The day before Father's Day, my mother called at about 8:30pm. I didn't answer the phone. My gut said it was a bad idea. Deciding I was going to leave the call to go to voice mail and resume treating Snuggle Bug's plantar wart, I didn't think anything more of it. Then Beloved's phone started to ring. He answered it and stepped out into another room for some privacy.
My mother apparently was calling to let me know that my father had a TIA and collapsed in Walmart a week ago, but he was fully recovered. Honestly, I was expecting her to call and tell me that he was dead. His health has been degrading and he's too damn stubborn to take proper care of himself. We've had literally no contact over the last several years since my paternal grandparents died. I'm happier and healthier for it.
My mother is a master manipulator and chronic liar. I honestly don't know if I believe her about my father having a mini-stroke. At the same time, I'm not surprised if he did because my grandfather wasn't too much older than my father is now when he had a mini-stroke in his right hand. I know if I call my father, he's going to down play his health situation. So, I really have no reliable source of information about his condition because the relative that I do talk to, they're not talking to very much at all.
My mother tried calling my maternal grandmother and because I stopped writing her and I never really called her, she didn't have the means to get her hooks into me to try to guilt me into 'making peace' with my family. She was pulling that crap a while back to the point that I just stopped writing her. She kept saying that it was going to magically resolve the problems between my parents and I if I just talked to them. She kept saying that my parents didn't know how to get ahold of me or where I lived now. (My parents helped us move into this place just about twelve years ago.)
Mom lied to grandma to try and get grandma to shake me into talking to my parents. Grandma turned into a persistent passive aggressive pain in the ass. So I cut her off too. I didn't need the implied "you're a bad daughter for having boundaries" argument in every letter. Apparently, my parents do have our number and know how to get ahold of us. It's a miracle, I'm sure. The only reason why I have their number in my phone is so that I don't accidentally answer it, I'll see it and let it go to voicemail. If it's "important" they'll leave a message (theoretically).
I'm seriously considering calling my parents and telling them to delete my number and my husband's number from their phones. I am furious with mom for her passive aggressive manipulative crap. I'm furious that when dad had his stent put in, I didn't find out until a month later (when they came by sniffing for money). I'm angry that they waited a week to tell me that my father almost died. I'm angry that over the course of a pandemic, they never reached out to check if we were ok, knowing that I have some serious health complications.
I'm angry for a number of reasons. All of them boil down to my mother is back on her bullshit and trying to suck me in to coming to the farm to help take care of my father and work for free. I've got my own family to take care of. I've got my own work to do, that I get a little bit of money for. They can both drop fucking dead for all I care. There's no way that they're going to own the damage they caused or the harm they did. There's no way that I am going to get a genuine apology out of them, because they think they did nothing wrong. Apparently beating your children and threatening them with weapons is appropriate parenting. Apparently attempting to psychologically break your children is appropriate parenting. Apparently threatening people's lives to force compliance is appropriate behavior when a parent wants their adult child to do what they want.
Hell will freeze over before I go talk to them. They're toxic as fuck. They've just gotten worse as time has gone on. And I'm not going to allow them any space in my life because even a five minute phone call would psychologically injure me and put me in a position where it'd take days to recover. If they show up on my doorstep, I'm going to shut the door and lock it. If they persist in trying to get in, I'll call the police and inform them that I'm being harassed. I know how to handle this kind of shit. And that's part of the reason why they haven't tried this shit really until now. I put them on notice when mom threatened my sister-in-law and her daughter's lives if I didn't do what she wanted. I told them that I wasn't going to talk to them until they treated me with respect. I told them that if anything happened to any of my nieces and I had reason to suspect they were the cause of it, a copy of the original email and my reply was going to the police.
So, they sat at the farm and bad mouthed my sister-in-law and myself. Because they're a pack of cowards. I used to worry about losing the respect of my family. Now, I don't care. Because the family members whose respect I worried about losing are either dead or away from the farm and my parents' bullshit.
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