The horror within

 

It's not politically correct to call someone crazy, but sometimes other words elude me.

Imagine spending your life with someone who was always held up to be everything you are not (and everything your family thinks is important.)

People are created by the molds that form them, which is why there are so many family rituals, traditions, and preferences. We want to be liked and being like someone makes us more likable to them. 

My mother used to get so mad she would throw glasses or even whole chairs. It did not seem unnatural to me and neither did her habit of slapping me so hard across the face that my nose went numb. Her criticism of me was subtle, always supposedly for my own good, but she considered everything about me awkward, clumsy and not pretty.

I knew I did not want to be like her and yet some of her habits carried over until I was nearly middle aged. Not the slapping in the face habit, but the taking it out on material things habit. Little by little I worked through all that. Still, I had a maternal aunt who was a bit dotty too. She use to send my dad bottles of clear water that supposedly contained mites from her head.  They weren't there, but she shaved her head to get rid of them and once set her whole apartment on fire. 

It comes from both sides of the family, this craziness, and I worried it might get me. Instead it got the perfect member of our family. The petite, pretty, social-lite who tried to be as low class as she could manage all her life. She taught herself to use bad grammar, walk pigeon-toed, dated men who were truly losers and put all her focus on a pretty daughter who is now considered bi-polar. 

This person will bend over backwards, lie, make up things, or do whatever it takes to please people and most people think she is a sweet little woman who is just a bit dotty. That's the scary part. 

I've always been leery of her passive aggressiveness. It can be incredibly cruel and sly, but after seeing her explode into a bellowing, screaming, foul mouthed monster who could not be reasoned with or stopped for over twenty minutes I saw what lay beneath. It's just possible her daughter is the result of living with this woman.

She scares me. It's like living in a horror movie. I know that monster that lurks within, but no one else will ever believe me unless they see it too and she has a lot of practice hiding behind the kind old lady facade.