Jean · A New Baby Arrives

A New Baby Arrives. Time To Pretend to Be A Mom Again

When my first daughter was born my Aunt ( my mother's sister ) came to take pictures of the baby. It had been over three years since we had any contact with Jean. My Aunt gave some of the pictures to her mother, who in turn sent them to Jean. Suddenly, it was time to pretend to be a mother again.

There was no apology. Nothing. There was a phone call, and her tone was and message was: "Chris, you need to forget about things. You never forget".

If you have been a victim of the kind of abuse described on this site, trust me when I say Don't Forget. Because when you do, you open the door to the abuser all over again.

For four years, Jean pretended to be a grandmother. For her, this meant dropping a card in the mail on the baby's birthday and sending clothes at Christmas. For Jean, it gave her the opportunity to brag and show pictures of her grandchild to friends. All the benefits of Grandparenting without any responsibility. Sort of like her parenting philosophy.

After my second child was born, my wife and I moved back to California.

Though we lived less than a hundred miles away, the pattern established in college repeated itself. Jean never came come to see us unless we coerced her to come down for a holiday, once every other year if she could break away from her young boyfriend. Visiting her house was like taking the kids into a fire zone - she and her boyfriend smoked constantly, and everyone would leave with sore throats and coughs.

I continued to hold the belief that I should put the past behind, forgive her actions of the past even though there had never been a single apology or regret expressed on her part, and that perhaps she had mellowed with age, and that she wanted to have a relationship with me, my wife, and children.

I was wrong. Her idea of a relationship was having the "trophies" to show off, pictures of grandchildren and stories to tell. It still meant dropping a card in the mail on birthdays, but didn't include coming to visit them, or even calling them on the phone. All the visiting was from us to her. There was no job to tie her up, since a convenient "fall" in a supermarket left her suddenly on disability (so coincidentally soon after her last child reached adulthood and her welfare checks dried up).

There would be a few more drunken harangues, were she would start in about "You're just like your father". They ended when I told her very clearly that if she ever mentioned him in that context to me again, or ever brought him up again at all, all contact with me and my family would end. Apparently, there was some thought that went on in that alcohol-addled brain, because she backed off, and with the exception of times she needed to be reminded after she started down that path again, things remained cordial. But it was still a one way street. A street that only led to her, never from her. There was no affection from her, no sign of any interest whatsoever in my life or my family's lives except such that she could toss off in conversations to her friends.

The Young Boyfriend Gets Older and Smartens Up

Eventually, Jean's boyfriend must have woken up one morning and realized that while he was in his mid to late thirties he was waking up every day next to a woman that could be his mother. A woman with no inclination to do anything but drink and cook meals.

They split up, and my phone started ringing. My mother wanted to know if she should go after her ex for Palimony. Once again, the disgust rose in me at her unbelievably parasitic nature.

But never fear, she found someone else to fall on her back for in just a matter of weeks.

Closure

Sometimes it takes a reminder, a neon billboard twenty stories tall thrown up in front of your face to tell you the time has come to walk away.

There was nothing in my relationship with my mother that offered me anything. No peace of mind, no sense of family, no sense of caring, no love. Just reminders of her selfishness and petty cruelness, of a life spent caring only for her own whims and desires.

In 1997, I lost my father to cancer. He had never pulled his life together after dropping everything to come find us. Alcohol and fate seemed to conspire against him from ever finding success or happiness again. Though he worked harder in one week than my mother did in all the years since she abducted us, he never pulled out of the situation.

The doctors only gave him eight weeks when they diagnosed the cancer.

My mother, who had destroyed this man, who had vilified him to his children and to everyone who would listen, came like a ghoul when he had only days to live. She came to his house, and acted as though she was distraught over his condition, over his immenent death. In all the years they had been apart, with the exception of my wedding and the period she had used him to help pay her rent on Cape Cod, she had never done anything to have any contact with this man. Never called, never visited, never even sent a card. Yet there she stood, and even had the gall to take out a camera and take photos of him at his worst moment, were even his pride could not protect him.

My father was unable to stop Jean from destroying his family, I have no intentions of letting her selfishness and petty behavior effect mine.

My children are both old enough and smart enough to realize that this woman who pretends to be a grandmother never even took the time to call them, come to see them, or do anything to have any form of real relationship with them at all. They remember this on their own, without any input from myself or my wife. Their other grandmother who lives 3000 miles away made the trip more times than Jean did from just a hundred miles away, and calls them more in a month than Jean called them in their entire lives.

They have no desire to see her, and do not miss her, since the contact with her was fleeting and one sided at best. Their feelings for her were never effected by any comments by myself, or my wife, but purely by her own actions, or lack thereof.

And fortunately, at least in the State of California, the presumption of the law is that an intact family has the absolute right to who they associate with, and who they allow their children to associate with, as they see fit.

So we removed the cancer from our lives.

The ever present "What If?"

Unfortunately, when dealing with someone that lacks the basic ingredients that make us rational, caring, feeling adults, we have to acknowledge that there really are no limits to what they are capable of.

For example, after my grandmother (my mother's mother) moved into a retirement home, she transferred all of her cash to her other daughter's bank account in trust. This didn't sit well with Jean. For reasons I never understood, she always resented her sister. Always referred to her as a "townie". Perhaps it was because her sister succeeded were she failed - she too had come out of a bad marriage, but instead of using her kids as bargaining chips, or going on welfare, she got on with her life. She met a new man, and stayed happily married for years.

Somehow, Jean got it into her head that her sister was not handling the funds properly. She arranged through a friend at a state agency to obtain a copy of her sister's credit reports. She then used those reports to snoop into her sisters banking and loan records. Things she would have been morally outraged with had someone done it to her, she did on a whim with utter disregard for her sister or her sister's right to privacy. She then contacted her older brother, who she had also ridiculed and held in disdain for years (envious too I think of his stable, comfortable life) and painted a story of her sister as a thief and encouraged the brother to take control of the money. He did. And those actions disrupted a lifetime relationship between my grandmother and her son in law, who she came to believe was stealing and spending her savings.

When dealing with someone like Jean, there is no limit to what that person is capable of. There is every reason to believe that Jean may do something more to try to interfere in my life and the lives of my family. To try to interfere with my children. In fact, to this date, despite repeated requests to simply leave us alone, she continues to try and act like a "grandmother", one who has done nothing to harm us. She sends late birthday cards, with scribblings on the back that say "I've opened a bank account for the children".

When my wife contacted her, to help avoid a phone call from me and the inevitable confronation, and asked Jean once again to leave us all alone, Jean turned it into a rant and tried to start a fresh argument about the need to forgive and forget.

That was the end of the last conversation, the last effort to deal with her like a rational human being.

Now, we simply live our lives and ignore her efforts to interract or interfere.

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