OrphanPip

Well it has been quite a while since I last wrote an entry for my little autobiography. Today was the last day in Canada for you to file your taxes without penalty. So, of course I was doing my taxes last minute. What does this have to do with the topic of this entry? Well, my mother's a retired accountant and for some twisted reason doing my finances reminds me of her. Also, as a co-chair of my brother's trust I had to sign some stuff for that, gah.

Anyway, for most of my childhood I'll admit that I was probably much closer to my mother than my father. She had chosen to stay at home with me, which she hadn't done for my older brother. My father on the other hand often left earlier than I woke up and came home around 8 at night. That essentially meant that most of my parent time was with my mother.

She was a good mother, for the most part she did everything a mother should do. Then her parents died in close succession around the time I was starting elementary school. In retrospect I realize my mother was a troubled individual. She was no longer the active person she was, she started to spend all her time lying in bed. She stopped doing anything around the house at all. At the same time the relationship between her and my father became strained.

The fighting between my parents defined my early impressions of my mother. I bought everything she said about my father wholesale: she said he was a liar and an idiot, and so in my eyes he became a liar and idiot. I think I might of quite literally despised my father when I was young.

By the time I was a teenager I started to notice everything wasn't quite right with my mother. Some days she would become hysterical over the slightest things, while others she would be the happiest person in the world. She would bounce from wanting to go out to a movie and dinner with the family, to running away from home and disappearing for two days. Needless to say, this was a stressful situation when I was a teenager. A lot of people have it much worse though, I was fortunate that as a kid my mother usually didn't direct her anger at me. Many kids today and in the past have had it a lot worse than me.

The moment I realized my mother really wasn't the saint I thought she was when she kicked my brother out of the house. I was around 12-13, my brother was around 21-22. At this time my parents were deep in debt and it was my brother paying most of the bills. I couldn't understand her irrational anger towards my brother, who had done nothing wrong to her. Anyway, she kicked my brother out of the house and didn't speak to him again for a year. I still don't understand why they fought.

Apart from years of my mother's irrational argument and anger at my father, what has most tested our relationship has of course been her issues with my sexuality. I touched on this a bit in another entry. I was sixteen when she first questioned my sexuality, but at the time I assured her that I wasn't gay and we went on with our lives. When it finally came to me having to tell her the truth, she called me a disappointment to my face and to this day she refuses to acknowledge my sexuality. I don't want to deal with it, so it remains a rainbow elephant in the room that we don't discuss.

Soon after that my mother and father reached a particularly bad point, where for the first time my father left her. They were separated for a few weeks while my father lived with my brother and I with my mother. I thought maybe this separation was what was needed to bring peace to our home. What it really made me feel was intense worry that my mother would be incapable of taking care of herself alone. She's practically blind, she has difficulty walking, and most of all I fear she'd harm herself like she's threatened to do so many times before. She talked with my father and agreed to seek help about her anger, the first time I'd ever heard her acknowledge it, acknowledge her fear of bipolar disorder or depression. One session came of it and she never followed up. My parents still fight, but they haven't had anything too extreme lately.

Despite my mother's mental health problems and our strained relationship, she has shaped large parts of who I am. I owe my mother for my love of reading, my appreciation of charity and volunteer work (which she was a part of even during her darkest days before her health started to fail), my love of animals, my appreciation for social equality, and the need for kindness to others (even if she didn't always follow up on what she taught me). I also probably owe her for why I cringe at people arguing and my dislike of Christian doctrine.

Overall, she was a good mother, and she did the best she could.