One thing I’m sure we can all agree on is that parents largely influence children’s lives. Sometimes the influence is smaller, sometimes bigger, but there’s always something to be said even if the child never knew their parent. One thing I have always struggled with is my relationship with my mother. My relationship with my father is complex but was never all that important because he wasn’t that large an influence on my life and I don’t interact with him very often. I grew up with my mother and she raised me alone so she was pretty much the main adult influence in my life.

You get to a certain age and you start to wonder - does my relationship with my mom affect my relationship with women in general? Am I looking to date people like my mom? Not like my mom? Is there some crazy subconscious bullcrap secretly plotting to destroy my life so that I’m never happy enough in relationships??? Quite frankly, I have know idea. I never really bought into that line of thinking and while I think there’s definitely connections generally, I don’t particularly feel that my relationship with my mom has determined my relationship with women at all up to this point.

Regardless of that my relationship with my mother is complicated in of itself. I’m currently living with her for a month before I start traveling again. I was worried this choice would be a huge mistake as I hadn’t lived with my mother for 8 years since I left for college but I was and am also hoping that it could possibly strengthen our bonds. Since my mother first got cancer about 9 years ago which also coincided with me leaving the apartment and becoming an adult she has become increasingly negative and self centered and has very erratic emotional behavior. She goes from furious to crying to happy at the drop of a hat, most of which is due to a mixture of the medicine she takes and her emotional state after being through several years of cancer. All of this is understandable but that doesn’t fix the fact that she funnels most of her problems into me. I often feel as if I’m growing backwards as she treats me more like a child and I have more fucked up interactions with her now that I’m an adult than I did when I was a kid.

The thing that concerns me the most is how I am with her. Generally I’m a very calm and peaceful person, I virtually never get angry and I’m almost always relaxed. However, my mom, in her seemingly never ending quest to drive me insane, draws out the worst in me. I worry that this will never change and also that this may follow me into a serious relationship with a woman I may be with for a long time. The longest relationship I’ve had has been a year and I’ve had two year long relationships but the last one ended when I was 19. Do I have some crazy caged angry guy dwelling within me waiting to release all my vengeance on my next long term relationship? Maybe I’m just getting a quarter life crisis as my friends start to marry off and I’m reaching the age where people are expecting me to start thinking about having a family (I’ll be damned if I ever get married though, fuck that religious garbage). Being back at home has all these questions once again re-emerging. After having tried to talk to my mother seriously about our relationship several times over several years and each time turning out to be worthless as she literally forgets we’ve even had the conversation within months, I wonder, will my problems with her ever get better? If they don’t is it going to doom me into being some fucked up romantic partner? I hope it’s not, and the first part about preventing those things is being aware of it, but the mind is so complicated....who knows? As of now, I definitely think I’m fine and I haven’t ever really had any serious problems that I haven’t fixed with any of my girlfriends.

I guess I just have to keep on my toes and be aware and listen to my girlfriends when things are wrong. I just hope, more than anything, that one day I can fix the relationship with my mother but who the hell knows if that’s possible. At the least I’m confident that I can prevent that problem of my life from influencing others. I’ll tell you one thing though, I can’t wait to move out and go back to Guatemala.