My Estranged Mother "Apologized" To Me.

Me with my Mom’s late dog in in my bike basket, a few months before he died.

At least once a month, my estranged Mother emails me to tell me how things are going in her world, as if I never left.

I will occasionally stumble upon her emails in the “trash” folder where they are automatically sent, which I occasionally still open out of curiosity.

Mom’s interactions with me are formulaic, usually packaged as one of the following:

Nice Mommy: She talks to me in her saccharine-sweet, flowery tone, inviting me to come home anytime, peppered with bribery and false promises.

Transactional Mommy: Dangling money in my face because she knows I have a history of financial insecurity, and survival might just be the perfect weak spot to reel me back in. Always worth a shot!

Warning Mommy: Creating intense pressure to do whatever she wants me to do, NOW. This one is usually combined with other face(s), and it always includes bulldozing my boundaries.

There is also the infamous Mean Mommy, which has only come out when I’ve lived with her, and most importantly…when I had nowhere else to go, and no resources to leave. But if I would so much as start packing a duffel bag, SIKE! her head would spin back to another face, like the exorcist.

Case in point—Mom has many faces, and a lot of tricks up her sleeve.

But unfortunately, since I’ve figured her out so well, she has used her creative energy to find novel (sometimes extreme) tactics to provoke a response from me.

That is what happened in this most recent email she sent, which included a half-assed apology for that one time she threatened to have me shot dead because she claimed I was hiding her kittens in my bedroom—an incident that I wrote about in detail on Substack, the day after it happened.

But that’s not all…there were some other things she shared, too. I’d like to reflect on my Mom’s “apology letter”, my connection with the animals who have been in her care, and where I’m at in my estrangement journey.