt "with dots in it," as she'd complained repeatedly to the waiter, to accompany the poem.  I got an A on the assignment, as per usual, and it even hung on display for my school's poetry month, to my mother's relatively quiet embarrassment.

In high school I penned a series of mocking poems about a character named Fattie.  Sometimes Fattie was my mother; sometimes she was a classmate.  They were vague enough in terms of detail that the people I wrote them about could never seem to identify themselves.  I encouraged them to read the poems and then, when they laughed at my depictions of them, I fed off their reactions in a Palpatine-esque fashion.  One particularly difficult classmate who had bullied me from before I knew who she was started collecting my poems to make into a Fattie Anthology, never knowing the first one she'd read had been about her.

A December or two ago I started writing a Christmas song about my dad.  It includes lines like "My asshole dad, my psycho brother / I wonder how long till you kill each other," and ends with "Merry Christmas / I won't care when you die."  It's cheerful and up tempo.  I never finished it.   

The First Time I Self-Injured, I Thought I'd Invented It

[Trigger warning:  This post is about self-injury.  Also, I lifted most of the title from a Chuck Palanhiuk novel.  That's probably not a trigger, but I want you to know I know.]

When I was in high school, I started hitting myself in the head.  Slapping quickly progressed to closed fisted punching.  Eventually I escalated to banging my head against the wall of my bedroom.  

The first time I did it was fairly instinctual -- I think.  I don't remember if it was before or after I'd first heard of cutting, but the idea of cutting was unappealing to me because I was self-conscious enough about my body already and didn't want to add scars to the list of attributes I felt I had to hide.  When I hit myself though, it was instinctual.  I didn't know anyone had ever done that before.  The physical pain anesthetized my emotions.  It was immediate.  It felt good simply because I didn't feel as bad anymore.

I don't remember what prompted each occasion I hit my head, or any of the occasions.  I had a hard time living at home with my parents, especially after the dawn of adolescence, which also coincided with the start of my mother's prescription drug abuse.  I had plenty of friends and did well in school, but I was not entirely well and home was not a happy place.  I hit myself a lot the year I was, I think, seventeen.  Seventeen was hard.  I remember dreaming that I was graduating and moving away and then awakening to find myself still a junior in high school.  I cried and cried.  The cheap wood-paneled walls of my bedroom gave a satisfying vibration when I slammed my head against them.

I eventually developed a dull, lingering headache that lasted for weeks.  I don't often get headaches, so I was a bit alarmed.  I think now, in hindsight, I had possibly given myself a minor concussion.  At the time though, I thought I might have caused a brain bleed.  My grandmother suffered a brain aneurysm not long before this time, and I worried that I might have caused some kind of hemorrhage in my brain that was going to kill me.  My primary concern wasn't so much the dying as the possibility that God would count my self-initiated brain hemorrhage as a sort of "long con" suicide attempt and that I would burn in hell for all eternity for instigating it. 

In a panic, I bargained with God that I would stop hitting myself in the head if he would excuse me from dying of a brain hemorrhage and burning in hell.  I stopped hitting myself, and within a couple of weeks my headache subsided.

I took up banging my head against the wall again in the final year or two of my contact with my mother.  I don't remember the circumstances.  My mother was at her worst in terms of leaving me raging voicemails and waging campaigns against me with family at that time.  It was around the same time I started drinking and actively researching suicide techniques (spoiler alert:  the most effective ones sound horrifying).  I don't remember any of this in reference to self-injury though.  I just remember the apartment where I lived at the time.  My bedroom had an exposed brick wall, and I made the mistake of banging my head into it.  Just once.  It hurt.  It hurt really, really bad.  There was no satisfying vibration or echo or even a thud.  It barely made a sound and it HURT, and the bricks were actually sharp.  I remember that wall.  I stopped not too long after that and haven't taken it up again. 

Now I know that 45+ minutes of high intensity cardio creates the same numbing effect in me, except my head doesn't hurt and the only physical sensation is a sort of warm, sore, jellied feeling in my muscles.  It isn't as immediate an effect, but it's close enough.  This end note sounds off here to me, like it doesn't belong with the rest of the story, but I think it's worth noting it's hard to quit self-injuring without finding a coping tactic with which to replace it.  I didn't come up with exercise right away either.  I don't remember that time all that well, but I probably just drank more for awhile, until that stopped helping too.

Inside My Father's House

I just saw the inside of my biological father's house for the first time.  I'm not there.  I have never been inside it.  But my half-brother has started posting Christmas photos on Facebook tagged with the town where his parents live.  The only time I've ever heard of that town was when I found my biological father.

Here is what I can tell so far:  I don't like the floor tiles, and the walls are off-white.  I think it was the kitchen I saw, but I'm not 100% certain.  I would call the style "suburban affluence."  It looks like colors and styles picked out by a contractor -- bland and inoffensive.  They also have one of those tiny refrigerators for wine, and it looks well stocked, as does the adjacent wine rack. 

That's it.  That's what I know about my biological father's house (aside from things I'd already found on Zillow, such as the purchase price and an aerial view of the land, neither of which really tells me anything about him).  Still I found myself shaking as soon as I saw the location tag on Hans' photos.  Isn't that stupid?  I felt like I was seeing something I wasn't supposed to see, like I'd hacked into it when all I'd been doing is scrolling through my newsfeed.  It's unnerving whenever one of my half-siblings posts something about their parents, I guess because I know they know who I am and that they want nothing to do with me and I assume they'd find it unnerving to know I'm reading about them.  I'm half-hoping and half-dreading Hans posts a picture of our father over Christmas just so I can see what he looks like now.  A video upload of him would be holy grail material as far as I'm concerned, one of the few things I hope to see before I die.  I'm still not sure I'd be able to pick him out of a line-up based on the photos I've seen, and I've always wished I could hear his voice once and see him in motion.  He looks nothing like me in the post-high school photos I've seen.  Maybe we move alike or something.  Maybe we smile the same.  He never seems to smile in photos.

While I'd never want to go back to not knowing who my biological father is or unknow the fact that I'm donor conceived, sometimes I wish I could flip a switch and forget these facts exist.  I wish I could forget the parents who raised me too, for that matter.  Not forever, and I would never want to go back to the wondering because the wondering is crazy making, but I wish I could stop thinking and caring about them all.  It's a waste of energy when I ought to be doing other things, and it makes me feel so sad.  I ought to be frosting a cake right now and washing the dishes.

Another Email

For the record, I was grossing $30k per annum in 2007.  I don't even know off hand what the mysterious $2k referenced below was all about.  It might have been something extra my dad had me transfer over when their account was empty, intended to cover the household bills that were on autopay (which was most of them).  I know that was a thing that happened at one point.


From: Christina R. Martin <christina.r.martin@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, May 4, 2007 at 2:07 PM
Subject:
To: Paul Rossetti <stargazer23401@aol.com>

Hi Dad,

I returned Mom's calls today.  She told me she already spent the $2000 that she discovered in the bank yesterday and then said she had come to me to solve her money problems.  I told her I didn't know what she should do, and she accused me of not caring.  When I told her I care but that I didn't have a solution, she got mad at me for not immediately offering her money -- apparently the solution to her money problems is supposed to be me.  She claims I have "money coming out [my] ass" and that Dante is better than me because, despite the fact that he is getting evicted from his apartment and losing his electricity, "he cares."  She said, "You make good money, dontcha?"  I told her I don't make nearly as much as she does, and she said, "I don't have any money!"  She started to yell some more, so I told her I had to go and I hung up.  She makes me very sad.

Love,
Chrissy

The Time My Mother Found My Address -- and a Contingency Plan

Dear Jerry,

My dad says my mom finally looked up my name on the internet and found me.  My address is on the first page of hits, so it's an investment of about 5 seconds.  I figured it was only a matter of time, but 2 years is a pretty good run.  It's pretty obvious she is in the mania stage right now, based on my dad's email below.  I'm wondering how long this one will last and if she is still living at that group home and if she is or was on any kind of stabilizing medication while there.

My phone number doesn't appear to be listed online yet, but even once it is, caller ID makes it easy enough to avoid 513 calls that aren't from my dad or you or your family.  I doubt she'd take the 8-hour drive to show up on my doorstep if she hasn't been able to reach me by phone in 3+ years, but if she did, I have no idea how one is supposed to handle that situation.  I imagine she would take a bus like she did when she accosted my dad in Cleveland and then take a taxi to my house, and then say she can't leave because she'd need to call another taxi and doesn't have enough money for it to take her anywhere anyway.  Have you ever heard of someone in this situation?  My first thought was that I would call the local police, but I think they'd just say they don't want to get involved in a domestic squabble and that she hasn't committed any crime and she'd be left sitting outside my house waiting for me to make a move.  I'd like to have some kind of contingency plan that doesn't involve giving her money or letting her into my home.  -- C

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Paul Rossetti <stargazer23401@aol.com>
Date: Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 3:53 PM
Subject:
To: Christina R. Martin <christina.r.martin@gmail.com>

By the way, you'd better watch out. Evidently your mom has access to a computer, and is with it enough to have found you there.
She's also told Dante she is going to sue me for another $500 a month for monthly maintenance. I'd sure like to know who's putting her up to all this.
Love, Dad...
___________________
DON'T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF, IT'S ALL SMALL STUFF...

For a couple years after I stopped communicating with my mother, I still feared her showing up on my doorstep, as noted in the email above.  I had moved halfway across the country since the last time she knew my address, but my new address was highly findable.  When Michael and I bought our house, our county published our names, address, and the purchase price of our house, as they do with all real estate purchases.  For awhile it was the first thing that came up in a Google search for my name, and it worried me.

I live a full day's drive from my mother, but I imagined the craziest things she could do, such as taking a taxi to get here and demanding I pay the thousand dollar cab fare because she had no money, or something similarly ridiculous.  I worried about this scenario a fair amount, and sometimes it kept me awake at night.  How would I get rid of her if she showed up?  What if she threw a fit in my driveway and said she couldn't leave because she had no phone, no car, and no money?  I couldn't control it.  I can't control anything she does. 

What I can control is how I react, so I hatched a contingency plan so I wouldn't lose any more sleep imagining this stupid scenario.  First, I had to decide what else I had control over and what I would be willing to do.  I have control over my house and my property and my body and my money.  These were all things she had seemed to control up until I got my own apartment and a full-time job, so it was easy to forget I was a financially independent adult who could put my foot down. 

I decided I would not pay anyone who brought her to my home.  That would do nothing to benefit me, and no one could legally make me do it ("no one can legally make me" has become a big deciding factor in letting myself say "no" to things -- I say "no" to a lot of things now).  I also wouldn't give her money or let her into my home under any circumstances.  I could just imagine her kicking off her shoes, lying down on my couch, and declaring squatters rights or something.  I know squatters rights don't work that way, but it would still be harder to make her leave once she got inside.  I also wouldn't drive her anywhere in my car.  I refuse to put myself in any situation in which she could try to abduct or kill me, likely or not, and I also don't care for the inconvenience.

What I would do is tell her politely and firmly that she is not welcome at my home or on my property and that, if she doesn't leave immediately, I will call the police.  No conversation, no "hearing what she has to say," just my telling her politely and firmly to leave.  If she said she couldn't go because her cab already left and she had no phone and no money and it was raining -- my god, the rain -- and she had nowhere else to go, I would be willing to give a little to ease along the progress of the situation.   

If it were raining, I would give her an umbrella I don't mind parting with forever.  We have at least one cheap, collapsible umbrella that is sort of half-broken but still in use because it's small enough to fit in a backpack.  If it were raining, she could have that (envision "I am a benevolent god" meme here).  I would bring the cordless phone to the door (after locking the door behind me while I went to fetch it so that she couldn't sneak in) because if she tried to steal it or break it, I have two others and they don't work beyond my yard anyway so it would just be amusing to me.  I would let her call someone on my cordless phone to retrieve her, and if she swore she had no one, I would call her a cab myself.  I would allow her to wait at the curb for the car rather than calling the police on her immediately.  There would be a time limit on how long I would allow her to wait in sight of my home, and it would be based on how long it typically takes a cab to come.  Maybe 30 minutes.  I might be willing to pay a taxi driver in cash to take her to a bus station or airport, but I would give no money to my mother directly, and if she came back, I would not pay another cabbie again.  I consider this very generous of me since paying the cabbie in the first place isn't my job and calling the cops is free.  

If she came back again or refused to go in the first place, I would call the police, and they would come and remove her because the police in my town are very helpful and I am a thirty-something, affluent, white woman, while my mother looks like a crazy homeless person.  I forgot this fact a lot when I was younger.  I am an affluent white woman, I have power, and the amount of respect I receive from strangers has increased dramatically since I entered my thirties.  Even if my mother tried to claim she has a right to me and everything I own because she is my mother, the cops wouldn't accept that because it is crazy and not how America works, even if it's how my mother's mind works.  I would calmly and quietly explain that my mother is severely mentally ill, refuses any sort of treatment, and that I haven't been in contact with her for the last seven years for this exact reason.  I would express a subdued but believable amount of fear and, now that I have a child, mention protecting her.  They would take my mother away from my home because it's their job and also because I know how to behave in a variety of situations and she does not.  I have no problem calling the police as many times as necessary.  And unlike my dad, I have no qualms about pressing charges if it came to that.

I also had a clever plan in which I would sneak out the back door, go to my neighbor's house, sneak us both back in through my kitchen door, and have my neighbor answer the door to tell my mother I had sold the house and moved.  I think it would take too long to go get my neighbor though.  It might be worth trying if my mother were higher functioning and more dangerous, but I think the flat out rejection of sending her away or calling the cops would be equally effective at getting rid of her in the long-term.  She doesn't handle rejection well, and I don't think she'd be willing to put herself out there a second time.  I think she would crumple.  Sometimes I think if I were to look her dead in the eye and state point blank, "You aren't worth the trouble," she would explode into a pile of ash.

[Edited:  Re-reading all this I realize my contingency plan has changed.  I would tell her to leave and then call the police.  I wouldn't give her an umbrella or call her a cab or let her wait at the end of my driveway for a ride.  I would just call the police.  Apparently I don't have the patience or benevolence I had four years ago.  Oh well.]

Words of Wisdom

I had a really hard time deciding to go 'no contact' with my mother, which seems to be pretty standard for people cutting ties with their parents.  In one phone conversation with my best friend Jerry, I remember saying how I like to believe there is a point to everything we go through in life and that we're meant to learn something from each hardship.  It gives a point to the hardships.  If I cut ties with my mother, I would be giving up on learning whatever lesson that relationship was meant to teach me.

Jerry replied, "Maybe the lesson you're supposed to learn is when to walk away."