I wish I could send my mother around to all the buffistas with difficult parents and have her make them lasagna.

Yeah, me too. Actually, I could send my whole extended family around, and there are a lot of them. They can be loud and crazy and opinionated, but they're good people.

I essentially orphaned myself when my father died, because I was tired of trying to get my blood family to acknowledge me. A sadder, lonelier option, but it worked for me. I've always admired the people who actually speak to their families.

My brother and I had a conversation once about "When did YOU realize that not all parents treat their kids like inconveniences at best and saboteurs at worst?" I think I was in my 20s. And I didn't know how to process that for at least 10 years.

Gosh. The extent to which I can relate to the trigger conversation cannot be overestimated.

Years ago, I dropped a glass in my kitchen here...my adult home. I stood shaking and sweating, waiting for someone to come and beat me for accidentally dropping my own property.

For some reason I still can't quite fathom, I shakingly reached up into the cupboard, grabbed another glass and smashed it on the floor.

It would be hard to say if I cried or laughed more during a spontaneous expulsion of every emotion I've ever felt.

It took quite a while to get myself together and clean up the kitchen floor. Thank goodness Bartleby didn't live here yet.

Somehow, that one cathartic moment ushered in a whole new way of dealing with my own mistakes.

I find myself saying, out loud, "Oh Sweetie, it's okay."

I have zero idea where that came from because no adult I ever knew spoke to me that way.

I wish I could hug all y'all.

My brother and I had a conversation once about "When did YOU realize that not all parents treat their kids like inconveniences at best and saboteurs at worst?"

I think I was almost 40 when I realized that my grandmother was mean to me not because I deserved it, but because she resented my presence, being a little kid in her house when she didn't want to be a parent/caretaker anymore.

Steph, I don't mean to interrupt, but my mother optimistically decided she could take Tylenol instead of Percocet today. Now she thinks she'll want Percocet tonight. If she took 1300mg of Tylenol around 5PM, and two Percocet have 650mg of acetaminophen, I think she should be okay to take the Percocet around 11.

Does that sound good to you, or are we going to manage to blow out her liver?

The thing is, for the most part, my parents were wonderful. They supported my weirdness and encouraged me to be the freaky little kid I was. I will be forever thankful to whatever PTB that I got my dad, and I still offer to loan him to my friends who need a good, supportive parent.

But, in 20/20 hindsight, my mom was broken in a lot of ways, and somewhere in my kid brain I decided that if I just tried hard enough, I could make her happy and whole. And healthy, because there was all the baggage of the leukemia tied up in it. (And the avoiding bills, and the hoarding, and the teaching me how to hide bills from my dad and how to dodge collection agency phone calls and and and.)

So, yeah. I'll just hug all of you. And then I'll go hug my oldest two teddy bears, because they came into my life around age 10. [link]

Does that sound good to you, or are we going to manage to blow out her liver?

Oh, 6 hours is a fine interval. Unless she's washing it down with a liter of whiskey (but if she is, her liver is probably fucked anyway). And since she's probably not...

Yeah, 6 hours is totally fine between acetaminophen doses.

As for the question Liese asked earlier about whether the triggers ever go away, or lessen -- for me, I do actually seem to be easing up on the automatic fear response when I break/damage/destroy something, simply as a result of time living with a person who has a proportionate response to that. When I broke the milk, my gut was sure I was going to get screamed at, even though Tim doesn't do that, and MY BRAIN KNOWS IT, knew it at the time, but my lizard brain disagreed HARD. That was several years ago.

I ripped a hole in the bathroom windowscreen a couple of weeks ago when I was getting snow off the car roof with a broom. (I didn't gauge how far away I was from the house, and the bathroom storm window wasn't down, and I caught the screen with the broom handle, and...rrrrrip.)

My immediate reaction was, in fact, "Ffffffffuck, I'm going to get in trouble," followed pretty much immediately by "No, you're not. It's cool."

So my automatic response is still fear, but it only lasts a split second and I can remind myself what is true.

AND if my mom overreacts around me now, I just walk away. Because fuck that. (I don't think I do have a fear reaction to her any more -- thank you, therapy -- I think I just cock my head, squint, and think, "I know what you're doing, and it doesn't work any more. Go sell crazy somewhere else.")