Fucked-up Role Reversal

Because I didn't have enough shit to worry about already...

Welcome to my world.

I've mentioned a little bit about the situation with my mother: her flipping out, leaving, marrying a strange little foreign man she met on the internet, etc. Well I'll be damned if it hasn't gotten a little more complicated and infintely more bizarre. I have long been the adult in my relationship with my (increasingly unstable) mother. But I have recently had to go all after-school-special on her ass in light of revelations about her home life with the little husband. Apparently he is wildly jealous, so he doesn't like her speaking to other men (especially my father, with whom he has forbidden her to have contact). He's got a nasty temper and tends to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation (he threw the kitchen table into the wall, and has hit her on only one occasion, to my knowledge). And when he's pissed at her, he'll go for a week or two without speaking to her. They live in a one-bedroom apartment, so this takes a tremendous amount of spite and sheer willpower on his part. Both my father and my brother have offered her money to send the little fucker back to Africa, but Mom is too proud to take it... and she doesn't want to admit failure in regards to the marriage. Until now, I have remained calm and understanding with her and have refrained from passing judgement. A week ago, I got my judge on.

Last Sunday night, I received a phone call. It was Mommy Dearest, and she was crying hysterically. She and crazy Napoleon had had an argument (regarding my father's marriage on Saturday), and Napoleon got pissed and told her to leave and not come back. She called me from the Wal-Mart parking lot, because she didn't know what to do or where to go, and she was afraid to go home. Grrrreat. Meanwhile, I had NO idea what to tell her, and her cell phone was dying, so I told her to go to the school where she works (she keeps a cell phone charger there), charge her phone, try to calm down, and call me back. Fifteen minutes later, she calls back, still sobbing. I suggested she stay at the house with my sister for the night, but she didn't want to drag S. into it (but obviously had no problem doing so to ME!). And all of her friends were out of town for the holiday weekend. So I gave her the number for the local women's shelter, to which she was, of course, to proud to go. And then I snapped. I went on an extended tirade about how she was being stupid, and I told her that she may not want to hear it, but the marriage is OBVIOUSLY not going to work, and her husband is OBVIOUSLY a psychotic, unstable PRICK, and she needs to send his sorry ass back to where it came from. I offered her the thousand-dollar surplus from my student loan (which I was planning to use for rent and food); I BEGGED her to take it. She said she'd think about it. I told her to be careful and to take care of herself, made her promise to call me the next day, and then we said goodnight.

She did call the next day to tell me she was okay, that she had gone home and received nothing but the standard silent treatment (and discovered that Napoleon had turned all the pictures of them face-down and had taken their wedding picture... she didn't know what happened to it). I reiterated my request for her to take my goddamn money, and then we parted ways. I haven't heard from her since. I guess I should call her.

It's great that she's got someone to talk to about her problems. It sucks that it's me.