16 November 2020 - Anti-Oedipus; My Complicated Mother-Son Relationship
My relationship with my mom is... complicated. She is on the one hand someone who I give lots of emotional trust to, and yet someone who I feel I need to force a wedge between. Someone who I care so much about, and yet do not want to be as involved as I am.
I feel that I serve a role in my mother's life like the husband or best friend she wished she had. I have been fulfilling that emotional role, esp. that like a spouse, for a long time. I used to fill the "friend" role more, but have been able to distance myself on that front more successfully than the other. I am having a re-evaluation of my situation on the heels of my mom essentially telling me her and my dad are "looking into [...] separation," ie the sad-but-expected affirmation of reality which had been slowly forming over the past several years of their disintegrating relationship. It is in this context where, as she is struggling to sleep, she tells me how she loves me very much and that "life would be difficult" if I were not involved in it. There was the implication that by "involved in it," she meant the present deep involvement I have in it.
I fucking resent her for making me take the role as her confidant at the age of 12, when my dad decided to jet off to Thailand for a three-week solo adventure one early March. She did not like it, and I got to hear about it for the next three weeks. I listened as I was an obedient preteen, and felt it was my responsibility as her child to listen to my mom. But she talked and ranted to me more like a friend than a kid. Maybe that doesn't sound so bad, but it wore on me over the next 7.5 years.
Even at age 4, my parents would regularly use me as a messenger between the two of them, a trend that lasted until I was 17 or 18 and I grew tired of it. And by that, I mean I started to resist so my mom moved to texting him and being upset when he didn't pay attention.
My mom has given me so much care and support over the years however. I cannot emphasize that enough. For much of my life, she has been my rock, my one point of stability. It was only when I started online dating and esp. after discovering my own bisexuality that this started to erode. She is uncomfortable around homosexuality, and does not believe bisexuality to exist (she once told my sister on the subject something to the extent of "one day [they] pick a side," referring to whether a bi person enters a heterosexual or homosexual marriage. She still gives me all sorts of love and support, but it feels like it only extends so far.
I don't like how my parents feel like I "am taking the other's [parent's] side" on issues when I am trying to be neutral, like all either of them can childishly accept is agreement.