Coming at you fresh from that dream where you get drunk and do something extraordinarily stupid.

Then wake up gasping from the horror of it all,

and your body feels hung over,

and you at once believe it was all real, ALL OF IT. OMIGOD, I DONE FUCKED UP, LIFE AS I KNEW IT IS OVER.

So you’re lying in bed, eyes open wide but also blind with panic,

trying to figure out how to fix this unfixable mess.

You remember you’re not actually hung over.

You’re just exhausted from that long-ass, emotionally draining day yesterday.

And since you didn’t drink last night, you for sure didn’t kill someone and flee the scene, and there’s only like a 2% chance the body of someone you supposedly like is stuffed in the trunk of your car.

So you breathlessly thank your past self for not doing anything stupid, while simultaneously cursing your jack-ass subconscious,

WHAT THE FUCK, MAN. THAT WASN’T FUNNY.

Anyway, any day that starts without needing to decide whether to go out in a hail of bullets or meekly surrender yourself to the nearest authorities is my new high bar experience of 2020. Here’s the flashback that inspired today’s title.

Unrelated (?) my dad’s memorial is set for May 16th.

One Ex was invited, with my mother musing that perhaps she should rescind the invitation for my comfort. In an act of extreme fuckupedness, I actually ended up explaining to my mom why it would be super inappropriate to bar that person from the memorial.

Which I later realized was exactly the same game we always play: my mother offering to bend the rules and exclude The Ex for my comfort.

For those of you not part of my fucked up family dynamics, this offer is nearly universally followed by (regardless of which option my sisters or I choose):

Somehow* The Ex finds out about the event, gets invited/shows up uninvited, with much drama for being excluded. This happens even if the person has been included, because there is always the vibe that the invite was up in the air, and so everything has the tension of a mousetrap ready to go off with the slightest bump.

My mom disappears to coddle The Ex, which is framed as my mother ‘keeping an eye on The Ex’, but on the surface just looks like my mother arm-in-arm with Ex, escorting this person all about the event, spending singular time with that person and therefore super-duper reinforcing the behavior, because instead of being excluded, Ex now becomes the center of my mother’s attention. **

This all happens while The Ex acts like a huge asshole and my mother gives us dagger eyes not to engage because she’s doing the best she can to keep the peace.

The absolute kicker is, knowing this, I still played my part and said it would be unfair to tell this person to fuck off all the way to the beginning of time. Because (surface reasons) my dad was this person’s last living relative and presumably has a right to be there. Also, (therapeutic reasons) cycle of stupidity is hard to break.ETA: Looking over this, LOL, I still don’t understand, even when I’m telling you the way it works, that either decision I make, The Ex still shows up.

PS: none of this gets into how the other Ex has been actively barred from the memorial, which… I guess we will see if that person just shows up anyway, or if the barring causes both Exes to bail, or what. The nice part is that this used to happen when I was a child and the Ex an adult, but now I’m an adult too, so I can fuck right off and not care if those two dramalamadingdong all about the event in question.

In lieu of a nice wrap up, here are the last of the images from our trip to Playa, including some video of the artistic interpretation of how it feels to be caught in my family dynamic. Happy New Year!

 

*The amount of angry assed air quotes I had to edit out of this story was ridiculous.

**When I was a child, this felt pretty fucked up, to watch a full grown adult be so needy for my mother that The Ex acted like an spiteful, jealous sibling towards me when we were alone and then wildly cooed over me in my mother’s presence.