Dear Mom,

I want to thank you and BDL for putting CLH and me up last week. I appreciated the room and board, the turkeys, and the water. On the plane I finished the last of the water bottles I had filled from your tap. I don't know what it is about that well, but I still think it's the best tasting water anywhere.

A couple of things from our conversation Tuesday afternoon that I wanted to clarify or repeat:

1. My reluctance to Talk to you, to reveal sensitive personal information to you, stems mostly from the following cause: Your track record of wounding me afterward with the information by either twisting whatever I tell you to your own purpose, or assigning meaning to whatever I might say contrary to the significance I might have told you it had (which belies your assumption that you know best).
2. If I were you I would ponder the significance of your having assumed that I have been in denial merely on the grounds that I have not shared my personal revelations with you. You stated declaratively that CLH and I are in denial, which provoked me to ask you exactly what you think I deny. You evaded the answer with your explanation of Al-Anon, and I asked again, and again, and made it easy for you by telling you that I acknowledge my father and other relatives were/have been/are alcoholics, that you're a codependent, controlling enabler, and that my life has been profoundly affected by alcohol, and asked yet again what you think I deny. You said, through tears, that you didn't know I knew any of the above acknowledgments, because I had never told you that I knew them.
   This indicates two things to me:
   One, that we do not have the "wonderful relationship" that you have asserted, because if we did have such a wonderful relationship, I might have told you those things, and
   Two, that just because you don't know that I acknowledge some truths, doesn't mean that I don't, in fact, acknowledge them. That you only in 2001 realized that anything you didn't know isn't necessarily so, shows your continued self-absorption. Through your words and actions, I perceive that you have a peculiar kind of tunnel vision and see things through your own lenses. We are all of us human and inclined to see things as they suit us; I wonder if you know that you do wear these blinders. I'm pretty bad at removing my blinders myself, but I know they're there. Do you?

Another point that intrigues me is your saying that Al-Anon has taught you to detach. While I can see the value of not letting random snipes from passersby and construction workers get to you, I also can see that too much detachment makes you appear unfeeling and untouchable. This ties in with the "someone's anger is her own problem" you claimed several times. As I tried to explain at the time, this strikes me as a dangerous axiom to follow. If someone's anger toward me is her own problem, and not also mine, then how does that person connect with me? and how do I acknowledge my own role and possible fault in our interaction? how do we exchange ideas and come to a solution? how is our relationship healed and improved?

If I, myself, operated on the premise that everyone's anger, pain, or happiness were only her own, and detached myself from those emotions, then I would turn more and more inward and become more egocentric and lacking in affect. I would be unable to relate. This is how I perceive you--as being untouched by your daughters' emotions and able, by seeing us only through your funhouse mirrors, to use and think of us as best suits you though not necessarily as we are. For you to read the previous sentence and think, "Well, what she perceives is her own issue" doesn't address our problems.

In all of this, in our conversation Tuesday and in writing and rewriting this letter in the days following, I dread the result. In the past, the result has been a marked indifference on your part to what I have thought, and pain on my part for having once again hoped and trusted enough to reveal myself to you, for you to ignore or to twist, and an inability again on your part to acknowledge the validity of my point of view. I don't say that my arguments are infallible or untinged by resentment or impartial and disinterested, but I do assert that you should consider the possibility you might be at fault at some times, in some ways, and that if my life has been affected by alcohol, then not only my father's addiction but also my mother's controlling, enabling, self-imposition, and martyrdom have been factors. I should tell you another thing: whatever I acknowledge about my upbringing, I also take full responsibility for my current personality. I am an adult, and it, in all its charms and faults, is my responsibility. I acknowledge the effect others have had on me without blaming them for the result.

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I am curious about something you said Wednesday morning that I didn't pursue at the time, as I had had quite enough criticism by that point without asking for more. I believe CLH said, and you agreed, or possibly you said and CLH agreed, that my hair is too long. I am curious to know what your objections are and what you might think is an acceptable length. If you dislike my particular face in long hair, then I agree with you: my face is better flattered by short hair. (Of course, I think short flatters everyone and long hair no one.) If you balk at its particular length, then would you consider my shoulder blades a less objectionable endpoint? Another possibility is that adhere to the convention that women over 30 shouldn't have long hair. If that's the case, then do you also oppose CLH's shoulder-length hair? or does that not count as long?

I'll tell you why the comment pissed me off:

1. I don't take any criticism from you well
2. Yours wasn't even an attempt at constructive criticism
3. You again suggested that it could be shaped or styled, and
4. I particularly don't take kindly to criticism about my hair from someone who wears her short hair over her ears.

I submit to you, as I have done before, that a braid or a bun, in which my hair almost invariably is, is indeed a style, and that "shaping" would not show unless I wore my hair loose, which I almost never do, but would make plaits and chignons uneven and difficult to form. I admit, as well, that as I had neglected to bring a comb with me or to wash my hair since the previous Friday, my hair probably looked quite ratty by Wednesday morning. However, this admission means little since you dislike my hair even when tidily braided, off my face, off my neck, and, I emphasize, off my ears.

You did seem to warm to the idea of my being on old lady with a silvery braid. I appreciate that, if it was genuine and if you were picturing what I conjecture, a Tasha Tudor-esque old woman in a long skirt with her silvery white hair plaited and pinned at the back of her neck, pruning her roses and singing to her dog.

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Also I wanted to tell you that I remember the sort of olive I like. If you remember, olives came up at Oliver's as CLH removed them from her potato skins. The sort I like are Moroccan, though I don't know the species; they're immensely briny, small and black and shriveled with throat-constricting quantities of salt. Yummy.