It's time to accept it..

It's been awhile since I wrote.  I think I needed a break.  The heaviness is less heavy.  The stress is still very much there, but the weight of it is just more manageable.   I needed to just ride that for a bit.  Not speak of it or write of it while I enjoyed these sporadic moments of relief.

In speaking with my aunt, I stepped closer to peace.  I suspect it's still a ways off, but I think I have found it in certain moments.  I need to accept that I will never feel good about it.  It will never not hurt.  It's never going to be easy to see posts about moms on Facebook or see other moms and daughters, especially of similar age to my mom and I.   There will always be things that trigger memories of her that cause a missing that stops me in my tracks.  That breaking of my heart may be an eternal echo through vacant halls and halls of memories I wish I could climb back into.  There will always be times where I allow myself to wander down those halls and remember her.  I wish I could take those good times and sew together something that made her better.  Something that stopped her brain from whatever causes it.

It's getting easier to see.  I still admit to some far off hope that one day we can maintain some kind of healthy agreeable relationship, though I know that it is not realistic.  She will not get better.  She will not learn not to hurt us.  She wouldn't have sent those awful Xmas cards if she was gaining any clarity or seeing progress that could lead us back together.   She would have stopped when we were children if she could have.  It's like there is something that is scrambled in her brain and when it's triggered, there is no accountability or concern for what damage is causes.  And that is because she doesn't consciously know it has happened.

And so I accept that there is an alternate reality out there.  It is her reality.  Where this is all out of nowhere.  Where it is because she did too much.  She was too good to me, and through all of that spoiling, I lost the ability to appreciate her.  Where I am betraying her.  Where I have turned.  Where she doesn't know where she went wrong.  Where I must be ill.  Where she hopes that one day I can see the error of my ways and stop doing this to her.  And that reality is the story she will share, when she eventually can't pretend anymore to those around her that she is still in our lives.  She will say I went off the deep end.  And she will be my victim.  And they will believe her.  And I finally accept that.  I finally feel like I don't have one toe in her reality where I feel the accountability to her version.  I finally feel less swayed by her story.  It is just that.  A story.