Mixed blessings

The hardest boundaries are the ones someone you love can't set.

It’s okay to have crazy people in your family.

Everyone does. I was blessed with a surplus. But, of course, it’s a mixed blessing. On one hand, it really shapes the weird and wonderful dynamic I have with my mother. Sometimes, amid a tsunami of craziness, we become each other’s anchors. No, you’re not dumb or weak or getting senile, mom. Ignore what so-and-so said. Your ex-crack smoking son can confirm that. And, in turn, she confirms that I’m doing all right for myself these days — no matter what toxins may fill her ears.

But mixed blessings are still mixed.

You still have a deranged family member.

Sometimes it feels like living under siege.

My mother always has an explanation.

“He’s just like that.”

“She’s going through something.”

Maybe.

Or maybe decades of trauma, denial and mind-altering substances eventually change a person in ways that don’t change back. The thing is, when you're really close to the inferno for a very long time, it feels less like an explosion than a slow evolution. It's hard to notice the drift when you've been living inside it for years. That’s where other people come in:

“What’s up with your brother?”

“Is your cousin normally like that?”

That’s when you realize...

There was never anything normal about it.

That’s the real downside — when, in an astounding feat of denial, you manage to convince yourself that this is the new normal. From then on, it becomes a lifetime of appeasement.

Which only feeds the madness.

Wouldn’t it be liberating to simply say, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m out”?

Well, it does happen. Sort of. Recovery taught me boundaries. That means you can’t yell over me, belittle, control, bully, call a thousand times a day, utterly fail to make eye contact or any of a million fucked up things you do — without me saying, ‘No thanks.’

What a relief.

Then a friend reminded me:

“You can be separate from it.

But your mom can’t.”

Right.

Sometimes you maintain contact not because you can’t leave, but because someone you love can’t.

That’s the blessing.

That’s the curse.