- very locked - - string of expletives - Ok.

- very locked -

- string of expletives - Ok. So, I knew something had gone on the other night when my parents went to dinner because the sweet smell of tension was in the air when they got home.

Mental and emotional abuse is a seriously fscked up thing. I really don't understand any of this. Probably because it is not, in any normative sense, understandable.

You guys have helped keep me sane when I was overwhelmed. In case I don't do it often enough, I want to thank you. Both for listening, and for respecting the privacy of what I talk with you about.

I don't know how to give details without blathering, here. I'm just going to say that my father had a completely shitty upbringing and that he made changes in his life before he ever met my mother to completely turn that around. This was not an insignificant thing.

Earlier this week, my mother, while eating dinner publicly in a restaurant, threw his having been abused in his face. She did this while also trying to bully him into validating some incredibly stupid things she's done over the past several years that have hurt her directly, and all of us directly and indirectly. We will none of us ever agree with or validate those things. She is mad at all of us that we will not validate them, but she is particularly mad at my dad for some reason.

She is manipulative, bullying, disrespectful, and self-centered. She is also making up stories with spin that might qualify for use in DC.

I am sure she did this in public on purpose as an attempt to control him because she thinks that she has him cornered that way. I am starting to believe that subconsciously, if not consciously, she wants to goad him into becoming angry in public so she can use that against him. I think that she both does and does not understand who he was before she met him and before he did deliberate work to become something other than what his environment had imposed on him. I think she is trying to destroy that.

It may be that consciously she does not want him to lose control and hurt her. But I am all but certain at this point that she definitely is trying to create that situation subconsciously. Because it fits with her other created narratives of martyrdom (as my sister put it). It also fits with her narrative that all the money and the house are hers and she's going to take them. (As if she doesn't get them when he dies, anyway.) It sets up a situation where complete strangers would back her up as the supposedly aggrieved party, having no idea what she did to provoke.

I do not like people who hurt other people in general. I really don't like people who hurt other people on purpose. I hate (actual hate) people who hurt other people deliberately and manipulatively the way that she is hurting my dad and trying to set him up. That's a problem, because she's my mom.

However, I told my dad that while I am in town, whenever she plays this game of pushing his buttons that he is to call me and I will come and get him, or be there so he can leave and I can give my mom a ride home if he needs to take the car and leave for a while. Whatever he needs to do to step back from the cliff edge she keeps pushing him toward.

When my sister is here this weekend I will speak with her, as well, so that we have a system set up so that if one of us is not reachable by phone, the other is, so he at least has a safe person to talk to to help talk him down or through whatever is going on. But so no matter what, there is always someone he can reach immediately.

I cannot fucking believe that this is what is going on.