Due to A Series of Uninteresting Events, I’ve been jogging predawn since school started. At first, a weirdly intimidating experience: the shadowy silence, the inverse world quality, the recovered memory/realization I hadn’t stealthed around a sleeping neighborhood since sneaking out during high school.

After a lifetime of being taught to be a woman, be safe, be around people, stay in lighted areas of the parking lot, etc., I’ve found it quite liberating to prowl around the empty streets, in the dark, on my own. I don’t even take a flashlight, though I’ve occasionally tripped on road debris. I must admit, some irrepressible smugness at the end of my jog, to see other runners appear with headlamps, even though the sky is already the peach dawnlight of polite society walking time. Let’s go live to the reenactment:

Recently, I was chased by a dog in the dark. The kind of dark where you can still see the stars, and everything is shadows, but there’s a bluish blush on the eastern horizon. If you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you know I’ve had several bad interactions with dogs. I tried to search for links, but it turns out I use the word dog a lot.

I’ve been bitten by a Chihuahua, chased by a couple 100 lbs growlers while their dipshit owners called, “He’s harmless!” from twenty yards away, discovered (like Easter eggs, hidden) every dog in my neighborhood who likes to hide behind their fence, silently waiting as I walk by, until we are separated by a quarter inch of fencing, and then bark their balls off.

I kind of suspected perpetual bad dog interaction was my Mark of Cain or whatever for going atheist. Which, I guess if I was really a complete atheist, what God do I think is punishing me? And I guess if I think God is punishing me with a plague of dogs, it proves I’m secretly some true believer, and therefore God should lay off. Follow up question about whether God can microwave a burrito too hot to eat, and it turns out we’re all stoned. But whatever. Dogs don’t like me.

Anyway, in the wee pre-dawn hours of morning, this big assed shadow dog came Cujo-ing from its yard, out across the road, growling and barking, directly in my path. This marked the first time in many cases of unleashed dog encounters that I felt I knew what was going on. I’ve been chased enough that I recognized the pattern (dogs don’t come straight at you when you run, they triangulate to get where you’re going to be) and I used my FUCK NO voice instead of my Aghhhhh! shriek, and commanded, “HEY, BACK UP. SOMEBODY COME GET YOUR DOG.” as loud and bossy as I could. Then I took a few menacing steps toward the dog.

Some unseen person must’ve called from the open garage (or maybe I just totally dominated that mean dog) because it whined and retreated, throwing a bark and a growl on its way for good measure. Anyway, I resumed my jog, telling myself how I was the biggest, baddest land mammal on these here streets. And really, who can argue? Not that bitch assed dog, or their owner. Or even, dare I say, GOD?

MOM UPDATE (which I initially attempted to shorten to Momdate, but our relationship is too enmeshed as it is, so maybe let’s not use that kind of wording)

To be quite honest, some of the energy I’ve used to jog has come directly from energy I used to spend worrying about my parents. I stopped calling my mother every week, stretching out the time more and more, until now I call closer to every three weeks to a month. Furthermore, I no longer call on a schedule, only when I’m up to it.

It’s working out really well for me, to be totally selfishly honest. So much so that calling now feels a bit like deciding to do some familial peyote – I only do it if I have the free time to feel sick and have introspective, complicated feelings about our relationship. Or you know, because I haven’t posted in a month and I need blog fodder.

She has taken to mentioning my lack of calling in a hookish way about 80% through our conversation. Recently, it was, “Well, I don’t call you because I know you’ve got work and I don’t want to interrupt, but I love hearing from you and you know… I miss you.” in a very small and hesitant voice that heavily implied she’d been knocked off whatever pedestal she used to call me from, at any hour of the day, whenever the hell she felt like.

A time after that, “You know I drop everything when you call, because I never know when I’ll get the chance to talk with you.”

And always now, the grateful, “Hey, thank you for calling,” as if I’m a movie star fulfilling some dying kid’s Make-a-Wish request. OK, maybe not that dramatic. If Make-a-Wish voice was a 10 on a 1-to-10 scale, her thank yous stick to the 5-to-7 range. So you know you’ve broken her heart, but she’s still bright eyed grateful to have you do it.

Internet, it breaks my heart every time. From other things she’s mentioned, I suspect she’s depressed, which seems like a natural consequence of Dad dying. It seems like the hallmark of near-death-old-age to have regrets about how you lived your life, but to hear them from the person who raised me, about her relationship with me, is devastating.

The worst part, is her seeming confusion, her bafflement as to how things could have gone sideways like this.

It seems an invitation to go back to where we left off in our fight. So we could either move forward, or at least I could clarify why we’ve broken so she can stop dangling there, so heartbroken. It’s sometimes tempting to rehash the whole thing for her, as if I might explain it in a way to make clear to her what happened, that I could ease both our suffering with clarity. But I know this is a trap.

Mom Update, Subsection I: NOT SURE THIS PART MAKES SENSE

When The Exes caused me anguish, my mother would always claim bafflement at why I was so angry/hurt/scared. It would be my job to tell her, exactly, what had happened, with her asking questions and sometimes arguing. Until finally, catharsis! I would be crying and we would be hugging and she would say something magical like, “When you explain it that way… yeah, I see the problem. They just get under my radar.”

Except the next time something bad happened, my mom again wouldn’t understand why I was upset and I’d be compelled to go through the lengthy process of explaining to her exactly the dynamic. She could be standing in the room while an offense happened and not believe it until I convinced her it had happened. She would say horribly slippery, not-exactly-invalidating things like, “I believe you see it that way.” Or sigh and say, “Well, I can see you’re angry, and I know you don’t get mad unless something hurt you.” Without ever acknowledging something bad had happened.

Twenty years, this went on: the agony of not being able to protect myself, my choice in believing it was her job, not mine. The relief when she’d finally ‘see’ what had happened. Never as it happened, or in time to prevent, or even see it, the next time. But for me, the vindication that if I kept nailing my point to the floor in front of her, she would have no choice but to see it my way. By the time we broke over it, I was a lunatic in my adamant attempts to finally, finally win this battle once and for all.

DRAMATIC RECREATION OF ME TRYING TO CONVINCE MY MOM THERE WAS A PATTERN OF BEHAVIOR, using my stockpile of incidences I had to have at the ready any time there was a new offence, which made me so adamant I came off a little conspiracy theory because OMIGOD, JUST ACKNOWLEDGE MY REALITY (Contains graphic footage):

I feel that trap now, when she seems so bewildered at why I don’t call. For me, it’s hard to tell if I got so burned by our falling out that I have become rigid and too afraid to extend myself to save our relationship. Honestly, I cannot see a way that I would ever trust her again. I’m not even sure I would go back if I could see a path; I feel healthier with the separation, even though it causes her pain. I’m afraid maybe I am a bit of a monster; she is old now and I have selfishly taken everything from her and ungenerously throwing her away now that it is my time to take care of her. Or I am too damaged to tell the difference between and act of kindness and legitimate self-protection.

Except right now, when she uses that wounded, baffled tone, it seems like an invitation to crawl right back into that place where I do all the emotional labor, trying to convince her of my reality. I just can’t. As guilty and torn as I feel about the outcome, I don’t think I can ever engage in a pattern similar. If she doesn’t understand why I don’t call as often, it’s not for me to explain to her. She’ll have to do her own work to put the facts together in her own coherent story.

Mom update, Subsection II: PRETTY SURE THIS PART MAKES ZERO TO FIVE PERCENT GD CHANCE

But my mother was an excellent parent in lots of ways, and so I’m still trying to figure out if it’s possible to salvage some kind of relationship without falling into the traps of our old one. A couple of months ago, I invited her to go to Playa del Carmen with us for Thanksgiving. I immediately threw myself to the floor after the phone call, wondering what the self-sabotaging fuck was wrong with me. Since that time, I’ve spent more than one complete 24-hour cycle debating the best way to renege the invitation without completely destroying what remains of our relationship and come up empty handed. At least once, she’s offered to bow out and I crazily insisted she should still come. We are flying together. We are sharing a condo. Seven days of inescapable togetherness, during which, at any time, she might decide to have a full out LET’S TALK ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED AND KEEP TALKING UNTIL I AM SATISFIED. At which point, I might run into the sea and never return.

But here’s the thing. She had to get a passport, because it’s been a thousand years since she left America. Neither of us speak the language. There will be new things to do and see every day. There will be vacation related hassles to confront. My family of origin never traveled out of the country together, and my kids have likewise never traveled out of the country.

I’m hoping some part of me was smart while I thought I was being stupid; maybe this will be the kind of shake-up that lets us figure out a new way to interact. Maybe neutral ground and new experiences and a full schedule of activities will help us have a relationship without being how we used to, that we have something to look forward to instead of always swimming in the conversational soup of pain and regret. Or maybe it will kill one or more of us. Anything seems possible at this juncture. But at least inviting her bypasses the utter guilt of leaving her alone for her first major holiday as a widow. And I made double sure we had other plans for Christmas vacation, so if it goes really bad, I won’t have to see her anytime soon after.

I guess either way it shakes out, I’ll have something to blog about.