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The Return
After a week of going missing, my mother returned to my brother’s home as if nothing had happened to her. My brother told me it was the strangest thing to him. When he tried questioning her of her whereabouts, she stated that it was not a topic of discussion. So my brother did not press the issue. We all went back to trying to settle back into a peaceful and less dramatic life.
Unlike my brother, I was not new to our mother’s games. Nothing about her behavior shocked me. She had not placed me on a pedestal as she had done with my brother when he was a child. His head was spinning from the shock of her actions. My head was spinning from the fact that sooner or later she would try to make her mark on my territory. I needed to prepare.
I noted that her time away [wherever she disappeared to] from my brother had solidified the control she had over him. He took her back into his home and ceased to question her actions any further. He did not hold her accountable for the emotional turmoil that she had caused him, his wife, or his children. My mother had him dangling on a puppet string. He could not see this fact. He could not see anything. He just knew he felt miserable and trapped but did not understand the reason. I knew the reason.
It should have been clear to my brother that our mother was not so mentally unstable after all. It should have been clear to him that she used his weaknesses against him to gain the upper hand over his household. He was so blind and so loyal to her. He was traumatically bonded to our mother in a most symbiotic way. His phone calls to me soon disappeared, and I assumed that his life was now back to the normal that he was accustomed to even though our mother lived with him.
Clearly, my brother did not get it. Our mother did not live with him. He lived with her. Sure, it was his house, and he paid the bills, but she managed to find a way to not contribute to anything. He said so. She was controlling him covertly, but he seemed oblivious to this fact. She obviously realized that he missed her presence [when she left] enough so that he worried about trying to find her. So now that she had returned, he would oblige her and attempt to live peaceably with her. I, on the other hand, was very cognizant of her manipulative games. I knew it was only a matter of time before she was going to ramp up her schemes to come for me.
Sorrow
The schemes of my mother were put on hold after a long time of peace. Everything halted when my brother’s world turned upside down. He fell into deep and tragic grief when his wife of many years passed away. Sorrow permeated his life, and I briefly paused my no-contact clause that I had developed with my mother long enough to attend my sister-in-law’s funeral. For the funeral and times throughout my stay in my hometown, I instituted the grey rock method by having the shortest conversations possibly with my mother. I felt tortured.
During the funeral, my mother was the star in a rather covert way. She was observed as the peacemaker during a family feud that cast my brother and his in-laws against each other. My mother manipulated her way into situations that would normally be meant for my sister-in-law’s grieving family. No one seemed to notice this but me. No one seemed to care. My mother came off looking like a saint. Since my brother was battling grief and helping his children to adjust, I never mentioned to him all that I saw, and kept myself in the background until everything was done.
I stayed in contact with my brother after I returned back home, but as time saw my mother having more prominence and dominance within his home until she had completely taken over, the contact I had with my brother tapered off. As long as my brother did not have a problem with our mother’s dominance within his home, then I did not have a problem either. His life is not my life to live. During this time, though, my mother busied herself with assisting my brother, and life seemed well for them on the surface, but I was not so trusting of her motives. I never trusted her motives because I do not trust her.
Manipulation
I was right not to trust my mother’s motives. She was always plotting how to gain the upper hand over others. She was still plotting against me. Each time she called me, she had a different phone number. So I always had to screen my calls. I programmed my phone to only accept numbers from people already in my contact list. All other calls would go straight to voicemail. Because my mother and brother lived together, I had to screen his calls as well. She had now taken him under her wing, and I was concerned that he was back to being our mother’s flying monkey.
During the time that my mother’s schemes to get closer to me began, she was calling me multiple times a week. I was still instituting my no-contact rule with her. I checked my voicemail to see it had been inundated with numerous messages all saying the same thing. She always started off sounding as if she was physically dying. She’d be barely whispering. It was one great act. I would have to strain to hear her. Then her voice would come in clear enough for me to decipher her words near the end of the message. Basically, her messages were the same. “Let me come live with you,” Why don’t you let me come visit you?”, “Why don’t you take my calls?”, and “Why can’t I see your house?”
My mother had one agenda, and one agenda alone. She was trying to get to my house to become the kind of tenant who can live rent-free. Yet, I was on to her schemes enough to know not to open myself up to her games, her trickery, and lying acts. She did not care about me. She only cared about what she could gain from me. She still sought to control me, and after gaining success with my adult brother, she regained motivation to pursue me. She had gained the upper hand over my brother and found herself covertly ruling his household and living basically rent-free.
There Is No Peace
For a time I had pockets of peace away from the family drama, but then there was far too much drama where my mother was the center of attention. From selling her house to her mysterious disappearance. and from becoming the primary co-occupant of a home that belongs to my brother to devising a scheme to make herself a living occupant within my home, my mother the queen of creating chaotic drama. She was certainly not cowering away from showing the ruthless side of her true self just as long as no one outside of my brother and me could see it. Behind the scenes, she planned another scheme that landed her not too far from my doorsteps. She planned another scheme that literally shook me into a panic attack.
My mother was my enemy. My enemy was near. My enemy was here.
My Voice Unchained 