Another day, another dollar. I would be lying if I said I particularly enjoy what I do. I guess I don’t hate it tremendously. I hate my mind not being occupied more than anything else. When I had jobs that didn’t ask much of my mind, I would fill my mind with books and engineering ideas. Now that my job is entirely technical, my mind is not so filled with books or engineering ideas. All of those thoughts belong in the realm of “other people’s assets”. I am a bastion of proprietary knowledge.

I don’t hate my life. I don’t really hate as much as I say that I do. I’m honestly more ambivalent towards most things than I am averse. I’ve come very far in life to hate existence so completely as I make it outwardly appear. I am little more than a convoluted abstraction of the prominent influences in my formative years. My grandma would impart in me that love is the strongest force in the world. My grandfather taught me that you have to stand up for yourself and be assertive. My father taught me that not everyone leaves a legacy. My mother taught me the same.

Yet it bothers me. It deeply bothers me to leave things the way they’ve been left, with no resolution. I am daily perturbed by every ounce of my life intersecting with my lone surviving parent. I have never understood her as a person.

My mother has never been much of a “talker”. That isn’t to say she’s always been some silent, stoic type. Not at all. She’s silent and stoic if you completely ignore body language and furrowed brows. If you continue pissing her off she gets much louder and noticibly more frustrated and angry. You can cross that threshold on accident very easily.

I think I learned my parenting style from my mother. She was very largely “hands off” when dealing with me for most of my life. The thing I do differently is that I try not to be invasive in the lives of my kids. My mother wouldn’t invade my privacy unless she felt some provocation to, otherwise she sort of just ignored me. Honestly it felt like she wrote me off as a person a long time ago, and I really haven’t recovered from it.

My sister was her experiment. She was more invasive in my sister’s life by far. She would wear my sister down as much as she could. My sister was very cowed, not resilient at all, and to this day my sister has no backbone to speak of. She has a boyfriend that sleeps on his phone and couldn’t care less about their kid, for instance. Things my mother wouldn’t put up with herself. But my mother helped create this human with no spine. While the weight of some of my mother’s crushing control issues impacted me a little, I was also pretty defiant. Sometimes openly defiant. I am more likely to stand up for myself than my sister is. I defeated the biggest bully in my life, after all. It only cost me a parent/child relationship in the end. Was it worth it to me? I don’t regret being stronger willed than I would’ve been had I caved. I don’t regret it at all. I’ve enjoyed successes in life because of it.

My grandmother was not that controlling. She would express sadness, anger, disappointment, or any number of feelings she would experience. My grandmother was a communicator. I’m grateful that my grandparents had outsized influence in my life due to my mother being a single parent. It gave an otherwise angry child a good influence to learn from. But these differences between my mother and I are irrenconcilable. I just struggle so hard with that fact. I know they are. I know that my mother lies and deceives to get her way. I know that she isn’t just stubborn, but steadfast in everything she does. She never questions her actions, she never questions hurtful things she says, she speaks from her own perceived steadfast authority and expects her word to be read as law. There is no room for me in her vocabulary. I exist on the outs. It’s not an easy thing to accept but it is what it is and I do struggle with it. She shouldn’t be important to me because by all reason and rationality she’s not even capable of loving me. Yet here we are.

I don’t hate her. I would have to understand her to hate her. The most I can understand is the narcissistic outer layer that anybody can see. The easily caught lies. The lack of empathy or nurture instinct. Warts and all, this is the person I came from. It hurts my heart to know that she doesn’t love me. Especially when I can begin to love myself. I’ve worked on loving myself and in these ends I’ve found more love for others, and especially forgiveness for myself.

I dunno.