Spiky

[smokingboot]

And now it starts, the ankle throbbing away angrily to itself. Meanwhile, my mother decides to tell me she doesn't want presents and I am not to send her anything. She does this every year. It is inevitably tiring, and now, with so little left in my tank, I have told her off.

She is going to be displeased. But I just can't be doing with this every year, every time. Of course, back comes my thought; why not respect her wishes? Why not do what she wants? She doesn't want presents, don't give her presents!

And the answer is that it's not what she wants. It's like her demands that we not turn up for Christmas and don't visit her because of monkey pox or whatever. When we ignore these orders, she is delighted. When we take them seriously, we end up in situations like the one where I'm wandering around Granada on Christmas Eve, the one night everyone is home, because she's told me that she doesn't want to see anybody, only to learn later she was waiting for me. It's just that disease talking, just that something in her head that wants her to be poor, to be in the cold and dark, to have little, to eat less, to be forgotten, to give everything away in a kind of exaggerated largesse towards her children, where they are completely infantalised and can give nothing back, and she sacrifices everything for them. She takes the old trope and turns into a form of self abnegation that is at best creepy and at worst, dangerous to herself.

Sometimes I can reason round it but not today. Today, I need the cleaner to leave so I can collapse, I need to put the fire on. There can be very little work, I need to just stop.

Comments

[mallorys_camera]

It's so exhausting when people who are close to you can't tell you what they want in relatively clear terms.

Sending you love.

[smokingboot]

Thank you. Sending you lots of love right back X