Don’t upset me with your anger.

I have a complicated relationship with my mother.

I suppose it is no longer complicated, as I no longer have a relationship with her.

With the blessing of my therapist, I have blocked my mother on everything. I visited her last in December in Baton Rouge. I spoke to her last in late January. She is likely reading this blog (along with other relatives, who know both of us). It puts an unreal sheen to my storytelling and makes me extra self-conscious.

I recognize that it is one-sided and flawed as both memory and self are fallible. But I could say that about anything I write.

I’m not quite sure where to start. I have many other bits and pieces of this tale in the works: the ever-persistent genetic shadow of severe mental illness, her hoarding, summers in Baton Rouge.

I’ll name her Crepe Myrtle, or just Myrtle. Here is an extremely short version of why I have cut her off, a sound bite blog missing more than forty years of context and conflict.

Myrtle gifted my children, her grandchildren, digital cameras when they were young. She is a talented photographer and encourages her grandkids to take photos. TV and Chick both love using these cameras, especially at camp and in places where they are not allowed to bring phones.

Myrtle’s own camera broke. She asked her grandchildren if she could have theirs. They politely demurred, telling white lies and trying to put her off as best they could.

Myrtle sent me this text.

This was the first I had heard of this. I went to to the kids to ask what was going on. They both shared: they wanted to keep their cameras, but didn’t want to tell their grandma a flat out no. They told her a polite fiction that they couldn’t find it.

Here was my response to Myrtle.

From there, Myrtle texted back a very normal apology and a positive-seeming response. It seemed liked it should all be resolved.

But.

There is always a “but”.

But Myrtle started doing the thing she does. She does it when she’s angry or annoyed about something and wants to talk about it. She starts calling me and leaving messages. The message will ask me to call her back. She will escalate to text and to Facebook messenger if I take more than 24 hours, telling me to call her.

I usually need about 2 - 3 days to carve out the emotional energy as well as the time for these phone calls when she works herself up like that.

When I called her, I figured I had a sense of what was going to happen. She was going to chastise me somehow for being mean.

I am not allowed to give her feedback— if I do, I hurt her feelings. I cannot tell her something hurt me—if I do, I hurt her feelings.

She begins the telephone conversation with saying that we need to have a “frank conversation.” And her opening is something along the lines of: Just as you stand up for people who are less advantaged and you go to protests to support immigrants and gay people, you should also support me, stand up for me, and not be so negative to me.

It was a messy metaphor on her part, at best. But she seemed proud of it. You could tell she had been ruminating, practicing this frank conversation. She likely picked the comparison because she thought it would have emotional impact.

And it did.

I screamed at her.

My friends, my gentle readers: I do not scream often. I am not that person. I have not yelled in anger in many years. It was like I was a teenager again. My rage was raw and deep.

This comparison of Myrtle’s broke me somehow. Through some twists and turns of her imagination, she conflated the moral imperative I feel to protest, to put my body and in 2026 my literal life at risk for the ideals I deeply care for…. with my tone in which I texted her about not asking for gifts back.

I don’t recall exactly what I screamed. It was something along the lines that I couldn’t believe she would make that comparison. I know that I called her tacky for harassing her grandchildren to return gifts. I told her not to contact me and that I was furious. I needed space. I told her to give me time. At least a week. I spoke over her and hung up on her.

And just as she does every time I tell her I need time, she immediately called me back. My desire to cool down just intensifies her need to push me, to get in one last word. I didn’t pick up.

Here is the message that she sent me immediately after:

It was this line. I read this line and that was the moment I decided that I was done.

We were so far removed from the first argument, a minor correction about the way she was treating her grandchildren. We had somehow stair stepped away her faux pas onto me, onto my anger, onto how much I upset her.

If I cannot upset her with my anger, I have nothing else to offer her.

I was done. I am done. She is blocked everywhere.

Here is the last attempt I have from her, prior to the complete blocking.

More metaphors: A request for peace. Myrtle is waving a white flag. To her, this is war. She is surrendering to me, to her aggressor.