Walking Disaster

Even for someone who wisely hasn’t spoken to her own in years, mothers can continue to fuck with our lives from afar. Recently, being reminded of maternal toxicity, I decided to tell another “funny” motherhood story. The good news is that I finally figured out why my whole extended family has been thinking that I’m a stubborn moron for a decade and treating me as such.

Bad news is they were all told and believed that I had turned down a full-ride scholarship, which actually makes them stubborn morons, in my humble opinion. Yes, I’ve already written about mine before, but since I was recently reminded of her psychosis, I figured I’d write about her again. Although this story is less about my mother and more about my dad, and how paranoia is not paranoia when someone actually is out to get you.

Unfortunately for me, I grew up with a woman whose love language is subpoenaing. Notice how I don’t say “raised by.” Because of this, I now have a hair trigger for panic attacks whenever I hear the word “lawsuit”, and while my legal troubles have stolen the spotlight in the last few years, my dad had a potential brush two years ago that he was able to avoid by being a beyond type A mental person.

He was such a record keeper and paper/receipt holder, that when someone brought a complaint against him, all he had to do was go to his storage unit and dredge up those files. What was a potentially weekend-long job, was done in about an hour. Astoundingly, he found a Tupperware about twice the size of a banker’s box full of everything he could need, and a letter.

The letter read as follows: “Dear future [Dad], in case you ever find yourself in a legal clusterfuck due to your parasitic ex-wife, everything you will ever need is in this box. I hope you will be done with her bullshit, but I sincerely doubt it. Signed, 2007 [Dad].” If you think he didn’t have the smuggest face dropping that evidence off and getting his complaint dismissed immediately, then you haven’t been paying attention to how petty my family can be.

This is the whole crux of this post though because when you’re surrounded by crazy…crazy makes sense. This unbelievably (or maybe believably) happened for a second time just the other week. Same person, same complaint, different court. And because my dad spent quarantine digitizing his records, as all fun people do, he was able to hand over an external hard drive to his lawyers, thus proving once and for all that while life brings changes, things somehow always stay the same. I’m proud he’s joined the rest of us in the 21st century but pissed that we both still have to deal with her bullshit.

This practice would’ve helped me in my suit. I, unfortunately, didn’t expect to get sued for 3000x my net worth, so I spent the majority of 6 months, and then a subsequent two years dredging up proof for every complaint brought against me. I now live my life under the assumption that everything will be used against me at any point ever. And I won’t apologize for it.

So from now on, I don’t want to hear from anyone about my tendency to keep every receipt or payment, either on paper or in my meticulously organized inbox. I don’t want to hear about how it’s shitty of me to record potentially incriminating phone calls, even though it’s technically legal in federal court (if a bit of a moral gray area).

And I really don’t want to hear about how I screenshot too many conversations for any future possibility. Because when you have a career criminal for a mother, no matter how white-collar she is, those screenshots and bank statements are bound to save my ass again someday. And it teaches a valuable lesson to any scheming friends or readers out there: don’t write shit down.

Stay tuned for more stories of her — like when I found my dad’s checkbook in her car six years after their divorce, or her brief foray into a cult, or one of her many many many other lawsuits. You can also revisit other stories (check out part one and part two), and if anyone feels like donating to a GoFundMe so I can pay for intensive psychotherapy, that would be much appreciated.