Moments Suspended In Time
Friday, April 18, 2008
Holiday Girl - Part TwoAnd as if this week hasn't been emotionally draining enough, yesterday I got a phone call from Holiday Girl's mother.
When I heard her voice (she has never called me before) I was all happy, I wanted make sure she was ok and was coping with the upheaval of this week.
When I asked her how she was this was her reply:
(This is a fifty something year old mother and grandparent, a professional in her field)
"You will shut up and listen to me"
I was so surprised I did this that...in retrospect I wish I had ended the phone call then and there.
There is too much to write but the basic gist of it was this...
- She doesn't like me and never has. She has tried to find good points about me but has failed, only because there are simply none to find.
- I have 'won'...I have convinced HG to leave her husband, I am responsible for breaking up their marriage because I want HG all to myself.
- One day HG will 'wake up' to me and realise what a manipulative person I really am then she will leave me and I will die a lonely friendless person.
- How the only person she feels sorry for in all of this is School Girl Mermaid...that 'she only hopes against the odds she will make something of herself...that she should be living with her father to have any chance at life"
I stood there and listened to all of this...too numb with absolute disbelief to even hang up then after she slammed the phone down in my ear I just crumbled onto the floor and sobbed.
I have never been spoken to like that before, let alone by a person whom I thought I had a good relationship based on mutual respect. How could I not have known she hated me? I have stayed up at her house in the country many times, of which she referred to; I NEVER would have gone there if I had known she didn't like. How humiliating.
HG chose that moment to call, I was crying so hard I couldn't even talk, just the sheer shock of it, so unexpected. She knew instantly what was wrong, apparently she had just had a massive fight with her mother in the solicitors office when her mother tried to get her to sign over permanent custody of her son to the violent ex-husband....then her mother turned on her own best friend who was there to support her and HG...then she yelled at HG's Aunty and the solicitor(!) before walking over the road to her solicitors and signing over her house to her ex-husband (a battle they have been fighting for four years since he left her).
I didn't feel quite so bad after that but her comments still cut deep...particularly what she said about my parenting...that was just vicious. No matter how much she was hurting over what is happening to HG...if playing the blame game is how she copes there was NO need to say what she did about my child and my parenting skills. That was one of the meanest things she could have ever chosen to say.
When I lie in bed at night I can hear her voice playing over and over in my head...saying those awful hurtful things...and I just want it to stop.
Mermaid Girl