Mommy dearest is finally waking up to the fact that everyone being mad at her might mean SHE is the problem. But there’s an out! One of her brothers was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. So she’s been letting the mask slip around her family and they are telling her they are concerned. But she won’t get checked because “it can’t do any good to know so why bother” she says. She also cancelled her retirement to keep working longer out of pettiness towards a rival at work. But yea, it must be Alzheimer’s.

My aunt called my sister today concerned about mom. She asked if we’ve noticed mom just making up outlandish shit lately. My sister was already overwhelmed heading to a funeral when she got the call so she lashed out and said something along the lines of her calling my sister when she banned my siblings from family Easter because they have children and she has white carpet.

My aunt asked what she was talking about. She said she tried to get them to come but told our mother she was worried she wouldn’t be able to have an Easter egg hunt for the kids because the backyard is a mess. She wanted them there. “I have dogs that do much worse to the carpet than you kids can.”

My sister had a separate Thanksgiving this year because we were all feeling mom was not only a problem but had poisoned them against us as just bad children. We felt unwanted and were backing away. Because mom kept saying they were “her” family, not our family. We are basically guests as far as mom is concerned.

My aunt was horrified. “She’s worse than we thought!” My sister corrected her “no, she isn’t. She knows her brother got an Alzheimer’s diagnoses and everyone is worried about him so she’s trying to steal his thunder. She’s ALWAYS been like this but tells everyone else that her kids are horrible little liars when they cried out for help when we were little.”

“What do you mean?”

And my sister just dumped everything. The time mom had her arrested at prom. The time she told cops I beat her and had me thrown in jail. (I didn’t. She made the entire fucking thing up). The checks from children’s services where we were coached to lie because if we told the truth we would never see eachother again. Just everything.

My aunt had no idea. She was horrified.

All this time we thought they knew and were just okay with it. And it was just mom lying AGAIN.

My sister had to go then. They had arrived at the funeral for her murdered friend (the one mom said must have deserved it).

And that’s the realization I now have for the holidays. The abuse we rationalized as children was so much worse than we realized because our mother isolated us when she couldn’t control the narrative.

Bonus: My mother said if the grandkids are at her house, she is their parent, not my siblings, because they came from her eggs (WTF). My sister basically told her she won’t see them inside her home if that’s how she wants to behave. I’d have told her to dig up grandma and get a second opinion but my sisters play was more diplomatic.

The narcissist is coming to Christmas at my sisters and I don’t know what to do. She going to pretend everything is fine. She is going to push buttons. And she is going to piss us off as much as possibly just hoping for a fight where she can play victim again.

And I’m done with this sideshow so I’m considering making her the spectacle this time. All I have to do is set some sort of reasonable boundary and calmly call her out when she crosses it. If I can plan this out ahead of time, it might just make the outcome more manageable.