Mommy Dearest

If all you’ve ever known is enmeshment, it’s much harder to imitate healthy connection. A mother with a teenage boyfriend. A mother who competes for her daughter’s sexual partners. A mother who comments on her son’s manhood. A son who has been groomed to let his mother fondle his hand, fingers stroking fingers, intertwined like lovers. A sister who approves of or rejects sexual partners for her brother. A sister who laughingly reminisces about her brother’s sexual exploits in front of his current partner. A sister who asks her brother to adopt her daughter. A sister who allows her daughter to sleep in the same bed as her brother. A sister who is furious that her brother claims to be in love, saying she was happy for him to have sex, but a committed relationship wasn’t something she approved of. A mother and son who use the pet names “honey”, “baby”, “sweetie”, and “darlin”. A sister who trades controlled substances for her brother’s time and attention. A mother who declares “I love you son, like no one else will ever love you!” A man who describes his relationship with his sister as unnaturally close. A man who accuses his sister of acting like a jealous girlfriend. A sister who celebrates her brother’s “return” to his friends, and thinks it’s normal that he took the daughter of a former girlfriend, the daughter being two decades younger, to a concert and then spent the night with her. An uncle who texts his niece that he loves her in the middle of the night. A son who exits the shower and sits beside his mother and watches a movie with her wearing only a towel. A man who calls his wife a whore, and she responds “Whore? You’ve slept with way more people than I have, and for all I know you got drunk and raped people in college.” A man who becomes enraged, eyes black, when he hears the word “raped”, and drags his wife out of the house by the neck; a man who had already raped his wife in her sleep at least twice that year.

Imitation will work at first, but eventually the facade will fray and wear thin. The actor will forget his lines. The spider won’t smell like home anymore.