On Sunday my mother came to visit me unannounced and uninvited. From the way my door buzzer was ringing I suspected that it was her. So 7 months of no contact were broken when I answered the door. I tell myself I should have gone to church but I was laying in bed going back to sleep over and over again. I answered the door because she drove a long ways to get to my home. I have not responded to her phone calls, emails, snail-mails, and triangulating with the relatives but I'm not at the point where I would turn her away from my door, I would feel rude for that. After all what kind of person turns their mother away from the door. If I didn't answer the door then I would be left with the anxious anticipation of what her reaction would be to me not answering the door. So out of politeness I answered the door to see my mother even though my stomach was turning sour.
It was a seemingly mild visit. There was no outward drama. It was also awkward. For the first time in my life I found myself spontaneously lying to my mother in reaction to her questioning. For me this is healthy. I also found that I am able to tune my mother out for the first time in my life. My eyes just glaze over while she is blabbing on about something. My mind is not held captive by her, I can actually think about something else if I don't want to listen to her. This is the first period of no-contact I have ever had with her, I plan to continue it as much as I can. It may end up that "no contact" is really contact once a year when she drives out to my doorstep. It's sad. I know it would be sad if I was on the outside looking in.
I felt weak for answering the door.
I intuitively know that my mother's visit was prompted by my grandmother. My grandmother tried to contact me about me doing unpaid work for her. I didn't respond to my grandmother since the Nar-thing is generational she has the problem also. My mother is driven to respond to my grandmother, my mother doesn't have a real relationship with me and she wouldn't have come to visit me of her own volition, my mother is trying to be good for my grandmother.
At the end of Sunday while I was showering I had a combination of feeling like crying and feeling nauseous. I realized my feelings come out in private, it comes out when I'm in the shower because I can't show that to my mother. I can't show her my pain. I can see my own pain now before I didn't even see it myself. Yet it is still something I hide from her. I had a feeling of disgust at my behavior, not at mySELF, but disgust for what I am going through.
Even though it was a mild visit I wish I hadn't seen her, my mother intersperses her on-going dialogue about her world with underhanded comments about me that refer to how I deserve bad things in life, that I deserve all the badness life has to offer.
I remember how when I was in my early 20's I was so confused by my own emotions, I could not put them into a context or make sense out of them, I always thought myself to be rather eccentric but at the same time I always deeply felt that something was not right.
Breaking no-contact with my mother feels like "going back to the bottle" even though I have never been a drinker. She caught me off-guard. And it is like my willpower was weak. Being away from my mother is probably like being sober.
I simply needed to write this out to make it more real. I'm not looking for advice or commentary.