It's easier to build a child, than repair and adult

My mother is a psycho. When I was just a baby she and my father got a divorce, and my sister went to live with him. My sister and I are eight years apart, so when she left I had no one to take care of me anymore. On the bright side I am very independent, but on the not so bright side I am a bitter Betty about using my weekly allowance of twenty dollars to pay for basic needs and school supplies. On a few occasions I would work up the nerve to ask her for things like a year book or entry fee for competitions I got chosen for. Then I would be told "Shannon, I don't have that kind of money" or "This is a really bad time"

Guilt kept me in line and submissive.

A week ago I was doing a twelve page long autobiography in developmental psychology, so I needed to know stats about my conception, when I first walked, talked, potty trained, ect. She sat there for a second, and then she proceeded to tell me she remembered none of that stuff, and she never kept a baby book. WHAT? I'm sorry W-H-A-T? It's like I haven't been here this whole time. It's like when I said that she just noticed I was alive. No family dinners, no sex education, and now no past. FANTASTIC. What is so great about all of this is when we went places she would have no problem hugging me and patting my head and telling the whole world about my many achievements. I don't think we have ever hugged once unless it was in front of a lot of people. Talk about issues in my personal life NOW.

So I walk into my mothers house yesterday morning to find her setting up Internet for the ipad she just took from my eighty year old grandpa. I'm sorry, what happened about never having money? What happened to respecting your parents and not stealing from them. I'm sure some of you might be thinking "Oh well her mother probably came from a broken home" or "Oh her mother is an alcoholic or a drug addict". I'm sure those things would make more sense, but no. My mothers parents are good people, married for over sixty years, my grandpa was a professor, and my grandma was a stay at home mom. My mother was never beat, or never went hungry. She had my sister at 16, so she is stuck somewhere in her old childhood, and she can't get out. EVERYTHING is about her, and how sad it is that she doesn't have more money and that she has to clean up after herself, or that she has no friends. Gee ma, I wonder why?

I like to call my sister and vent all my feelings about my mother. Now that we are both older, we can just laugh about most of it. Well when I called her to tell her that mom remembered nothing from my childhood she told me that she had boxes of our baby stuff up in the attic. "That's Great" I told her. She said it would be great if she would give us any of it. I didn't understand, It was ours, why couldn't we have it?

"Didn't you know?" she said. "She still has a ton of Dad's stuff too, and lots of things with the name Hall on it. She won't let him have it or me, and I am a Hall, she isn't. I tried taking a ceramic pumpkin with the name Hall carved in it when I was younger, and she still hasn't forgiven me. Nothing she owns is hers Shannon, she thinks she's entitled to it all"

I shouldn't have been shocked, but I was. Mostly sad that I had grown up in that house and never once did she mention that I had baby things waiting for me. But they weren't ever meant for me to see, or touch, or remember, they were up there to stay hidden and rot. But I won't let that happen. She goes out of town today with my step-dad, and Ashley and I will go up there and get it. It's ours. Something I can touch, maybe spark a memory. I feel so sad, so mad, so betrayed by my own mother. I am very grateful for my older sister.