Bitterness.

I still carry a lot of bitterness from when I was growing up.  A lot of my psychological problems are directly attributable to one parent or the other, either through commission or omission.

My mother, once she got full, physical custody (the state kept the legal fiction that it had custody) and my male genetic donor had slipped up to the point that all he had left were supervised visits, retreated into her bedroom and locked the door, not coming out except to eat or use the bathroom. 

I was thirteen.  My sister was ten.  She didn't reappear for two years, when my sister attempted to kill herself by taking an entire box of Benedryl. 

I'd had issues my first year of high school: namely, I'd been in the middle of a failed relationship between my best friend and his girlfriend.  I'd gotten so bad where my nerves were concerned that I lost about thirty or forty pounds (and I only weighed about 115 to begin with). 

No Mom. 

My second year of high school, I busted up my knee in PE.  Oh, the incident wasn't so bad, but I'd been tripping and falling for years, and the damage had accumulated to the point where I needed surgery.  Mom shuttled me around, and was there for the surgery itself, but the only reason she was around for my recovery was because it was during Christmas time, and it would have looked bad to the rest of the family.

Well, that, and my sister had just gotten home from her hospitalization after she'd tried to kill herself just before Thanksgiving. 

Yeah, I still resent the two year disappearance.  I resented when she disappeared, but I adapted, took responsibility (as best I could) for making sure the house kept running.  When she reappeared, she stepped back into the parental role she'd relinquished.

That did not work.  I'd spent two years as an adult.  I was not going to step back into the role of a child, especially not at fifteen, and absolutely not with an adult who'd proved that she wasn't trustworthy, nor worthy of respect.

I've mostly moved past that bitterness.  It was eighteen years ago, for me.  Every so often, something happens to remind me of it, but I refuse to dwell on it.  Like my friend, the Mojave Rat says, I try my damnedest to live in the now, and to not live in that awful time in my life with the rage and bitterness.

My mother, on the other hand, still dwells on every bad decision she ever made.  Especially the decision to marry my male genetic donor, and have two children with him.  And she can't go an hour without mentioning it, or how sorry she is that it happened.

Thing is, by doing that, she's standing in my sister's path to recovery, and not letting her move past her problems.  She's forcibly keeping my sister in the time when we were harmed. 

By doing that, she's keeping her youngest child as a helpless child, despite the fact that it was more than twenty years ago that the abuse happened, and my sister is now thirty. 

My mother's behavior eighteen years ago isn't worthy of any continuing bitterness.  Her behavior today most certainly is.