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I keep thinking about looking into therapy. Even though I honestly feel like I would be fine without it, and I don't have any pressing need for it, I do think therapy benefits all people, and, you know, I am a people. I sort of looked into it once, maybe a year or two ago, thinking it could help me get a better grip on my own emotional reactions to my husband. I can't hold on to any hope that Shobhit would go to marriage counseling with me—although, frankly, I would love it if he did. Within the first year of us getting together, he actually told me he felt that if we ever got to a point of needing counseling then we'd be past any hope of salvaging the relationship. And that's an insanely ignorant and naïve way to look at the prospect of marriage counseling, but that's also kind of a separate conversation.

The resurgence lately in my thinking about therapy, some of you may very well have guessed, is due to the death of my mom. I just realized while typing this that she died two weeks ago today. And I realized something odd last night: I don't especially miss her. I am saddened by her death, because there is no avoiding that when a mother dies, and I grieve her loss—but I don't miss her. Is that fucked up? The fact that I think to ask that question is what makes me think maybe therapy would be good for me. Because grieving someone you don't really miss is a very strange experience.

Hell, I've visited her an average of twice a year the past ten years far more out of moral obligation than any particular desire to. I haven't "missed" my mother in any natural or traditional sense, in terms of a child missing his mom, since I was a child. And it sort of feels like I got over Mom's death with suspicious swiftness: not once did I truly weep; I cried pretty hard for about a minute after the first phone call letting me know the morning of July 1. I cried occasionally a few more times the rest of the day. Then, I got teary-eyed due to various triggers a few more times from then until the following Saturday, after which I returned to life as normal. I've really been fine, emotionally, since—although I have on more than on occasion acknowledged that this will likely change again when Shobhit and I actually go back to Wallace two weeks from Saturday. I expect that to be an especially surreal experience.

I think it might have been Danielle I was talking to a few days ago, in which a particular memory I had not thought about in ages came up, something that was a huge part of the truly lasting damage in Mom's and my relationship. It was soon after Mom and Bill got together, less than a year after their wedding and about a year and a half after I came out. (The double whammy of my coming out in 1996 and the truly reckless nature in which Mom and Bill got together in 1997 combined to alter the dynamic of Mom's and my relationship pretty much forever.)

I had sent out the December 1997 / January 1998 edition of my relatively short-lived The Fruitcake Newsletter, and since it detailed Jennifer and me visiting Grandma and Grandpa McQuilkin in Hawaii over New Year's, it was quite long. Still, there was one part that I made a stupid crack about Bill:

I stayed the entire week with Danielle, the first time I went home to Spokane and did not stay with any family members. My mother's house is much too dirty and I'm not comfortable yet with her recently-acquired oversized (and overstuffed) Nerf Ball of a husband.

Now, in retrospect, I still find the Nerf Ball reference objectively funny. I will cop to the "oversized" stuff being fat-shamey, something I have a long history of being guilty of. Either way, I should have known better, even at the age of 21: one of the people I sent this newsletter to was Darcy, one of Mom's closest friends, and my only excuse for it never occurring to me that Darcy would get offended on Mom's behalf is that I was not yet 25 and my brain had not yet fully developed.

Well, Darcy told Mom about it. And Mom was so livid, she sent me a truly vitriolic, livid email filled with personal attacks. As I said to Danielle when talking about it recently, whether what I did was wrong or not, that was not a very motherly thing to do. Even when I was 21, it would have been far more effective for her simply to express sadness and disappointment, and tell me that it hurt her feelings. Instead, she struck back, and in a far more severe way. Up until that point, we were barely managing to build up a new kind of healthy relationship in the wake of my coming out in 1996, and this just set us all the way back again. I do not still have a copy of that email, which is probably for the best.

The greatest irony is that for Bill's part himself, from day one he just thought being called a "Nerf Ball" was funny. I can't tell you how many times he's brought it up and laughed about it over the years. Nearly any time it came up, though, no matter how long ago the incident was, it clearly brought back Mom's resentments over it. She was insanely defensive about her decision to marry Bill, since I was far the only person who had told her she was nuts—just a reminder, they married a month and a half after meeting online, and thirteen days after meeting in person. That would be crazy now, but in 1997 it was beyond belief. But, time proved them right; they had a loving marriage that lasted until death did them part, and they were a match made in pig slop heaven. I think Mom felt she always knew this would be the case, deep in her bones and so any challenge, even from the start, just made her angry.

Whatever the case, my relationship with my mom has never been what it truly should be, but has especially not been since 1998. As I said before, since that time, truly the only reason we even continued to have a relationship at all was because I was the one who made sure of it. Her mobility issues with chronic pain and chronic poverty over the years made it harder for me to resent her never having visited me in Seattle (it's always been me visiting her in Wallace, and Spokane before that), but this extends far earlier than that became a convenient excuse. I went to college 80 miles away from her home in Spokane and she still could not be bothered to come to my graduation in 1998—as opposed to Dad, Sherri, Angel and Gina, who all came from across the state. Mom's stated excuse even then was health reasons, but this is something I have never stopped resenting, much as I wish I could. If the roles were reversed, I would have come in a fucking stretcher if I had to.

I won't say Mom has never put in any effort at all, as that would not be fair. She's sent me a few cards over the years, actually called me a few times (as opposed to me calling her), given me Christmas presents on occasion. I do know she loved me. It's just that I also feel that her efforts, while they existed, were truly minimal. She basically did the least she could do without doing nothing. And we only had a relationship at all because of my efforts.

So, to the extent that I do grieve, it feels a little like I grieve what should have been, as opposed to what actually was. As things are now, I am experiencing conflicting emotions between feeling like, "Well, I don't have to deal with her anymore," and still being sad that she's gone. Which I'm sure is broadly a relatable experience for people losing much older parents who became really high maintenance with declining health, but Mom was only 68. And I can only say how grateful I am for other people in my family, like Auntie Rose and especially Sherri, who offered me the kind of support through my life that I should have gotten from Mom but didn't.

Of course, it doesn't help that Auntie Rose already died this year as well. But, she was 82. She had a good long, full life and she was an unusually kind and selfless woman. Her passing was sad but not tragic.

Let's all just pray Sherri lasts a good couple of decades more. I feel very fortunate that I still have two parents left.

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— चार हजार सात सौ छिहत्तर —

You know . . . if nothing else, being able to write all this shit out is in itself therapeutic.

Of course I also have to update you on my life over the past day. Really exciting stuff! Shobhit worked at Total Wine, and I ran out of cereal yesterday morning, so I suggested we go to Costco. At first Shobhit suggested I walk to meet him there when he got off work so he wouldn't have to drive up the hill to pick me up at home. He was still at home during my lunch break and I finally said to him, "Shobhit? I don't really think it's fair for you to expect me to walk for an hour and a half instead of you just having to drive an extra few minutes." He said, "Okay."

But, I later compromised: I felt like going for a walk, just not for that long. He got off at 6:15, so I left home at 5:45, grabbing a library book I've had since February, and ready while walking straight down Pine to the waterfront, through Pike Place Market. That way Shobhit could just pick me up along the route he would have taken to Costco straight from work anyway. He was slightly delayed getting out of there due to a system outage, but it was only a brief delay.

Even with a mask on, which is less comfortable in warmer weather, I found the walk quite pleasant.

We went on to Costco, where I spent $120. Not just on cereal though.

We came back home, and Shobhit still had to work on filing out taxes. He applied for and got yet another extension, but he finally got them filed just this morning. Since he wanted to work on that, we didn’t get to watch the new movie on Hulu that I really want to see that's getting lots of buzz and great reviews, Palm Springs—we'll watch it this weekend instead—and so I spent the rest of the evening finishing up the digitization of home videos I have with Mom in them. In the end, I don't think the cumulative time of the footage is all that long, and my aim for the compilation video is to use only stuff that would be compelling to people who knew her. So right now I have no idea how long the compilation will end up being, but I rather doubt it will reach the hour-and-fifty-minute length the compilation I made of Grandma McQuilkin in 2011 wound up being. People I share it with will probably be grateful for that.

Shobhit works a swing shift tonight, so I should have a lot of time to get quite a bit of initial work done on the project in iMovie. In spite of everything I have said and written about Mom, I am still enjoying this whole project.

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[posted 12:34 pm]