Naked Lunch

I am having lunch with my mother tomorrow. Which is unremarkable, but for the fact that we have spoken only a handful of times since Christmas, and the only time I have actually seen her since then was at my father's birthday dinner in July.

She lives about 20 minutes away.

Our relationship began to spoil about four years ago, when I allowed myself to be bullied into an ill advised investment. Numerous tearful exchanges, a variety of 6 to 8 month periods of not interacting, and my unending state of continuous denial later, we are having lunch. A cozy party of four. Mother, child, the ill advised investment, and either her failure (or mine) to extricate me from it as the pink elephant in the room.

I need to talk to her. I need to wrest control of the situation back. I need to make her hear me. I need to confront these demons -- the last, and actually, the only which have caused me prolonged stress due to sheer anger. This topic is the only one I can think of, in all my life, that has provoked a visceral and unending anger in me. I have to exorcise the anger. It burns. I generally try to ignore it, but my heart tells a different story. It bears the telltale blistering and puckering. Ever-raw and unhealed.

But this anger, this unexplained rage -- its strength scares me. And only now am I beginning to realize it is because the pool from which it emanates is so much deeper than I had ever realized. The investment isn't the issue. My mother ignoring my opinions isn't the issue. The issue is that the lesson I learned early on, the one I have spent my whole life working towards applying, is that I don't want to live a life like my mother's. And with this ill-fated investment, I feel she has pulled me into that morass. The one that made my breath short as a child, that seemingly compelled me to ensure dinner be made and the house cleaned prior to my father getting home every day in the hopes he would be a little less angry, that spoke with a soft Spanish whisper of "shhhh, don't tell your father" right in front of his uni-lingual-face, that post-dated checks, that was generous with promises, but always made you never want to ask "how" when they where actually fulfilled, that always screened calls, that prized cash-and-carry as the existence of a viable credit card was always a dubious proposition, that was always scrapping and planning, and hoping and wishing and risking and betting, with a wink and prayer that it would all turn out okay.

It did. Well fed and properly clothed, exceptionally educated and not at all deprived is how I turned out. I was a fortunate kid. I am grateful. But that fortune was so hard fought. The battle scared me. I worried about survival from one day of the battle to the next. I worried about the foot soldiers. I was always worried. I was always insecure. I was always afraid.

There was no safety net.

And after all these years, there still isn't.

I am my own safety net. I accept that. I am proud that I can do that. But I am fiercely protective of it. The one thing I loved about working at the firm was that I never had to think about money. I just don't want to think of it. I want it to be a non-issue. I have enough for what I need and for a fair amount of what I want, and that is that. When that is threatened, my whole world seems tremulous. A quivering house of cards that can fall at any moment.

And I fear, as I down shifted the fiscal benefits of my career, that my mother now has the power. The power to pull me down, to pull me under, to drag me out to sea, untethered, unmoored.

I need to talk to her. I need her to hear me.

I am afraid.