If there has been one major factor in my life to make me happy and sad, it would have to be my mother. Yet I find it hard to write this part of the blog series and have been putting it off for over a month because of how deeply personal it is to me. I have a hard time talking about my mother ... a very hard time.

In my early years, my mother was my best friend. She knew everything about me and did everything with me. She was loving, caring, and such a happy and great woman. She has always been a single mother, even when Dean was around, and was making a living as a registered nurse at the Meriter Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin, as a delivery nurse.

My earliest memories of her show her as a happy woman, carefree, and highly spirited. She was thirty-four when I was born, and she was early into her career as a nurse (only four years or so into it). She took great care of me and was always very protective of me. I can remember all of the times we went to the zoo and the parks throughout Madison. The times we would spend with her friends, such as Melissa, and my grandfather--those I remember fondly. She always read me stories, told me jokes, and played games with me.

Throughout my years as a student in school she would be my savior from the horrible, horrible, harassment I would receive. Every time I would finally give in and tell her about what happened, she would ride in and have it fixed. She would lead way to change school board policy. For instance, the teachers would say, "I didn't see it, so I can't prove it." as a way to not have to do anything about what would happen to me every day. My mother brought that down in a firey crash.

We were happy, I was happy, I thought. December 27, 1997, at 11:00AM changed all of that. Dean was my mother's only true love and will probably be the only person she'll ever let into her heart. But when that bastard killed himself, he did something to my mother that will stay with her until the day she dies. That bastard turned her cold, and he took from her that kindness and confidence that she always had. I hate him for that, and I hope he burns in hell for it.

Ever since that day, things haven't been the same. My mother went into an emotional shell for over a year. She was surrounded by grief and guilt. She blamed herself for his death. She blamed herself for causing his death. She blamed herself for somehow feeling his intentions and not doing more to stop it. I lost my best friend, and I lost my savior. For the next while, I was on my own, and I wasn't sure of what the future would hold.

A year after his death, my mother seemed to have come out of her shell. She had smiled for the first time since his death, and she had breathed a sigh of relief for the first time too. She and I went on vacation to Florida for a week during the sixth grade. I was thrilled! My mother was her old self again, and it was just her and I again. I would have been content had it lasted ... but it didn't.

I think what happened was that my mother saw my depression, and she reflected on everything I had been through because of Dean and school, and it just compounded her depression. She looked back on my troubles with ADHD and OCD. Somehow, she began to view herself as a failure very early on. When I was thirteen, it all began. The nosedive to and through the rocky ground began, and to this day continues shooting straight down.

I started to become independant. Any thirteen-year-old would. I began thinking for myself, acting on my own, and wanting to be separated from my mother's need to be the teacher instead of the guide. I was ready to learn on my own, make my own mistakes, and have her guide me through the rest of my life, but she wasn't ready to let go of being teacher. So we would fight. We would argue. But they weren't ordinary arguments. My OCD made them very bad. I have never been able to just blindly accept an answer or request. I've always needed a reason why. Now how would your mother or father respond when you ask Why? to a request of theirs? "Because I said so," is usually the response you'd get. I could never accept that because I needed a logical response. I am driven by logic, and I demand such responses. Here in-lied a problem: my mother is stubborn (as am I).

Another problem was that my mother never liked facing up to her problems. She would avoid them at all costs. These problems would include her smoking, her not wanting to let go of me, and other various issues. Being the loving son, I would try to address them to have them fixed.

Haha. I have been fighting that battle for almost seven years.

My mother could never stand facing the issues I would bring up. Instead, she would shut down and try to ignore me. That's when my OCD would kick in. "Mommy is ignoring me, I should get her to listen," I would think, and do. Sometimes these issues were my personal problems or me begging her for love, for an ounce of care. She would block it out. She would yell. {SHUT UP!} {FUCK YOU!} {JUST FUCKING SHUT UP!} Sometimes she would cry. Other times she'd call her brother and play me as the badgering son picking on his mother. Every time my troubles and pains would be ignored, and every time they would be added to my ever closed personal life ... and every now and then, things would boil over.

There have been so many times, so many nights, when I have begged my mother to just listen to me. Times when I have begged her to just please give me the time of day. I beg her to listen ... I beg her to for once just not shut me out. Every time it goes unanswered, and once in awhile she'll listen and end up not doing anything about it later.

These days, she is always upset with me. Anything I do is typically not within satisfaction to her, and she will let me know so. She gives me unreasonable requests and gets furious me when I am unable to complete them for her. For instance, last week she asked me to do a lot of laundry. She wanted it done by the time she got home. For five hours I did nothing but wash and dry the laundry she wanted done. I knew there wasn't a snowballs chance in hell that I would finish by the time she got home. But she demanded things be finished, so I cut corners. Her bedspread took two cycles (140 minutes) to partially dry, and even then it wasn't finished. So I took it out to get the dog crate pads in and dry. They didn't dry after one cycle, and I decided her bed spread needed to be done first, so I put the crate pads into the cages still a bit damp. After a third cycle in the dryer, her blanket wasn't totally dry, but I didn't know it. The outside was dry, but not the inside. That night, she went into a frenzy screaming at me. I tried explaining how long it took for everything and how there was no way I could have finished it by the time she got home. Her response was, "OH FUCK YOU!" That's a typical response these days. I tried explaining it to her, and she said to me, "Either shut up, or you can find yourself another place to live."

I just want her to be happy, and I try to make her happy. She had asked me a few weeks ago about the cost of the new computer I needed to buy. I at first said a number over $2000, and she got mad at me. So I finally started telling her $1600. It was just a made-up number, a number to make her happy. I was only trying to please her. She decided to try and do something for me, so she sold $1600 in stock and gave it to me towards this new computer. I was speachless. I was so excited to have an extra $1600 for it. So a few days ago, she asked me about the computer. I told her I was going for a $2500 configuration. She was furious. She had gotten $1600 to cover the entire cost of the computer, and now I was telling her that it wasn't enough. So I tried explaining to her that I was $1600 just to make her happy. She refused to speak to me for the rest of the night. The topic came back up tonight, and I tried explaining to her how I was only trying to please her, but before I could say anything, she told me to shut up.

We always fight. Almost every night we have a fight of some kind. I've finally started telling her how I feel about everything, how I am craved for her to listen to me. Even that she finds a way to tell me to shut up over.

It makes me incredibly sad. For years now I have been gaining this depression from all of this. I have cried many times because of our arguments, and I have cried myself to sleep many times because of a desperate need for someone to show me love and affection. Even today, I have no one who does that for me. Recently, though, my depression has been manifesting itself without an argument happening between us. Sitting in this dark room sometimes finds me reflecting on everything, and I just begin to cry.

I find myself torn between two important aspects of my life. In one spot, I can show you what seven years of dedication has brought me. A company of my own, a paying job, and the sites (www.animeforum.com / www.animegalleries.net) are the fruits of my hard work. I built my company through years of learning, trial, and hard work. The sites have received a huge investment in my life. I spend hours a day working on them, managing their systems, and helping grow them. When I started the investment, the sites received maybe 30 unique viewers daily and made nothing in advertisement revenue. Today, we get 14,000 or more unique viewers each day and get thousands in revenue each month. My company and the sites are so very important to me because of how much of my life I have dedicated to them. Leaving all of that would destroy me.

On the other hand, I have my wish to repair my relationship with my mother. I owe my life to her and could never repay that debt to her. I owe her my gratitude for being my savior throughout school. I owe her comfort and happiness because of how I was when growing up and how I am today.

One of the major factors towards her anger for me of the recent years is that very dedication to my company and the sites. She gets mad every time I have to fix something for the sites. She gets mad every time I do something for the sites before doing something unimportant for her. She doesn't understand my dedication to the sites. She does, however, understand my dedication towards my company. But even then, she gets angry about it from time-to-time. In her perfect world, she'd like to see me quit the sites and drop my company, and then take a job (say a resturaunt?) so that I have a better income.

... how in the world could I decide? I wish so very much that I could show her something tangible from my company and the sites to help her understand and accept my work there. But I can't see that happening anytime soon. It feels as if it has become a no-win situation for me. That cripples me, in a way, and I just cry because of it. I crave a solution ... I need a solution. This has been eating me from the inside for awhile now, and it has gotten to the point where I am seriously falling into a total depression. I have forever been a happy person, but this has been shadowing that for quite some time now. Every time there is an argument, every time we share a smug remark, and every time she ignores me that shadow only gets darker.

I am scared for the outcome. I fear her telling me to leave. If that day comes, it will tell me that there is no future for us. That would absolutely destroy me. I would plunge into depression and just hope that I can claw my way out.

I lost my faith because of this. I could never believe that there is a God willing to let this happen. If there was a God allowing this, then I shame that God because it would be a sick game to be played.

As I end this post, I have just one question that have been muttered by my lips for almost a decade: Mommy, where are you? I can see you, but can you see me?

Submit a Comment

There are no comments for this blog entry.