Thing2 just told me that he’s giving his Mother’s Day project to his grandmother instead of me.
I don’t have the words to say how much that hurts.
Norman’s position is that it’s my own fault for leaving. He will never acknowledge that part of why I left is that his mother ALWAYS came first.
She’s the reason he abandoned me in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. He was embarrassed to let me meet her.
She was the reason I spent holidays alone for the first five years that I was with Norman. I wasn’t good enough to eat turkey with her on Thanksgiving until I got into law school.
She was probably the reason he pushed me to go to law school in the first place. She used to say that her retirement plan was for him to take care of her, and he would say that his life plan was for me to take care of him. I didn’t pay attention; it took me way too long to figure out that the reason he married me was so I would financially support them both.
I’m going to go off topic for a moment to dispel a major misconception: Norman did not help me financially during law school. While I was in law school, Norman was still running around fucking random strangers he picked up in bars. The first time he told me he loved me was during my first semester when he was apologizing for one of his little dalliances. It wasn’t until my last semester, when I directly told him that I had a future to plan and he needed to decide if he wanted to be in it or not, that he decided he really wanted to be with me.
I had to promise to support him financially and have two children before he would agree to marry me. It was a negotiated contract. I forgot that contracts require consideration. There’s supposed to be an EXCHANGE of value.
I do understand that it’s my own fault. But I was raised to believe I was worthless, and he constantly told me that he was the only man who would ever put up with me, and I was absolutely terrified that no one would notice if I died, so…
I married a man who didn’t even like me so that there would be someone to notice if I died. That’s fucking terrible.
Norman bullied me constantly, in a lot of ways and for a lot of reasons, but never worse than when it involved his mother. When we bought our first house together, I was not permitted a say in choosing it. She even called the realtor and told him not to show us the houses I liked. And since the realtor was an old friend of her mother’s, he did what she said.
The house she chose for us was only a few blocks from her own. I hated it. I cried for weeks before moving in.
It sounds so stupid now. But I know with absolute certainty that I’m not the only woman who got married and had kids simply because that’s what came next. I had an education, the next thing was to get a family. It was expected; it was what you were supposed to do. I was so obsessed with being a good citizen and fitting into society that I made choices against my own interest. I am not alone in that.
After we moved in to the house that Norman’s mother chose, she started stopping by unannounced. I would just be sitting in my chair minding my own business and she would walk through the door like she owned the place. One day I objected. Norman informed me that she could come and go as she pleased because everything he owned belonged to her. I told him that wasn’t how it worked, that MY name was on the deed, not HERS, and that when you decide to marry someone everything you own belongs to your PARTNER, not your PARENT.
He didn’t speak to me for three weeks after that. The only reason he even started talking to me again at all was because my adoptive mother decided to visit for Thanksgiving and he never did the silent treatment thing in front of people.
It’s a hard thing to live in a house with someone who refuses to acknowledge your existence. Norman maintains that he never abused me because he never yelled. But silence can be as damaging as screams.
One time she was complaining to Norman and a few of his friends about having to cook Christmas dinner because it was too much work. So I said I would do it. She laughed in my face and told me I couldn’t possibly cook a decent meal. I was humiliated. Norman got mad at me because I left the room and refused to come back.
She planned our wedding. I wanted something small in our backyard, just a few friends and a bbq. She wanted a big affair. She said she would pay for it (although later she bitched about how much it costs) and Norman told me to go along because it meant so much to her. So I did.
For wedding favors I wanted to make mason jar mugs that people could write their names on, use for drinks during the reception, and then take home with them. Norman initially agreed, so I bought several dozen mugs and a friend of mine gave up her long weekend over the Fourth of July to help me paint and cure them.
When Norman’s mother saw them, she declared them to be tacky and said I couldn’t put them out. He told me to go along with it, because it meant more to her than to me. Several hundred hours and several days of work, and he thought it didn’t mean anything to me. The mugs sat in our garage until we moved to Washington, at which point they got thrown in the trash.
Norman’s mother made me order 50 extra wedding invitations so she could have her own guest list. There were people at my wedding I had never met before in my life. It was very stressful.
Norman said he wanted to be married in the Catholic church, so I went to a couple of meetings with the priest that the church his mother attended. One day I was dutifully reading my catechism book when he casually said he needed to find out what he needed to do to be married in the church.
Turned out he had never been confirmed as a Catholic. He was making me convert because his mother wanted him to be married in the church. I stood up for myself on that one. Converting for a husband is one thing; converting for a mother-in-law is just absurd.
At the wedding, Norman’s mother refused to be in any photos that I was in. When I got upset, Norman told me I needed to be considerate of the fact that it was a very bad day for her. Our wedding day was a bad day for his mother, to the point that she refused to come near me.
When I had my miscarriage, she came over to my house and told me the reason I lost the baby was because I used birth control all through my twenties. When I complained to Norman, he stuck up for her, and said she wasn’t being mean, she just didn’t understand how birth control works.
When I was pregnant with Thing1, she decided she was going to be in the delivery room. I told Norman I didn’t want that, and he told me I needed to remember that the birth of her grandson was a very important day in HER life. My midwife told me that no one would be allowed in the room without MY consent, so the next time she mentioned it I told her she wouldn’t be in the delivery room with me.
Norman was furious. He tried to make me go to couple’s counseling with her. Fortunately, the counselor that was covered by my job refused to see me with her, and said if we wanted a session it would be with me and Norman. We went, and she told him to stand up for his pregnant wife. He actually did. It was the one and only time.
Over the years we were together, Norman’s mother constantly criticized my appearance. She would tell me that she would tell me my hair was a disaster, that I didn’t dress right, that she would never hire a woman who refused to wear make-up because “women who don’t take pride in their appearance don’t take pride in anything else.”
Norman’s response to her hurtful words was to tell me to be grateful because she was “just trying to help.” He claimed she knew more about such things than I did because she used to be a cosmetologist.
I graduated law school cum laude and within three years had landed an elite position with the federal Judiciary and Norman’s mother persistently thought I was inferior because I rarely wear mascara.
I taught a college course this spring. I stood up in front of a room full of college freshmen and sophomores with my messy purple hair and tattooed hands and flannel shirts and sneakers and I taught them how to write a research paper. There was a young woman who sat in the middle of the second row. She had pink hair and sparkly eyeliner and one day she wore fairy wings to class.
I will never forget the look on her face when I told the class I used to be an AFPD. Her face lit up and she even bounced a little in her chair. It felt like I was telling her that she could be who she is, and look how she liked, and still be successful. Maybe I misread it. Maybe that wasn’t what she was thinking. If not, I hope she gets that message from somewhere. It’s something she needs to know.
When we moved to Washington, Norman’s mother came with us. When he first showed me the house, I thought we were going to make the basement into an apartment for her, but he said it would be hard for her to climb the stairs all the time. I said we could get one of those chair lifts. He said that was really offensive and refused to talk to me for a few days.
She got the master bedroom on the first floor. I got a corner bedroom in the basement. Norman slept on the second floor with the kids. We never shared a bed. He snored really badly and had a tendency to literally lie on top of me. He also wasn’t big on hygiene and usually stank. It’s hard to sleep with a loud, smelly man lying on top of you, so I had my own bed. And since I slept alone, it was easy for him to banish me to the basement.
It felt like I was an unwelcome guest living in a house that he shared with her. I own that house, but when I lived in it I was made to feel like an unwelcome guest in her house.
She came first. Always. She comes first now.
She took Mother’s Day from me. There’s no doubt in my mind that she told my son that him giving me a Mother’s Day gift made her feel left out. Emotional manipulation has always been her forte. I’m not good at that kind of shit. I’m too direct, too in-your-face to manipulate people. Manipulation takes subtlety, and I never got the hang of subtle.
I told my son that I am his mother, that Mother’s Day should be for me, that there is a grandmother’s day in September and he should make her a present then and give me his present this time. He shrugged. He’s six. All he knows is that grandma is there every day and she wants a present. Why keep the present for six weeks to give to a mother he rarely sees in person?
I get it. I’m not mad at him. He’s just a kid in a bad spot. But even though I know he doesn’t mean to hurt me, I hurt anyway. For twenty years I came last to my “partner.” Now I come last to my children.
And it’s my own fault. But maybe someday my children will understand why I felt like I had to leave. Why I didn’t think I would survive staying in that house. Maybe someday they will believe that Mother’s Day should be for me.
Maybe someday…
