My mom and I have always had an...interesting...dynamic. We got along really great when I was a fundamentalist, although as I got older, certain cracks started appearing even then. We're very different temperaments, for starters. I'm a bit of a steamroller (unfortunately), and mom is simultaneously the type who feels she should throw herself on the ground to let herself be steamrolled. She's not big on self-esteem.

Then there's the fact that I'm her only daughter, and her first-born. But hey, no pressure!

Then you add the weird dynamic that mothers and daughters always seem to have anyway.

And then you add the fact that I am no longer a fundamentalist and am therefore, in my mother's eyes, unfortunately going to hell. Plus, I've become a leftie, politically, which is also hellish, as far as she's concerned.

I've always been torn, when it comes to my mom. As the single daughter (I was never a good girl who got married and had kids, like my brothers did), I always felt that if my mom ever got sick or couldn't live alone any more, I'd be the one who was simply expected to move in and take over. I am so unsuited to such a thing, you have no idea. And that made me feel like I was really a selfish pig. But I swear, I can't handle someone who is so determined to make me walk all over them.

Not to mention that I just can't handle being disapproved of and mourned for, 24/7. And mom always has IDEAS about what would be good for me. Honestly, if I'd married any of the guys she thought would be "perfect for me" as I grew up, I'd have expired of boredom within a couple of months of the wedding. (Except the guy who became quite the bohemian philosopher, who I would eventually have enjoyed very much, but by then my mom would have been horrified at him.)

I honestly didn't move 2000 miles away just to get away from my mom. Nor even my fundie family. I love love love being with them; they're a hysterical lot. I really did move away to live somewhere warmer, more liberal, somewhere that reflected my personal philosophies more accurately than Calgary did.

But my mom has had a couple of falls in the last year, the second one being last night. She hurt her back -- or maybe hip? -- and the doctors think she has a microfracture and it could be a "bad injury." She does have osteoporosis (which is gradually improving with drugs, though not very quickly), but it didn't sound like they thought it was the osteo hip.

However, she's in her late 70's and it seems pretty inevitable to me that one of these days she's going to fall and have an injury that's enough that she'll need to live with someone, or move into a home of some sort.

Now I'm feeling, again, like a big selfish pig. I don't, I don't, I don't want to move back to Calgary and play that role that I've tried my whole life to escape -- the Maiden Daughter Living With Her Aged Mother. The really primary reason I moved to Toronto was to be who I really am, without those thousands of Expectations that were suffocating me in Calgary. Right now I'm feeling, as much as I ever did in Calgary, that I'm going to end up suffocated no matter what I do.

And yet she's my mom. How self-centred can I be? Can I really just expect that my two brothers (and their wives) will do all the work? When I'm (in their eyes) pretty much fancy free without any real responsibilities? That's always been -- for everyone else -- my Great Sin.

I really will NOT move back to Calgary. I need to visit more often, I think, but I simply can NOT do it. And I just know that will be one more thing that everyone disapproves of. And of course, maybe they will be right.

Dammit. It's hard to know when you should be a Calvinist, and when you should throw it off. *sigh*