So, I saw my mother again the other day

We had lunch. Turns out she’s still as shallow and narrow-minded as I remember.

She tells me the fortnight I spent in hospital, she couldn’t stop thinking about me.
“Yeah,” I said, “The hospital staff told me about the phone call you made to the emergency ward telling them that my suicidal state was my dad’s fault”

She told me she told them that she left him because he was “abusive”. I don’t know if it’s true or not. I never saw him abuse her in the whole time I lived with them. And I already know she’s full of shit.

Once, she kicked my sister out of the house for telling her that it’s not okay to go around saying “if you marry an Asian, you’ll have ugly children”. Later, she told all her relatives that she did it because my sister was physically attacking her. Bullshit. I saw it. So I take everything she says about abuse with a pinch of salt.

So, when she then followed that up with, “once, 27 years ago, he hit me so hard I thought I was going to miscarry” I was unamused. Like, why would she even say something like that except to be spiteful.

She apparently doesn’t realise how horrible she was to live with. Once, she said “That’s it, I’m making a rule. No bisexuals allowed in the house. I’m not discussing it.” A rule she made when she inadvertently discovered the girl I was dating at the time was bisexual. My dad got pissed at her then, so she threw a tantrum, slammed doors and went for a drive. Then for the following months would come into my room while I was sleeping and lecture me on how horrible she thinks this girl she’s never met is, and then leave before I had a chance to respond. She would send me texts telling me that I have a right to be happy, but that doesn’t mean I should accept any sort of shit (referring to bisexuals). Bisexuals weren’t the only class of people she targeted in her campaign to make my life hell. Muslims, any non-heterosexual I was friends with, people with skin that wasn’t white were targets too. I didn’t eat for days at a time. Contemplated suicide constantly. And then, to add insult to injury she said my depression was probably due to associating with “immoral people”. So, I stopped telling her about my private life. For a year before I moved out and stopped talking to her completely.

She still thinks what she did was okay, she says. It’s against the word of God. Apparently even if people don’t act on those impulses, they are still abominations.

Then, she started telling me about some book her sister is reading about a 3 year old boy who during clinical death hallucinated about meeting Jesus and God and the angel Gabriel. I told her plenty of people have hallucinations during clinical death and they depict a wide range of afterlives, not just your own.

She said, she believes the accounts that match scripture, but not any of the others, because they must be wrong. That’s her evidence for truth in scripture. I pointed out the circularity of her reasoning, but that’s irrelevant to her, because she knows just instinctively that scripture is inspired by the word of God, so it must be true regardless of any evidence to the contrary.

So I question her about her scripture. She hasn’t even read most of it. This book is like the cornerstone of her life. She unquestioningly believes every word within it, but all she’s actually read are passages referred to in her subscription to “Every day with Jesus”. And she tells me I’m taking bits of the book out of context. I’ve actually read the fucking book.

I’m not the one who tries to morally justify the divinely mandated genocide and mass rape depicted in that book. Yet I’m the one who lacks “good Christian morals”. So, she thinks I’m going to hell. Let her think that. I know she did a lot for me over the years, but I can’t help but find her repulsive now. She is just a nasty person. And she won’t change.

That’s my mother, really, a narrow-minded control freak who thinks God gave her a monopoly on morality.

Is there actually a reason I’m wasting my time trying to work things out with her?