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2002-04-25 | 1:55 p.m.

So I called a bunch of therapists this week and nobody ever called me back.

I tell you, it's enough to give a person a complex.

Anyway, finally today I managed to reach someone and schedule an appointment for next Wednesday. Then I had to call my Mom and ask her if she would watch Jasper so I could go to the appointment. I thought about lying and saying I was going to a "doctor's appointment," but then I thought no, if I start going every week she'll think I'm dying.

So I told her what I was planning to do and why, and then I had to listen as she rattled off all the reasons why she thought it was a good idea. There are times when my mother makes me feel like I am fifteen years old again, and this was one of them.

"I think it's a good idea for you to do something for yourself for a change," she says in this weird, "rich" General Mills International Coffees voice, as if I have scheduled a pedicure or splurged on a blueberry muffin.

"What I worry about," she says, "is, you forget. You forget things." Which is true enough. Then she tells me WHY she thinks I forget things. For some reason, this irritates me. Like she is pretending to be the therapist. Then I say that I think she should see a therapist, which I do, and she demurs, and says "I talk to you," and I say she should talk to somebody neutral, because it's not like she takes my advice, and she says, yeah, "I guess I think you tend to oversimplify things."

Which irritates the hell out of me.

Then she tries to sympathize with my position by saying that it must be hard for me, because I'm in the middle. As if I am often taking Diane's side against her. But I don't think that's true. Yes, I ask questions in a way that is annoying to her because I'm usually trying to figure out what really happened, as distinct from the two completely different and hyperbolic accounts I get from the two of them. I can see how she would interpret that as non-supportive. But to say I oversimplify things is funny, really.

Yes, Mom, I guess I do oversimplify things. I think you should move out and get your own place, and I tell you that constantly. Because every time I see you, you go on and on and ON about how mean and contemptuous Diane is toward you--which is true, I've seen it myself. Yet the minute you get close to moving out, she guilt-trips you into staying by saying she can't make it on her own, and you're so afraid she's going to start drinking again that you've consigned the remainder of your life to being miserable in a misguided attempt to protect her from her own worst impulses. Even though, let's face it, when you're dead and gone she's going to have to make it on her own somehow. Unless you outlive her.

I do say this to my Mom; most of it (I leave out the drinking and death parts). But it's just pissing in the wind. She has a martyr complex and she won't listen to me, so what the hell am I supposed to do about it? I can only work on myself. Beyond that, all I can do is make suggestions.

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