"He Became His Stories"

I just saw a bawlfest of a movie today: Tim Burton's BIG FISH. If you can get through to the end of this without crying, folks, you're dead and you just don't know it yet.
The story here, for those who haven't seen the film, concerns a young man whose father has always told him the most preposterous stories. As the old man lays dying (and there's a story about that, too), his son learns the truth of his stories and the truth of the man. "He became his stories". A fitting epitaph for an aspiring writer like me.
It's hard to watch a movie like this without thinking of one's own family. I've been recently warned that my mother, known to all and sundry as 'the wicked witch of the south' since her snubbing of my wedding, seems poised to make contact once again. We're not sure why, and to be honest, I'm a little leery of finding out.

My mom's full of stories, too. After we married without her attendance or blessing, we went nearly three years without any contact at all. So you can imagine our shock when the story of why came out.
I've still got the letter containing this story, mostly because the accusations made in it are so unbelieveable. If I ever quoted this letter back to her now, I'd get nothing but hot denials..."how could you EVER think I would write such a thing?" Nevertheless, supposedly we poisoned her food one Thanksgiving, a full year before the wedding and ten months before she broke all contact. The food poisoning was so bad that she had to be put on a ventilator, twice, and can no longer work outside the home. Of course, it wasn't quite bad enough for her to inform us until three years and many demands later.

So this is her story, and she's so firmly convinced of its truth that she's become it. Now, I'm afraid she may actually be nearing death, most likely from something to do with the tens of thousands of cigarettes she's smoked, and after being pushed away for years, I don't know how to react to her trying to pull me back.

You have to understand that this ambivalence about my mother didn't always exist. For at least three years, it was mommy and me against the world.
She and my father divorced in '77, an affair that made THE WAR OF THE ROSES look pretty tame by comparison. Until my stepfather came along in late 1980, my mother did *everything* for me...to the point where at eight years old, I didn't know how to tie my shoes. John changed all that in a hell of a hurry. I was promptly booted outside and told to make friends. That resulted in stories of my own: baseball games played with playmates who lived three blocks over, four and a half feet straight up and just inside my skull. I'd talk to dial tones for twenty minutes. Eventually, those fictions became fact and I developed some friends.
In the meantime, in the despicable manner of most divorced parents, every attempt was made to turn me against my dad. "You're just like your father" became the worst epithet my mother could think of to hurl. (Indeed, it was one of the last things she said to me before our wedding, and I finally got the chance to give the "insult" the response it deserved: "Thank you", I said.)
I was well on into my teens before I understood that the number of sides to every story equals the number of people in the story, plus the truth. I could at last appreciate dad's side of things, made even more clear to me by my mother's actions as time went on...culminating in the wedding no-show.

So here we are. I'm thirty two years old. I had to resort to a chainsaw to cut the apron-strings, but they're most certainly cut. (Ken solves his problems with a chainsaw...and he never has the same problem twice.) And my mother just might be sick. Or dying.

Some very uncharitable thoughts go through my head at that notion. There's a character in Stephen King's THE STAND, a character with whose teenage years I strongly identify. His mother, who has ignored him for years, dies in a pandemic that's sweeping the world. He wonders why he's not grieving. After all, he says, and I'm paraphrasing, 'you drink lemonade, you have to urinate...your mother dies, you have to grieve.' Of course, a couple of minutes later he dissolves into a blubbering mess: "I want my MOMMY!
There's a goodly part of me that wants to do the Jewish thing and scream "I have no mother!" to the high heavens. There's another part of me--the mother-voice that once made up my conscience--who rants and raves at the very thought. And somewhere in between those very uncomfortable places is the truth.

This story continues...