My mother is a fucking nightmare.

My mother is a hyperverbal maniac.

I'm not just saying this. I woke up from a cold-induced nap to listen to Mom and my older sister argue about the same things we argue, and Mom reduced my older sister to tears.

Mom sees nothing wrong with this. She sees nothing wrong with accusing my siser of being nasty and snitty while incapable of seeing past her own hypocricy. She sees no concept of time and snaps at my sister when she tells her she needs an hour break to calm down after what, an hour or two's worth of helping her on the computer to look at pages and pages of jewelry and clothes at HSN and QVC. Which Mom purchases then stuffs in the bathroom and never ever wears, while taking even MORE time to return everything else months past after the return policy. She accuses us and Dad of wasting our money on trivial things, yet she piles ring after ring and keeps buying expensive shoes and clothing just to "try them on at home" and then spend days returning them simply because they don't fit. This is not logical.

The entire time you're trying to help Mom meet her demands, she's a broken record that gets angrier and angrier no matter how calm or patient you are with her. She has no concept of memory, so she tells you the same damn story over and over and over again. 20 minutes later, she'll tell you again. 40 minutes, she'll tell you again. The littlest things set her off and she'll accuse you of being manipulative and nasty when she herself twists the facts to make you look like the villain. Even Dad, who's usually so quick to defend her it's almost hopeless, isn't falling for this anymore. It's bad enough that my little brother, who's normally so thankfully oblivious from family drama, he can't stand my Mom's behavior either. Mom wonders why my sister's not staying with us past Christmas to the New Year? She should learn to see past her own nose on the events that happened just now.

HELP

Dear Santa,

Feel free to toss this. I understand I'm not getting everything I want for Christmas and I've come to expect this. After all, I kind of deserve it, do I? Even my Dad asked me yesterday, "Why do you sound so annoyed all the time?" and that hurt. A lot. I never realized I sounded like that to other people.

But that's beside the point. I'm not writing to ask you for material things. My Mom gets one material thing after another and quite frankly I get physically ill at the thought of clothes and jewelry and high fashion at this point. If you use that crystal snowglobe of yours at all, you'd know exactly what I mean. What I'm asking you for is more like a pathetic New Year's Resolution, and we know how those turn out. But here it is anyway.

For Christmas, I want to spend an entire year in isolation working on my novel. Isolation, in specific, from my mother. I know exactly how likely that's going to be. But as of now, the novel's the only thing that's been keeping me excited lately. It gives me this fresh spark of life and I feel I can believe in things again. But the longer I'm with my mother and the more she rambles and wallows in her own self-pity, I can feel it poisoning me. But that's the thing. I don't know where else I can stay and I don't want to be a burden on other people the same way that Mom is being a burden on me. Not just me, but weighing down my sister and my dad too. She never leaves us alone, even when we tell her to. It's unbearable.

That's why I write, to escape from her cloud of eternal sick and pessimissm. Would you stand living with someone under the same roof like that? The world I write in my novel is scarier than she is, yet the people in it grow and change despite the worse circumstances. If they can find courage in a situation like that, why can't I? Which is why I get disgusted each time I have to retreat back to my mother, because she treats herself as a victim and never learns from her own mistakes, starting the vicious cycle all over again and dragging the rest of us down with her. And I'm sick of it.

I'll say it as many times as I have to. My mother is poison. My mother is poison.