The Water Bottle Incident (the day I decided to cut ties with my EM)

Hi I'm 23NB, a dramatic bitch and I love writing, so this post is a long one. Make sure you're sitting comfortably and please enjoy this tale of my wicked mother and The Water Bottle Saga.

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Allow me to set the scene for you: it is autumn 2018, I am visiting during my 1st year of uni to stay with my parents and brother (younger by a few years). My mother is a narcissist and my father is a doormat.

One morning, whilst both parents are out at work, I decide to cook myself breakfast. This sounds really mundane, but it's important for a few reasons: namely my parents rarely cook, ready-meals fuck with my health, and the kitchen is a cluttered mess stocked with all kinds of useless food you can't actually make a meal out of. By this point, various health problems had conspired to make this my first proper meal for a few days.

I made fried eggy bread (French toast but savory, whatever you want to call it). This detail (the frying) is somewhat important for later. I cook, then clean up after myself: years of childhood abuse has trained me to try to leave no trace of my passing, so even though we have a dishwasher I wash everything by hand — just in case something I've used ends up being wanted for use later and used as a reason to shout at me. My mother has left her water bottle in the sink (foreshadowing lol), which I remove from the sink and place on the side to wash up my stuff.

I go upstairs, eat. The meal is good.

I hear my mother come home. Like the traumatised child I am, I move one ear of my headphones off so I can hear more clearly: if she shouts for me, I must respond quickly or else she'll get angrier.

She indeed shouts for me. I yank my headphones off all the way and race downstairs to the kitchen.

She turns to me, voice full of scorn. "Next time you cook something, shut the doors to the rest of the house and open the windows. Otherwise you make the whole house stink of burnt oil."

I say my placating apologies and promises to do better next time. I am excused after only a brief verbal lashing and retreat back upstairs to my room.

That wasn't so bad, I think.

Alas, it was not the end.

She shouts for me again. I rush downstairs, thrumming with anxiety, waiting diligently in the kitchen. Her back is to me.

In the mildest, faintly wondering voice she asks, "Did you wash my water bottle?"

My mind races. What is the correct answer here? What will leave me the most unscathed? Is her water bottle fancy and special and she's worried I washed it the wrong way and ruined it somehow? Does she think it's damaged?

I answer truthfully, "No."

Wrong. Answer.

She is furious.

The verbal lashing begins: I'm lazy, ungrateful, selfish, how could I not even do so little as wash her water bottle?

There is no room for me to explain that I barely made it out of bed, let alone made food, let alone washed up, let alone managed to do more than the bare minimum. No sympathy, no understanding; nothing but vicious criticism and verbal abuse.

I stand there and take it; apologise. Eventually, she is finished and I slink back to my room.

Now, the thing is, whilst I had grown up with this sort of treatment and developed a kind of thick skin — a numbness to it, I had been at university for months. At university I wasn't savagely berated for every minor mistake I made, I wasn't bullied, I wasn't shouted at. In fact, I had been surrounded by lovely friends who supported me, built up my self esteem and encouraged me.

This meant I no longer had my thick skin. My mother's words sunk into me like knives and I… cried.

And (thanks to my childhood leading me to repress most of my feelings) I very, very rarely cried.

Lo and behold, what misfortune, what rotten timing, this was the moment my brother barged into my room. He stopped short upon seeing me very obviously crying.

"What happened?"

I didn't need to say much. "Mum."

"Oh."

Then I asked to be left alone and he left.

A few days went by without incident. Being criticized right down to the moral quality of my character for simply not washing a water bottle had all but faded from my mind. On my last night before returning to uni, we went out for a meal in a restaurant. Often, these are the only times my family talk to each other.

The food is fantastic and the conversation is going nicely enough.

Then, my dear brother, making a habit of rotten timing, does the conversational equivalent of dropping a bomb.

"Mum, you do know you made [OP] cry?"

The table goes silent. I would very much like to not exist. Unsurprisingly, this is not something I would have ever wanted to bring up — let alone in public!

My mother, all innocently miffed with wide eyes, turns to me and asks, "Did I?"

And, unable to lie (something to do with being neurodivergently averse to it, and having had lying beaten out of me as a kid), I say yes.

She is astonished.

To my profound, dizzying relief, she doesn't get angry. She doesn’t raise her voice. She doesn't berate me. I guess I should really be grateful my brother didn't bring this topic up in private, since the public setting probably stopped her from blowing up on us.

We talk. I haltingly explain that sometimes the way she talks is hurtful, that she says mean things or speaks harshly. That little things set her off. She takes it well, I think, responding with amazement and good humor. At the time I was too relieved to view it as anything but a positive. Hindsight from a few years' perspective, retelling this tale to friends and a few therapists, has me recognising her reactions as belittling. She didn't react as if she was horrified at how she'd hurt me; she didn't express any regret or attempt to apologize. Every response was of the tone, oh gosh, little old me did that? Well I never! How strange! I guess I'm just a little quirky. How silly.

She was undermining the severity of it all. Making light of it. She was smiling sheepishly and laughing. I, having not yet had the habit of coping via humor trained out of me (which was done by trying to tell jokes to my therapist and her sincerely responding with a sobering "that sounds like an awful experience"), leaned into it, recounting painful or uncomfortable memories as funny stories.

The meal ends, we go home, and I go to sleep feeling a little lighter and a little hopeful. Surely, this was the hardest part? The ever-so-touchy subject had been broached! Perhaps the relationship between my mother and I could really change for the better, grow into something more honest and open, something closer.

I was fucking naïve, of course, and this story is barely halfway done. My mum is a narcissistic and petulant parent, desperate to be the victim.

The next day as I am all packed and ready to go, putting on my shoes by the front door, my dad asks my mum if she would like to join us for the drive to my uni.

She says, "Well I don't know. Am I wanted?"

Bemused, I poke my head into the room she's sat in and say yes of course she's wanted.

You see, although my mother was presumably now seeing our relationship in a wholly new light, to me very little had changed. This shit had been my whole childhood, right up until the present. Just because I'd torn aside the illusion that everything was fine and perfect to reveal that I was actually very hurt and fearful, didn't mean that our relationship (at least on my end) had changed.

She seems surprised to see me but pleased I want her company, and joins my dad and I for the drive to my uni to see me off.

And still, the biggest bullshit is yet to come.

​

It is now winter term and I am fighting through exam season. Biochemistry is not an easy course and I have plenty of revision to do.

At 5.11am I get a message from my mother. It begins: "This is incredibly hard to write I love you so much. I’m sorry to say this but you’ve really upset me. I have been hurting since Friday at dinner. I have been crying for the last hour and feel like a shit mother."

Just to be clear, to really paint a picture for you, I wake up, during exam week, to see this message from my mother, sent at 5 fucking A.M. Needless to say, my stress levels skyrocket.

Her (exceedingly long) message continued with saying how hard she's tried to get my pronouns right. (Not once did I bring up the topic of pronouns during the conversation of how she'd made me cry. I'm still not sure why she brought it up here).

She then says that she's been 'walking on egg shells', scared of offending me, which is funny in a tragic way since that is how I have always felt like around her.

Her message continues to say she had some hard weeks at work. That ministry is emotionally, physically, and spiritually draining. She's hurt that her feelings never seem to matter. When she shouts it is because she is "deeply hurt".

Please, dear reader, remember the catalyst of all this: I didn't wash her water bottle. She was deeply hurt because, whilst providing food for myself and cleaning up after myself, I did not wash the bottle she had left in the sink. This is what "deeply hurt" her to the point of berating me to tears.

Her message continues in similar fashion (oh yes, it goes on much longer). Her trying hard to use the right pronouns for me is brought up again. She says she's neglecting work to write this because "I thought you were more important." She's spent 2 sleepless nights over this. She very dramatically talks about how she'll struggle to lead that morning's church service but "crying in front of your congregation is not an option."

The message finally concludes with her saying she loves me, is terrified I'll never want to visit again, and "I'm sorry I'm so shit."

So, all in all, a rather guilt-trip heavy message, with a mere 2 apologies — both of which are accompanied by self-deprecation. The remaining 300-odd words are her bewailing her tragic struggles, how terrible she feels, and how valiantly she's soldiering on through with her work.

Setting aside any hopes of managing to focus on revision, I painstakingly put together a reply. I do my best to be kind but firm: affirming that I still love her and I can appreciate her struggles, but that she has hurt me and any pain or difficulty she is going through does not justify how she has treated me. It ends up being a fairly lengthy message. In an attempt to demonstrate how this has been an ongoing problem (i.e. spanning all the way back to when I was a kid) and that it is recognisable outside of just the relationship between her and I, I mentioned that during my visit my brother and I had joked that she had "brought back my childhood nickname" by calling me a 'selfish cow'.

This was a grave error.

Her reply (sent the following morning at 1.43am) begins: "To kick someone when they’re down, twist the knife and to bring your brother in for extra pain is impressive."

And it really doesn't get any better from there.

"I’ve already apologised for being shit mother but thanks for dragging up the past where there have been things I’ve not been proud of. Shouting seemed to be the only way to get you to do anything, it came out of pain and frustration. Tell me when have you done something to help without it? Let’s use the last 2 week’s. When did you do anything other than for yourself? How did you expect me to feel to find you wouldn’t even wash my water bottle?"

I'm compared to my childhood friend who, one time when we were kids, made a cup of tea for my mother without being asked to. (My friend drinks tea; she simply made an extra cup for my mother whilst making one for herself. I do not drink tea. In fact, I don't drink anything much except water. But offering to get my mother a glass of water just wouldn't have the same depth of appreciation that a hot cup of tea would, right? Or perhaps, with how much she took the water bottle stuff to heart, the act of refilling her water whilst I did mine is exactly the gesture of mother-child appreciation she has been craving all these years). Anyways…

My pronouns are brought up again, this time about how I "make a big deal" about it and when her and dad get my "description" wrong I apparently roll my eyes and mouth the correction to my friend. (I would not dare to roll my eyes in the vicinity of my mother, since it is like pressing the button on a bomb, and it is always my friends mouthing the corrections because my parents have explicitly told me not to correct them because it is "rude" or something. And, seemingly contrary to my mother's beliefs, I do my utmost best to avoid conflict).

I'm really not sure how to sum up the rest of the message. Basically, she acknowledges that shouting is bad, but oh, how else was she supposed to react when she felt [various synonyms for unloved and ignored] and tired and sad? Shouting is her emotional release. As if that justifies it at all.

Then she drops in the fact she didn't throw up over her congregations (congrats, I guess?), before saying she didn't know if she should even reply to my message. The reason is she "didn’t want to turn it into a childish 'who hurt who first' or 'who is hurting more'" argument, "But after another sleepless night I decided I would."

So at least she's aware that it's a childish pissing contest over who is the most hurt and miserable.

I reply the next day, but what I said doesn't matter! I never got a reply. The reason for this will be explained later (stay tuned, folks!)

​

Months go by. I don't hear a single word from my mother. I try messaging my dad to ask how mum feels about me. His reply is the colossal understatement that "I think she's a little upset you wouldn't wash her water bottle." Oh sweet, ignorant father, we are WAY PAST this just being about the water bottle.

Asking my brother gets a more informative, bluntly candid answer: mum has been ranting about me behind my back and saying that I am trying to turn the family against her.

A very positive reunion to look forward to, then. Because summer break is fast approaching, and my accommodation contracts between my first year flat and my new second year flat have a few months long gap. I have nowhere else to go: I have to return to living with my parents.

Anxious to fuck, I move back in with them. Eerily, my mother acts as if the whole debacle never happened. There is no follow up, no continuation of the argument, not even a trace of animosity that I can detect.

I had no idea what to do. Should I try to bring up the subject to find a resolution, or at least some kind of closure? Follow her lead and pretend it never happened? Dear reader, be rest assured, to say I felt like I was walking on eggshells would be an understatement.

Weeks pass, maybe a month. The usual friction is there between us where I try to avoid incurring her wrath and mostly keep to myself; she makes passive aggressive hints that I should be helping out around the house more. Again, my parents don't do much cooking (and if they do, it is always my father). We have a dishwasher so there's very few dishes to do by hand. Sometimes I help with laundry, keeping the basket from piling up too much.

One day, my mother is waiting for a lift so she pokes her head into my bedroom to look out the front window it has, looking for the car. She spots a bowl of sweets I bought earlier in the week and asks to have some. I invite her to help herself.

And so I end up in the disastrous situation where my mother, linchpin of my childhood trauma, is sat in my room, on my bed, eating my sweets.

After a bit of harmless conversation, somehow the topic moves on to me admitting that I wasn't sure if I was even welcome back here (to stay with my parents) because she never replied to my message.

She tells me, rather detachedly, that she never even read my message.

Oh no, in fact, she had deleted the entire messaging app she was using to contact me.

And why? What was her reason for doing this?

Eating another few of my sweets, she explained, "I felt that if I had read your message I might not have wanted you to come home."

I don't know how to describe how I felt, but a good portion of me certainly felt trapped; this woman who had raised me was sat in my room — my only retreat, my safe space — on my fucking bed (eating my sweets!!) and had told me plainly to my face that she might not have wanted me to be here.

The conversation only worsens from there. Stuff about me not doing enough around the house. She made the argument, "If you had a flatmate who didn't pay rent, didn't pay for food, and didn't do any cleaning around the place, would that be okay?"

And I said, "No, of course not. But I didn't give birth to that flatmate, or choose to keep them and raise them—"

Nope. Same thing. Same situation. Nothing I argued was considered for a second. I was selfish and lazy and ungrateful for not doing housework.

It got to the point where I, on the verge of tears, asked, "So if I don't contribute anything to society, if I don't benefit other people somehow, then I am inherently worthless?"

And she stared straight into my tear-filled eyes and with all the conviction of god himself she said,

"Yes."

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Then her ride arrived and she left my room to head out the house, leaving me in tears with my now half-eaten bowl of sweets.

And that was the moment that I decided I never wanted to stay with my parents again, not like this. No matter the cost, whatever my situation, I was going to get a tenancy contract that lasted over summer so I wouldn't have to come back here.

I never wanted to be dependent on my parents again.