May 28th 2017

Still working out how to deal with my mother. inPeople suck. Cats are awesome. Dogs are alright.

•  May 28, 2017, 6:17 p.m.
 
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• Public

Still trying to interpret my OCPD mother, and figure out how to honor my principles; both for my own sake, and the memory of my father.

My mother has started apologizing every time the subject of my autism comes up in conversation. “I’m so sorry”, she says. I instantly go to my rehearsed reaction to that, “It’s not your fault”; although in her case that isn’t completely true. I’m just saying that because I learned decades ago that I CANNOT be myself with her. I have to act, constantly, with little snippets of reality thrown in occasionally, so as not to reduce her to huffing and puffing and general histrionics.

This woman is the queen of displaced guilt. Nothing is ever her fault, and throughout my childhood and young adult life, she’s skillfully made me think that she’s morally superior, and I’m a terrible person. - That’s finally changing, and I find myself going from hating myself, to hating her.

She always acts as though my calling her is some great gift of my time, but she will not call me. She says “If my kids want to talk to me, they can call me”. Then she carries on when I call her, as if her heart might break if I didn’t. The perceived insinuation to be, that I’m a horrible human being for not calling her more often. - As if I’m going to spend any more time than I have to on the phone with someone who spends the vast majority of the conversation trying to manipulate me, like she did when I was little.

That “I’m so sorry”, is said with a heavy sigh, like exasperation. Like it’s my fault for inflicting this tragedy of personal failure upon her. It’s the closest to remorse she’s neurologically capable of getting, and I understand that, logically, but on an emotional level I just want to strangle her. Saying those words, with the meaning that I should be sorry for even mentioning it, is as close to actual introspection as an OCPD parent can get. - It’s all I’ll ever have from her. And seeing her for what she is, I think it would be gratifying to slap the p!ss out of her.

If I talk to her about how I actually feel; like the other day, when I called her, and she said that she was “so sorry”, and I said “The only thing I hold you personally responsible for are the constant digs at me, my whole life”; she huffs at me. I know from experience that if I continue to talk about what she’s actually responsible for, she’ll pretend to cry and hang up on me, because she wants me to think that I’ve injured her by talking about my own psychological trauma, for which I take medication, and feel bad for pointing out what actually happened. 
I interpret this as an attempt at a guilt trip.

My therapist says that an OCPD person is INCAPABLE of introspection. And knowing that certainly helps me. Having the answer to the question “why” is an enormous relief. But it doesn’t make what I’ve gone through go away. - If you somehow unknowingly wander into the home of an alligator, (maybe you’re drunk in this hypothetical situation, I dunno); and the alligator does what alligators do, and bites off your foot, but you live, and make it to the hospital; do you blame the alligator? I wouldn’t. It’s an alligator. They eat other animals. It’s what they do. On the other hand, you now have to get a prosthetic foot, and somebody should take responsibility for that. (This is a bad comparison, because in this story, you’d be responsible, because you were drunk and lost.) But you get my point.

Like the fact that I’m autistic is such a wound to her psyche that I’m supposed to avoid talking about it for the sake of her OCPD feelings.

I got news for you, you malignant old bat: My neurodevelopmental disorder trumps your personality disorder. Or it’s at least just as valid.

And I will not cease to remind you that you have made my life unnecessarily hellish. The fact that I was undiagnosed doesn’t absolve her for every nasty remark, every yelling tirade, every bullshit punishment for the tiniest things. She was a shitty mother by any measure. The fact that I was an autistic kid, with therefore even more impossible expectations put on me by this condescending b!tch, only makes it worse.

And at some point, to honor my father, and for the principle of it, (one and the same, really), I have to go to Oklahoma and spend time with her before she dies. I still need to set goals for that visit. One of them has to be: “To make sure that she is overtly aware that she criticized, yelled at, and punished me for things over which I had ZERO control.”

That’s going to be a fine line. At this point, more than anything else, I just want to tell her to fuck off; but I can’t, because my father wouldn’t want that. Grumble

Damn my principles.