okay i don't even know exactly how it got started, but my mom called tonight.

yes. i know. i was thrilled, too.

it was more about how she doesn't agree with the therapist that brittanie's seeing, for very valid reasons. like the therapist thinks it should be okay for my 15 year old sister to be able to just "hang out and do whatever" until midnight.

and she was telling me how the therapist kept making her feel like she was a terrible parent, how she wasn't doing anything right, blah blah blah. and she commented on my silence. damn right i was silent - i can't really completely disagree and say hey you were mom of the freaking year. and slowly but surely, i started talking more and more.

what started as a conversation about how we kids as a whole felt slowly started shifting to how i felt. and i told her about how i did feel jealous that brittanie was in counselling, that i wished i had had someone to really talk to like that. my mom said "well you did go to a counseller". i told her no, i mean high school.

no blow by blow transcriptions for you - that comes when you send me a self addressed stamped envelope with 5 dollars for my troubles. i will continue with a gross generalization of the hour and a half that followed, though.

once i started talking about high school, and how i really didn't start standing up for myself until college, things just came out. so many examples of how she hasn't listened to her kids in the past and even the present. so much talk of the tension between her and michelle, and how i do not want to hear about what a bad person michelle is anymore. a lot of horrible revelations about what really happened with ken. and why i never told her. and that there was never a "lying streak" when i was a kid. it's all a little of a jumbled mess - so much was talked about tonight. and unfortunately i didn't get out everything - i realized after the phone call that shit, i forgot to bring up some super-crucial things like us kids constantly having to hear how she's tired of being a parent... it's hard to remember everything that's caused the tension in my 26 year relationship with my mom within one impromptu gutspilling.

i felt bad that she cried so much, but i also felt good about it, if that's not too terribly horrible to say. that she knows what she did. that she seemed to listen for once without turning things around like they were my fault.

at the end of the phone call i asked her, as hard as it was, to talk to michelle. "she doesn't talk," my mom said.

"she will. you just have to listen."

in about 7 minutes the mom-michelle phonecall begins, and hopefully with it will come at least a little bit of healing for them as well. god, doesn't that sound so very "very special episode"? it wasn't a cure-all, i'm well aware of that. the issues are long-standing and the cuts are deep. my mom and i aren't suddenly going to be bestest friends in the whole world. i don't know if we'll ever be able to make her understand what we're talking about when we kids say Justin could've been helped before he went so completely out of control. i've still got things to hash out with her on a few other topics, too.

i don't know if our family will ever be completely okay. times like this make me feel a little better about it, though.