I can never forget the words my daughter said on the day that I had just finished cleaning her home, at the request of my grandchildren. It was a three day job.
In the process, it started a fight between my brother-in-law and I.
My daughter was driving home from the coast with the kids, minutes away from her house when she called. I gave her a brief description of the fight I’d just had with my sister when she said, much to my surprise, “I’m glad, Mom. Now it’s you and me against the family. That’s the way I’ve always wanted it to be.”
I told her that’s not what I wanted at all. I didn’t want to be against anyone and she got angry and hung up on me. She pulled up in the drive just a couple of minutes later as I stepped out the front door and stood on the porch. She marched right past me, nose high in the air, refusing to look at me or speak, and marched into the house. A few minutes later she came back out and thanked me. The house had transformed and I think she knew she ha to acknowledge it. But the warm reception didn’t last long.
For the record, I never once mentioned her housecleaning habits to her then or since, never tried to make her feel bad for it.
When she learned about my coming lung surgery, she was excited. She looked at it as another vacation and talked about Bryan watching the kids at the pool while she ran around Austin, doing whatever it is she does when she’s in Austin.
Something happened while they were taking out half of my lung. My two kids got into a fight. As usual, big sister expected little brother to pay for everything, and, typically ignoring her three year old, allowed her to ruin two pizzas by knocking them to the floor while my daughter stayed glued to her phone, on the bed, sending news about me over social media, news that she really didn’t have, a typical scene.
She did not speak to me for the rest of the summer. I don’t even know why. I was heavily medicated and in deep physical pain when I left for my job in Gallup, a thousand miles away. It broke my heart to say goodbye to my grandkids.
It blows my mind to look back now and realize that when I got to Hunt, Tx that summer, everyone wanted me to join them in their anger against others. I didn’t join any of them, and in the end they all got mad at me over it.
By the next year, when I returned for my mother’s funeral, they had all seemed to join together in their anger against me. I will never forget my grandson looking up at me, at my mother’s funeral, and gnashing his teeth in some kind of rage. I hadn’t slept all night and kept looking at him, telling myself I wasn’t seeing what I was seeing. His anger seemed to be directed at me.
I think now, it was exactly what I feared. People had told him something about him to cause him to hate and blame me.
It was my daughter’s last statement to me, this holiday season, that made everything fall into place.
I realize now that, since she couldn’t get me to join her against the family, she decided to get with the family against me. She raised her own little army.
It broke my heart to learn she’d left me out of her wedding plans. Didn’t even let me know until the night before. She never thanked me for the $3k I gave her for her wedding dress, never told me which dress she had picked. I didn’t complain. I watched her wedding and loved every minute of it, except where Izzy’s leg was hurt. I didn’t complain to my daughter for leaving me out, when of course it broke my heart. Now she complains to me that big sister wouldn’t let her use the china for her wedding and that really made her mad. This means she made plans with my big sister, while keeping me in the dark. Was this mean spiritedness on her part? Is she using ‘the family’ against me since I wouldn’t join her against them? I will never know for sure.
She tells me untruths in every conversation and it leaves me speechless. I babble about nonsense to flush it out of my head.
She was so ready to rage at me after I sent her $1000 gift for her wedding. She not only raged, she informed me that her husband was raging about the gift as well. I was completely taken aback. I meant no insult by that gift.
My own mother never gave me a wedding gift and didn’t pay a cent for my wedding. I made my own dress and paid $8 for the material. There were no flowers, no music, no food. It was a home wedding. I never resented it or even thought about it until I received this reaction from my own daughter. I am exhausted from her hatred and her unrealistic expectations.
She doesn’t seem to be aware that her manipulation is pretty transparent.
No matter what I’ve ever done for her, it has never been enough and she has been very loud and clear about that, whether or not she admits it. I’m sorry but I’ve watched a lot of true crime on youtube in the past year, for some odd reason. I’ve never taken an interest before. It always bothered me that every time I went to my daughter’s home she was watching Dateline or 48 Hours in front of her toddler and young son. It seems she raised them on those shows.
Now that I’ve consumed a lot of the information about real crimes, from trials and interrogation videos, I realize how common it is that people are killed for money by their own family members and it does chill me to the bone. It makes me wonder how much I have to worry.
If there is time, my plans are to divide the inheritance between my 2 kids and give it to them now. I’d like to tell my daughter. This is all I have, now stop manipulating and stop pretending to be angry about anything other than money.
I believe some people in my family would have appreciated me more if I had been penniless.
I’m telling you I think that capitalism is part of what rots the core of relationships, because people begin to look at each other as sources of income. How many murders were committed for the gain of money and only for money? I honestly don’t know the percentages, but it’s enough that there are plenty of stories on youtube. Money stress is also a component in a lot of rage killings, and child killing.
I almost have enough of a pension and social security to get by on. I don’t have a lot of needs at my age. I love my own cooking and it costs pennies for me to live. I haven’t bought new clothes or shoes in years, don’t need them. I rarely do laundry, don’t go anywhere. I’ve never been demanding or materialistic, or needed to travel to exotic, expensive places, or needed to float around in the ocean on giant shopping malls. I have a nice little youtube channel that keeps me occupied and it’s what I have in the way of putting positive notes out to the world, what else can you do at retirement age?
I donate to a few organizations in Gaza and it is agonizing to witness their suffering. I have to purge myself, from time to time, working on my videos of wildlife, rescued kittens and home baking.
There are darker things I witnessed about my daughter’s lifestyle and the way she was treating her children. I kept my mouth shut because I knew I was powerless and that she would only block me from her life if I said anything. I felt like a monster for not doing anything. But I was absolutely powerless.
She accused me, fairly recently, of being jealous of the fact that she was supported by my mother, which isn’t true at all. I wasn’t sure it was good for her, thought it might have been enabling. Although I never said it, I was disappointed in the way my daughter treated the things that she was given. She was completely wasteful and made no effort to economize or take care of anything. She regularly complained that grandma was giving her enough. She wanted her kitchen remodeled with an island included, the kitchen that was covered in rotten eggs and melting apples.
I’d saved all my daughters dolls from childhood, kept them in a plastic bag in a storage room in pristine condition. There was one of each special doll, all of them I’d worked so hard to give to her and to take care of afterwards. A cabbage patch doll, strawberry shortcake doll, several others. With sadness i looked at them now. They lay all over her back yard now, dirty and weathered. I wondered why I bothered to keep care of them all those years. Why wasn’t she able to do the same? Again, I never said one word to her about it.
I keep getting the message from her now that I’ve always been critical of her, but these words that I write now have never been written before, or spoken before. Why would I? It’s embarrassing and humiliating.
But now that I’ve begun to write about it, I feel a great healing that I’ve needed for a very long time. It is leading me to truths that make sense now. It’s as if a huge infection has been lanced and drained and disinfected.
I also never said anything the summer before my lung surgery, when my granddaughter was two years old, and my daughter chose to spend every day away from her, attending play practice for community theater, leaving her in the hands of a babysitter. I felt so guilty not being able to be that babysitter but I only had a few weeks to find a job, having failed at trying to take care of Dad.
I would have given anything not to have had to work when my daughter was two. I could not understand my daughter’s choices, but I kept my mouth shut. I kept my mouth shut but the guilt never turned off.
I wanted to stay so I could be available for my grandchildren, but I had to find a job with health insurance. My only certification was in another state. My sister had decided I was not allowed to “cross her path” again and I actually had to cross her path in order to get to my grandchildren’s house. It seemed that leaving Texas was the only choice.
Oikos 