Mother has now gone back home to Cornwall after her three week visit, and it’s nice to have a tidy flat once again.  Much as I love her, she’s a messy cow and my home quickly becomes a pigsty with her around.  She’s always been an untidy person, and now she’s getting on in years, she employs a cleaner, so she never has to suffer the consequences of her slovenliness.  She says I’m obsessive but I’m so totally not, I’m  just  much cleaner than she is.  They say two can live as cheaply as one, and that may be true but the rubbish I accumulate when she’s around is way more than twice what I produce alone.  Weird.

My mother has psychopathic personality disorder, which means she feels no emotional bond with anyone and never shows affection.  As a child growing up, I couldn’t understand why she didn’t seem to love me or take pride in me, and although I do understand now, I can’t go back and have happier childhood memories, I’m stuck with them.  She has never fought my corner or stood up for me in any way, and it was only a couple of years ago when she told me about her personality problem, that I was able to realise why.  I have many memories of her not being there when I needed her, and they won’t go away no matter how much I understand why she has always failed to be there emotionally.

What my mother does instead of show love and affection, is help financially.  It’s something she can do without having to open up emotionally, so I allow her to help me out whenever she wants to and I no longer feel guilty at her bailing me out.  I did very well out of her over Christmas, and it’s nice to be able to take her financial help without feeling a failure.  Now I can let her pay out and know it’s her way of being affectionate and the more she does it, the more affectionate she’s being.

Her lack of empathy makes her seem very judgemental sometimes, and she shocks me with her attitudes sometimes.  She can’t understand why people don’t behave like unemotional robots, and although I try to tell her that she’s the one who is different, not them, she just shrugs and changes the subject.  She can be maddeningly irritating and I’m often to be found biting my tongue when she’s around, but she is also funny and down to earth.

They say we’re a product of our upbringing, and I now understand more about why I find it so hard to interact with people.  Being autistic doesn’t help but having my mother as role model, made it even harder to grow up balanced.  I guess I should have become a crazed serial killer or something, I have many of the so-called ‘pointers’ according to all the tv shows.  Maybe we’re not totally a product of nurture after all.  Maybe there’s more to destiny than people like to believe.

Well, I am still battling with Talk Talk over my proposed broadband supplier swap.  The latest is that the problem with the exchange has now been sorted, and some guy is coming over on 16th to get me switched over.  We’ll see how that goes.

I’m still waiting for the new saucepans I bought on 29th Dec.  Having phoned Argos expecting a row, he told me I should receive them within the next 3 working days.  We’ll see about that too.  It’s been a right nuisance having to do all my cooking in the microwave due to no saucepans suitable for my new cooker.

Another funny thing – I was cyber bullied on twitter yesterday by a couple of assholes who did not like my blog about UK gun laws.  Funny how it’s always the aggressive bully types who wants guns to be freely available isn’t it?  Precisely the reason it’s good they’re not.