By Wednesday this week, my mom had left two messages on the home phone, emailed me twice with questions about a future visit, and finally texted me:

I called her back Wednesday evening, and she spoke for two hours the way most people barf – in heaves beyond her control, apologetic for the mess but unable to be interrupted.

Two things came up. First, my dad has broken both his front teeth recently, the second one in the past few days. He doesn’t want to go to the dentist as his tolerance for discomfort is almost nil.

You would think breaking teeth would be forefront in the conversation, but it actually took about fifteen minutes for me to wedge in a follow-up question on this topic.

Instead, we took a side trip in the odyssey of dementia; Dad’s profound and ever increasing sensitivity to chaffing. How he can no longer stand tags in clothes, or seams in his socks. You’d think he’d wear sweatpants, but it turns out he can’t stand the elastic waistband. Sometimes when he’s cold, he’ll wear jeans to bed.

The subtext of course: there’s just no practical way he’d sit tight and endure a dentist appointment filled with drills and scraping and the discomfort of holding his mouth open. And at this stage in the game, it’s fair odds he’d simply jump from the car on their way to the appointment.

When my mother goes on one of these side trips, I can’t help imagining her like Alice in Wonderland, where any weird-assed, unsettling thing might happen. Occasionally, logic will work to resolve the problem (could the dentist give Dad nitrous? Maybe he could listen to music or a story on headphones as distraction?) but more often, you just have to roll with the new reality. In this case, next time I see my dad, he’ll be a snaggle-toothed mad hatter in jean jammies.

The other thing that came up was, of course, Trump.

My mom was born in a red state, and most of her family members voted for Trump and are still enthusiastically supportive of his regime. In the past few weeks, my mom took a public stand against him, and was strongly rebuked by her family.

As a quick recap, my relationship with my mother broke because her value system is, “Family is family, no matter what.”

Nice sentiment, I guess. *Here, the author shrugs like a sullen teen* But in practical terms, it means that any abusive asshole who happens to be related to you becomes both inescapable and protected by the motto – no matter what they do, you cannot reject them.

A few years ago, I absolutely did cut contact with a couple of relatives and adopted a new motto, “If you’re not safe, you don’t get to be family,” which my mother took as a profound betrayal.

I guess she feels I’m not trustworthy at a base level, that there is a calculating streak in me that allows me to sum up a person’s value, to not forgive, to never fully let myself bond to others. I am unable to love unconditionally.

More than once, she has tearfully confessed that she lives in terror of doing something wrong, and that in response, I will cut her out of my life and she will lose me with no hopes of making up for her mistake. I suspect she believes this argument tugs at my guilty heart strings. But most often, I think in my booming A FEW GOOD MEN voice, “You’re goddamn right, so watch yourself.”

After, I am always somewhat baffled she can imagine a situation in which she did something so horrible I wouldn’t feel safe around her, and still manages to end that scenario with me being the bad guy.

Anyway, the upshot of severing ties with those relatives has been that I’ve become the black sheep among my remaining family.

I’ve lost track of how long it’s been that this has played out. Half dozen years, perhaps? Less than ten. But over time both my sisters and my mother have made peace with the offending relatives, and so it is sometimes me who is excluded from get-togethers. This was my worst fear when I first considered breaking the family value – that they would do to me what I wanted to do. Over time, I’ve gotten about 80% OK with it.

All this leads to my mother’s decision to publicly go against her family on Trump after it came out all those kids were being held in concentration camps, and then the SCOTUS stuff.

During her first dip into speaking her mind about it, my mom was surprised by the younger generation in her family rallying in support of her – a bunch of closet libs coming out of the woodwork!

But the relatives my mom grew up with, her cousins and siblings, the people who represent my mother’s safe place? They sharply derided her, told her to shut up. Made ambiguously threatening statements about how they’d hate to see families torn apart by some people’s inability to keep their mouths closed.

These are people she’s given money to, bailed out of trouble, flown out to nursemaid when they’ve had surgery/radiation/chemo treatments, gone to their weddings, their children’s weddings.

“I woke up crying,” my mother said, and Jesus, it’s hard to imagine the level of conflict when a person starts the day in tears. “You know, these are the people who would do anything for me. And I would do anything for them. All I’d have to do is call, and they’d come if I needed them.” Even as she said this, though, I wondered if it were true.  “I’ve always prided myself on not caring what other people think. But it truly scared me I might lose them. I’m humbled.”

She said that last more than once, dismayed and confessional. “I thought I was a stronger person, but I do care about what they think of me. I even thought about supporting Trump just to get along, but the other part of me just started screaming at how crazy that was. I don’t know how they justify it.”

To be clear: never in a million years would I have wanted the revenge of seeing my mom in a parallel situation as the one she put me in. It’s unspeakably cruel with everything else that’s going on with her, especially because she’s right— my personality is a bit colder, more analytical, and *here the author preens herself on heartlessness* perhaps more suited to making that kind of decision.

But also, the situation seemed beyond coincidence. How could I be listening to my mother struggle with being rejected by her relatives when all my life the irrefutable rule had been, “Family is family, no matter what”?

I found myself nodding into the phone, that empathy you have for someone who has gone through the same strange disaster. Or maybe not empathy exactly, but that guttural and secret understanding, finally shared and confirmed with another person. Like how, years after I’d given birth, if I happened upon one of those TV birthing stories and the pregnant woman did those push groans, my empty uterus would contract in spontaneous, reflexive allegiance.

I had a million things to tell my mother. About how it gets better. About how she was right to stand up for her beliefs. And how I wanted to cheer her on as loud and energetically as I could, because it’s all too easy to get upside down and unsure when you are in a place where everyone you trust is saying you’re wrong. She’s not wrong.

But like the rest of the conversation, Mom was talking in that barf-like speech pattern that gave no pause for me to add thoughts. A lot of her attention focused on contemplating the Bible in regards to gentle handed conflict resolution, and all that WWJD, turn the other cheek stuff that might shore up her justification in getting back in line with her family. Luckily! I’d recently seen this meme and quoted it from memory.

My mother did not find it helpful.

After a while, I got nervous, wondering what I would do when she paused for breath and realized the situation – that what she’d hated about me was something she now had to consider doing for herself. Would we have to talk about all that brokenness between us? What could I say about it getting better without hurting her more? What would it mean that she’d spent decades hurting me in the name of a family value, and it turned out that value didn’t mean shit to her family?

But it never came up.

Maybe that’s for the best.