Fighting with Mom

For the first time in a long time, I'm fighting with my mother. Although, if I say that we're fighting over the holidays, people will roll their eyes and say "you do that every year." But while on the surface, it looks like we're fighting about the holidays, the real argument is me saying "give it a rest" and mom saying "back off" about a whole number of things -- her relationship with my father's family, her feelings towards living and working in St. Louis, and I think the bottom line... my mom living up to my expectations.

Which is kind of an ironic twist, if you ask me. When I think back to the way I was raised, I of course have always known that my family loves me. But like the song says "it's a strange way to tell me you love me" because it wasn't a mushy cuddly type of youth. If you wanted to be loved and respected (which of course you did) the way to do that was to prove yourself to be stubbornly independent and capable. Being out of control was the second worst crime next to lying. Every action you took in your life had consequences, good or bad.

So when I feel like my mom is playing helpless I'm alternately confused (mom has never, in my experience, been helpless over anything) and angry. She's got a lot of nerve saying that she gets to blame other things in her life for her troubles (of which I think she's making a mountain out of a molehill) when the whole premise of our youth was that we caused our own destiny. But everything I say to her skirts around that because I somehow can't bring myself to tell her that she caused her own trials and that she raised a mean kid.

Because through this I feel like maybe I'm just a hard bitch and I should just lay off. If I do that, I've been manipulated by mom because she gets to be above the rules she's set -- I'm angry again and we're back at a stalemate and she doesn't even know I've been thinking about it.