on to something heavy.

this is not going to be very vegan.

let's just for sanity's sake, begin in the present time.
currently, my parent's live in Bartlett with five dogs, me, and my mother's step mother. now don't get me wrong, i do not find that my mother is infalliable. but i do have her up on a list of people who are certainly more saintly than i am. without divulging so much information that my mother would be uncomfortable i will simply say this. my mother's mom was a beautiful woman who sang like an angel. on the flip side she also had a severe case of bipolar disorder which made her unable to take care of her six children. my mom grew up without a constant maternal influence. her father went so far as to tell her that her mother had died. imagine her horror when, as an eleven or twelve year old girl, the ghost of her mother (who is clearly not dead) comes walking up the driveway and asks if she knows who she is.
all that to say this. she was my grandmother. she was my mom's mother. she was one of those few people who are too beautiful to exist in this world. because of her mental illness and her behavior as a result, my mom's parents split when she was very young. another woman was introduced as my mom (and her five siblings') new mother. can you imagine? this new woman was not particularly fond of her new husband's children and to this day i believe that she is of the school of thought that belives children should be seen and not heard. (what a stark difference between the loud Italian heritage of her mother and this new woman!) and here is where it gets tricky. understandably the new woman wanted the attention from her new husband and did not wish to contend with six children who were not even hers. certainly, he is as much to blame here as her. i don't know details as i was not there. i can tell you this. she was not very kind to my mother or her siblings. in fairness, my mom's dad was not kind to his own children after returning from world war II. he came back a different person, calloused, cold, and at times ruthless.

fast forward to present day. this woman lives in my mother's house and my mom's father is in a nursing home because he could not be taken care of at home.
here is why my mother is a better person than i am. she forgives. she forgets. she goes out of her way to overcompensate for years of not having a real parent, not having them tell her that they love her, not having ANY sort of role model, and caters to what these people now want.
and maybe i am being unfair. it is clearly her place to decide how she feels about the situation. but here are the facts from where i stand. again my mother is not perfect but as far as parents go she is a saint. she made sure that my sister and i were well taken care of, attended to by both her and my father, doted on, and given a lot of the things that she herself never had. a lot of what my mother has done as a parent has been because she knows exactly how it feels to have the opposite and she never wanted that for her own children. she is making up for her mother's inability (which as i have said was not her fault, it was a matter of an untreated mental illness that left her completely unstable) and her father's callousness. this is one of the reason's i get extremely upset when someone mentions the potential that my parent's did not "raise me right."(Brandon, read Jeff here)
my mother is an amazing mother and an amazing person besides. best there is. kids lived at my house growing up because they needed a mother like her. she is kind and patient and affectionate and concerned. quite frankly, what more can you ask for? and maybe because i am the only person who knows how much my mother has had to overcome in her life i appreciate everything about her even more. she is obviously not like most moms. she doesn't play bunco or hang out with church ladies. she doesn't write thank you cards and the house is not spotless. but as i said, she had no one to model. not a soul. she has been fending for herself all along.
i am my mother's confidant. i have been her best friend in her eyes since i was born and she never treated me like a child. she will tell you i came out a little adult and it never really changed. she knew how to respond to me and appreciate my autonomy which is what i needed. (my sister is another story for another day, but she was a baby and still has a lot of the same mentality which makes her unique and fabulous in her own right)

moral of the story number one:
no one that is mean to my mother will get away with it if i have anything to do with it.

that is my point. i have a difficult time with this whole crazy situation because i know this woman was not nice to my mother as well as i know that her father was not nice to her. i have a hard time with it, my mother is forgiving.
my grandparents are my father's parents. always have been.
my mother's "parents" saw my sister and i on Christmas when my parents had to drag us to their house kicking and screaming where they would proceed to try to win our acceptance with gifts that further displayed that they had no idea who we were as people. if you asked me or Cortney we would have said that they didn't care. they did not really want to know us nor did we want to know them. everyone in the room was just going through the nicities.

so here we are and my mother is breaking her back almost every day to be kind to these people who were never exactly kind to her (again with the whole, we don't really care who you are as a person, we only care who you are as a relation and because we are going through the nicities). the problem isn't with her. she is not weak or foolish for turning the other cheek. the problem is with me and the fact that i do not like it. i don't want to see my mother mentally pushed to the limit by people who never went so far as to do .2% of what she is doing now for them. i am afraid that every day she gets a little closer.

moral of the story number two:
Be nice to people damnit. Especially your kids. One day they may be the decision maker on you going out in the cold with the polar bears, to the nice nursing home far far away where they can leave your mean old ass, or if you happen to have a saint for a daughter, to the comfort of a home where you will actually be taken care of and not simply left to rot.

i'm done. it's out of my head and here in blogland. i dont necessarily feel any better about it but seeing it outside my head helps. i apologize for the weight of the topic, i will come up with something lighter and more fun in a minute so that we can go ahead and get this down the post line. and someday we will have this same talk about my Daddy-o whom i also love dearly and who has had to contend with a lot in his life as well.