Acting on your best behavior, Turn your back on Mother Nature...

My mother was always the stronger personality of my parents. Especially when my father was struck ill at the age of 49 and basically spent the next 18 years slowly dying. My father was not an educated man and he dropped out of school somewhere around the age of 15. Knowing the things I know after raising my own children, and from working in education, it would seem that my father suffered some kind of learning disability. I am thinking he was probably dyslexic. He was a good man, a strong man, he was a hard working proud man, but he was not book smart. He gladly allowed my mother to run the house, gladly turned his paycheck over to her each week. Never questioned her judgement or decisions, and financially, she did well by them.

Deciding to buy a home with my mother, was, at the time, the right thing to do. My father was dying and she needed my help. I also did not want her to be alone when he died. Its been almost a year since my father left this world for the next. Alot of the drama and urgency of the last few years are slowly settling down and my life, while far from perfect is in a calmer place.

Lately my mother and I are having terrible arguments. We are both type-A personalities on some level. My mother is having a hard time with me moving on and rebuilding my life. She takes offense when I spend the night with the man I am seeing. I only do this when my 13 year old is away for the weekend with his father. She does not like when I deposit money into our joint account to pay bills. Our payroll schedules are different, and I simply can not put money in the bank when I do not physically have it. She is just not comprehending that. We had a real screaming fight last week. It got ugly. When she has nothing more intelligent to say, she resorts to being underhanded, mean and plain nasty. She brings up things from my marriage, she brings up my flaws, she fights dirty. She says things that can not be taken back.

On any given evening, after 5:30 pm my mother is also half in the bag on cheap red wine. She semi-blacks out. She denies saying the things she says. She blames it on me for not giving in to her. She blames it on the wine. She blows it off, saying, its over, let it go. I am starting to get truly tired of living in dysfunction. My "boyfriend" (oh, how I loathe that word..it reminds me of the "monster") sees her really for what she is, and in a very gentle way, he often points out situations where she is unnecessarily mean to me without provocation. He does not want to spend time at my house anymore and it has alot to do with my mother and her behavior. I do not want to spend time there lately myself. This is not to be misconstrued that he goes out of his way to point these instances out, more that he will mention it when I am going stark raving mad over the things she says and I start to feel like it is all in my head.

I really feel as though I am going to loose him, and I will someday end up just like her.