Reset Button

A couple of weeks ago Mom had a meltdown. I knew it was coming. I've experienced these meltdowns hundreds, if not thousands, of times over the past six decades. I can sense it, like the electricity in the air before a storm. Predictable. Like my migraines. But worse. It doesn't matter what precipitates the storm.  Or the meltdown.  You just have to ride it out, or ignore it, or confront it. None of those options affect the storm frequency, duration, or severity. Because the storm just is.  And regardless of what I do, it will come, and it will go as suddenly as it comes.

This last storm I got angry...I confronted the storm. Thought it would change the vector.  It didn't.  Hoped it would avert the next storm. It won't. Prayed it would make it easier. It did not.

Then Alex said something really intuitive and insightful (he does that sometimes).  "Don't worry, honey. She'll hit the reset button soon."

Reset. Exactly what happened within a couple of days. One day she is screaming and telling me to shut up and calling me names, taking all her stuff and putting it in her dresser drawers. Demanding her car keys back. Adamant she is leaving at the end of the month. She's had enough. She's through. She cannot take it anymore.

Then, it's gone. She is cleaning her room, planning how to rearrange her things.  Oblivious of the storm that was her less than 12  hours before. Sweet, loving, kind.  Again. Acting like a "normal" mom. She has reset.

But I have seen it all before, lived it.  And it still unnerves me.  Scares me.  I am a little girl all over again.

I am six years old, and I accidentally dropped the bowl of peas I was carrying to the dinner table.  I incurred the wrath of the storm.  I was screamed at and hit, and became the center of a huge argument between my parents.

I am 9, huddled in the bathroom with my brother and my three little sisters, being pushed behind Mom as she lashes out at my dad, screaming at him get out, get out, don't you dare hurt these children. What? My daddy never hurts us. Confused.

I am 11, watching her put my mentally handicapped brother's suitcase and pillow on the front porch and calling my dad to "come pick up your son." Where was he going? Was he coming back?

I am in the doctor's office at 13, undergoing a forced pelvic exam because Mom was convinced I was, in her words, a "slut." I didn't even know what that word was--I still played with Barbie dolls.

I am 16 and crying because she emptied out my hard-earned savings, money I had saved all summer so I could stay in Catholic high school, to be with friends I had known since first grade. I had to change schools twice after that.  

I am married and a mom, at 28, leaving her home in the middle of the night with a toddler and an infant after a particularly nasty blowup during which she threw a jar at me, narrowly missing the six month old baby.

I am an adult, and my husband is intercepting her acid-tongued letters (often 10-15 pages long) for "screening" to avoid more hurt.

Countless times, I have tried to reset our relationship, to start over, to forget the past. Only now, do I understand she LIVES in the past.  That her reset button is, to her, like that movie Groundhog's Day. But unlike that movie, it never ends.  There is no laugh track.  She relives the same reality. Pain. Rejection. Imaginary wrongs.  Distrust. Perceived slights. A victim of her neurosis. Made up illnesses. Miserable. A product of her own alternate reality for over 80 years, she no longer knows what is true or real and what is not.

This week, a storm is brewing again. I sense it. All the signs are there. We can delay it, face it, ignore it, run away from it, exacerbate it. But we can't stop it.

Thank God for the reset button.