About a week ago, my brother called to tell me my mother swallowed a handful of anxiety medication while on FaceTime with him.
This is how stressed I am, she said. I take these pills five times a day. Everyone feels sorry for your father. Nobody understands my pain or feels sorry for me.
She was chain smoking and crying and holding the bottle in her hand. Then she swallowed the pills. She didn’t take enough to warrant a hospital visit. I’m not even sure she took enough to do any damage to her physical well-being. She did, however, definitely take more than she was supposed to in any one sitting. It was an obvious ploy to guilt my brother for sympathizing with my father in my parent’s divorce.
My parents are divorcing because mother had an affair and everything about her has changed. Her appearance, her behaviors, how she treats everyone in the family. I didn’t know she was having an affair, because she was also seemingly in the middle of a mental health crisis and she had vehemently spoken out against infidelity ever since I can remember. I guess everyone is against an affair until they have one, though.
Around the time that the affair started, my mom started oscillating between hyper-critical, overly happy, and erratic. My mother has been mentally abusive my entire life, but since her affair began, it seems…
