Anyone have $2500 to spare for my dentistry? Fifteen years of bulimia combined with 18 years of parental neglect (and a complete lack of insurance or money the past several years) has left me with more teeth that have cavities than don't, and four more that just plain need to get pulled out (in addition to the ones I had pulled four years ago.)I am coming to the painful realization, yet again, as I seem to have to do every year or so, that what my mother means when she says she loves me isn't the same as what other mothers mean. Other moms take their kid to the dentist. Other moms figure out their kids have eating disorders. In the pro-ana movement, I was the only person I knew who had an eating disorder for more than three years as a minor without my parents figuring out something was wrong. At the time I thought I was just so clever, but in reality it was just easier for her to ignore my suffering than to do anything about it. Like my teeth - if I ignore them long enough, they'll all just rot away. She ignored me right into a series of high school suicide attempts, but somehow I survived that.
Today I hate my mother. I hate that she seriously considered spending $1500 to keep an elderly cat alive, yet I know if I call her and ask her to help with my dental bills, she won't do it. (In fact, she'll blame me for it, or tell me why I'm not trustworthy with money, or why I somehow deserve to not have teeth.) And it's not like she ever believed in faith healing for teeth. My whole childhood, she would take herself to the dentist, and have extensive (expensive) bridgework and fillings and crowns put in. I think she might have taken me in for cleanings and check ups three times my entire childhood. She didn't think God was going to protect my teeth, and she's known for years that I needed pretty extensive work to save the teeth I still have. She just doesn't give a damn.
My mother doesn't love me. My mother never loved me. My boyfriend* is gonna help me figure out how to pay for this, and he's not actually gonna let me go several more years watching my teeth rot away. It's baffling to me that someone I've known less than six months can care about my well-being. My family's known me my whole life, and they never did.
No real point to this post except to cry, and to remind myself later, next time I act like a battered spouse and want to "work things out" with her again. I just have to accept the fact that she was a *terrible* mother. She doesn't love me. And as much as I want to impress her or deconvert her or somehow get her to notice and love me, she won't do it. So it's probably not healthy for me to keep trying.
I've got an appointment with my therapist this afternoon - the therapist that my boyfriend willingly pays for, because he thinks it's important for me to not be overtaken with symptoms of mental illness all the time. Unlike my mom, who just tells me to control myself and quit being dramatic, and who I have told as recently as month ago how hard it is for me to be a good mother when I don't have my medication, and she said, "Oh, that sucks" and then continued to spend money like water on her own therapy, and trip to the cult survivors retreat (that I didn't get to go to.)
Crazy how finally having someone love me hurts so much. I guess I was still in denial about how bad of a parent my *mother* was, because it's so easy to blame everything on my grandmother, or my absent father. I think she broke me, too. I don't think it was just Gig. I don't think it was just my ex-husband. I think my mom was probably the first person who ever taught me that I don't matter and that my pain isn't real and shouldn't be addressed.
I want to go kick her in the teeth.
*Oh yeah. I guess I hadn't mentioned him on ATAT yet? Name's Dave. Sweetheart, awesome, funny, and a total dweeb (just my style). I wanted to wait a while, and get his okay before blogging him here.
**My Christian and former super-Christian readers probably realized this post's title was a (not very clever) take off of some Song of Solomons verses about his lady's sexy teeth. Clever comes after the novacaine wears off, okay?
