I'd Hoped for a Good, Long, Good Riddance.

My husband and I don't speak with our mothers, really.  Not unless it's unavoidable. 

Over the years, I have tried overlooking the past, forgiving what's ongoing, and moving past what's "right now."  Eventually the weirdness and abuse just became too much for me, and I gave in to the realization that there's just no need for me to continually forgive and re-welcome someone who just continues to suck.  

My husband's situation was different.  He met his mother's overbearing personality with silence and retreat.  I met it with humor and forced tolerance, until she was gone, and then he and I would come together for an hours-long rant-fest to relieve our frustrations and dissect the nastiness of her behavior.  The abuse in his past is rarely discussed, unless it's mentioned in passing to justify why he finally stopped speaking to his mother.  

At first, there was a "good riddance" in the air that was unmistakable.  No more worrying about steeling ourselves for the next visit.  No more worrying about how long she would stay, what kind of nasty, hateful comments she would make disguised as humor.  No more worrying about watching my husband transform into a quiet, scowling grump of a man, shoulders level with his ears, in a visible attempt to deflect her hateful jabs.  No more racist, hateful, intolerant remarks spewed carelessly in front of our children...
She would call, but he ignored it.  Sometimes she left a voicemail, crying and begging to see him, but he ignored it.  
It was a relief.  


Then there was just...nothing.  No talk whatsoever about his mother.  
Which was weird. 
Someone who had put him thru so much torment as a little boy, then made his adult life a misery had suddenly just disappeared from conversation.  Even my own mother still gets a jab in our private conversations now and then.   But his was just gone. 
It was weird.  


And today, I find amongst the "sent" items in our email, a note he sent to her, from our daughter, thanking her for the birthday card she sent.  It starts off as if our daughter wrote it herself, thanking her for the birthday money, and declares that she'll buy some toys.  Cute. 
Then, my husband takes over, tells his mother he's working two jobs happily, and that we love her, and miss her.  


And I am thrown.  


I don't love her. 
I don't miss her.  


I find her a dispicable woman, with dispicable values, and I want her to stay gone.  


Maybe it is easier for me. 
I have given my mother hundreds of chances, and every time she has shown me that I don't matter to her, and that I never did.  Every time she has shown me that she doesn't deserve any more of my forgiveness.  Even still, occasionally I'll still feel pangs of guilt, or a wishful feeling when I think of her.  I have dealt with this long enough to know that I don't miss her in the least...it's simply that I miss what I wish she should have been.  


Maybe having never confronted his mother, and never having told her how he feels about her, or her treatment of him, it's harder for him.  


Who knows?  Maybe she has suddenly become a person capable of thinking outside of herself.  A person capable of coming into our home, and leaving her gay-bashing, racist intolerance in her car.  Maybe she has suddenly become a person capable of accepting that the abuse my husband suffered was in no way any fault of his own, and rests solely upon her back, and that of the disgusting piece of shit she chose to allow near her child.  Maybe she has suddenly become a person capable of realizing that she failed as a mother, to protect her own baby from that monster, and then later blamed her son for the same abuse to which she herself subjected him.  Maybe.  And maybe my husband is now having those same wonderings. 

I, on the other hand, am entirely cynical.  I have no doubt that she loves him.  Somewhere.  In the depths of her selfish heart.  But I also know this about myself...


I can't leave my kids.  As frustrated as I get with them on any given day, I can't leave them.  I can't make up some dumb goddamn excuse, and leave them behind, to chase some guy, or marry some sex offender.  


Both of our mothers did that.  


And I can't let perverts or violent criminals come and go as they please, just because it makes me feel pretty for fucksake.  


Both of our mother's did that.  


And I can't and won't look the other way while my kids are beaten, abused, raped, tortured, or any other string of disturbing words that don't belong in the same sentence with the word "child."  


Both of our mothers did that...
Are you seeing the trend, here?  


And on top of all of it, his mother is a bitch.   I'm not saying that makes mine better than his, so don't get excited.  Mine is crazy and fake and laughable on a hundred different levels.  But his is just a down-to-the-bones bitch.  


And I don't know what to say to him, now that it seems he misses her.  


She has done something that my mother has never done, however.
She's apologized.  

I don't know what else to say about it.  I don't miss her.  It seems as tho he does.  And I feel awkward. 
And there it is.