My Circle, My Business

An Email from my mother 3 days ago:
Mom: I signed up for unemployment! Aren't you proud of me?
My reply: Well that's what every daughter wants for their mother...unemployment.
Mom: What does every daughter want for their mother?
My reply: Love, inner peace, health, long life, love, joy, happiness...and a residence 500 miles away.



I was explaining to my mother, yesterday, how my friend had just become certified in hypnotherapy and how a bunch of us were letting her hypnotize us before the prices went up when she began including it in her practice, because she is a licensed counselor. My mother then begins to say how she could go and see this woman. Why? I ask. Just to talk, she says in her cute, sweet, slightly victimized, little girl, I want to reach through the phone and strangle her voice. I told her, half joking, she doesn't need a therapist, she needs a kick in the pants! Then we spoke of other things. I have no earthly idea why this woman annoys me so much. Why I can sympathize, empathize with every other single person on the Earth, and not her. If anyone else and I mean ANYONE on the planet, told me they were going to a therapist, I would cheer them on, ask if there's anything I can do, listen and be supportive. I honestly don't know why it bothers me when my mother speaks of it. Maybe its because, deep inside, I feel like everything she says/does/thinks/feels/expresses/communicates is just slightly heightened by her drama. It's never "I'm going to see a therapist..." by the way, no biggie, just taking care of myself, talking to someone who can help me.
It's always "I'm going to see a therapist..." and oh how tragic because my life is so awful and no one understands me and don't judge me (now we're slightly whining because we are a victim).
It's because the moments of self realization, when they do come to her (and I know all of them because she can't keep them to herself and each one is like a new inauguration, complete with parade!) they don't change anything. She'll say something really deep or profound or something that, if acted upon, would probably change her life for the better, and then, in a puff of True Menthol 100 smoke, it's gone.
What other people think of me is none of my business. It's like a mantra in my 12 step program and it is the single most important thing I've learned in my experience at 12 step. It has released so many resentments, it has allowed me a life of relative peace and serenity, it is something that has opened my eyes and my heart and I thank God for letting me see it and my sponsor for telling me and whomever coined the phrase. But there's something else I need to accept.
It's none of my business what other people do. Especially my mother.
This is exponentially harder. I love my mother, I care about my mother. Every other person can smoke cigarettes and get fat and waste their lives sitting in a trailer, suicidal. Not my mother. Not my daughter. That's where it begins and ends and I'm having issues shaking this.
She demands to know why I don't go after my step mother about her smoking. My stepmother isn't my mother. Why don't I yell at other people to get off their ass and do something. Other people aren't my mother. Just like other people's issues, bad choices and behaviors don't effect me the way my daughter's do. These 2 women are my circle and I can't break that and now I feel like I'm fighting to make the circle better, safer, cleaner, healthier, easier for these women to whom my connection is different and stronger than any other connections I'll have for the rest of my life. No one can come into this circle until Megan has a child and this circle will remain unchanged until my mother dies (maybe it's all powered by my sudden awareness recently, A LOT, that she is going to die). This circle isn't perfect and that bothers me. I feel like I've made strides and I want my mother to make them to, but at the same time I don't want her in the middle of my strides. I want her to make her own strides and do her own thing. But then when she does, they never go anywhere and that is frustrating. Maybe I need to go back to therapy! And in 20 years, how much will that statement annoy my daughter! :)
Dear God,
It is none of my business what other people do, especially my mother. I love my mother. I pray you'll allow her peace and to enjoy her life and to make the best choices for herself. I am powerless over food, I am powerless over my mother. My life with my mother is unmanageable and I turn it over to your care. You can do what I cannot and it is not for me to question what that is. I am powerless.
Love and Amen,
Shannon