I doubt anyone would say life is easy. No matter how easy your life is, everyone has their struggles. Even the most beautiful, spoiled young woman who has men falling over themselves to give her everything she ever wanted still has problems.

What I have found to be true, though, is that a hard life is made significantly harder when you’re put in a position where you have to overcome your own problems, while someone else foists their problems onto you as well, as is the case with Bonnie’s mom.

Bonnie’s mom has been the third wheel in our relationship for more than a quarter of a century now. Bonnie and I met six months after her dad died, and her mom just sort of glommed onto us, and we became her de facto family. She invited herself to join us on dates, vacations, and holidays. She would buy our children presents for their birthdays and Christmas, but not for her other grandkids.

We were too young and naive to see what was happening, and it happened so gradually that we saw no cause for alarm. It’s only looking back that we’ve been able to see the effect she’s had on our lives and what a burden she’s been on our family.

Does that sound harsh? Whenever Bonnie speaks about her mom in a way that doesn’t praise her for being a wonderful, strong, loving mom, people tend to be anywhere from taken aback to outright appalled. Most people aren’t accustomed to a daughter having a bad relationship with her mother, and they definitely aren’t used to anyone being so blatantly honest about it.

For context, Bonnie’s mom has six children, thirteen grandchildren, and twelve great-grandchildren, and none of them want anything to do with her. Is it because she was a bad person? Not particularly. Abusive? Not so much as she was neglectful. She wasn’t good, she wasn’t bad. In fact, her whole life and personality could be summed up in a word: vacant.

She grew up in the Mormon church, which was the start of her problems, but what really derailed her life was a complete mental breakdown when she was a teenager. We don’t know exactly what happened to her because anyone who knows is long dead, and no one ever talked about it. We’ve only been able to piece bits of the story together over the years.

Primarily, a story Bonnie’s mom herself has told countless times since I’ve known her, and many more before we met, I’m sure. She tells a story about a time when she was 14, 15, or 16, where she lay in the middle of the living room floor and alternated between hysterical laughter and inconsolable sobbing for hours on end. There was nothing anyone could do to control her.

I always thought it was a strange story, but the more I heard it, the stranger it got, especially in the context of other stories I had heard throughout the years, like how she would go crazy if anyone grabbed her wrists. Once, when one of her two oldest boys was about three years old, he grabbed her by both wrists, and she reflexively threw him into a wall, busting a hole in the drywall. Of course, I’ve learned to take everything she says with a grain of salt because she’s a pathological liar, but there’s usually a grain of truth in even her most outlandish stories.

Among her other quirks that I suspect are related to her breakdown, she’s also afraid of being in a room with the door closed, so she has the most disgusting habit of shitting with the door open.

Then, a few years ago, more details emerged. She mentioned spending a year living with her grandparents, a story no one in the family had heard before, so Bonnie reached out to her Aunt to see if she knew anything about it. Her Aunt confirmed that that probably happened, but she is five years her sister’s Junior, so she wasn’t privy to all of the goings on back then, and what she was privy to has been lost to an aging brain.

Still, there’s enough evidence there for me to believe that she snapped when she was a teenager and became frozen in time. She never aged, mentally or emotionally, beyond adolescence. Now this is where any normal person would feel a sense of sympathy for her, and I did at one time, but that’s long gone, mainly due to how badly she has derailed Bonnie and my life together.

You see, she grew up doing whatever her parents and the church told her to do. Then, she turned 18 and married a man 9 years her senior, and spent the next 36 years doing whatever he told her to do. She never developed her own personality. She did and liked whatever he did. So, when he died, six months before Bonnie and I met, there was no one else to tell her what to do, want, or think.

So, as often happens in these fucked, traumatic family situations, she glommed onto the person closest in proximity. In this case, that happened to be Bonnie. Bonnie was only 17 at the time and was many years away from knowing any better. When she asked me just a few weeks after we started dating if I would mind her mom tagging along with us to a movie, I, of course, said no.

Why would I mind? It’s a movie. We’re all just going to sit in silence, staring in the same direction with a bunch of strangers anyway. Besides, I felt bad for her. Her husband just died earlier that same year. If I could go back in time and change my answer, I would in a heartbeat. It might have saved years of a third wheel in our marriage, and if you count the fact that Bonnie had to take care of her mom’s parents for the last seven years of their live’s we had more wheels than were even practical.

It was years of her inviting herself to Thanksgiving dinner at my parents’ house, despite her receiving invitations from her other children to have dinner with them. Years of her inviting herself on vacations with us. There was one trip that I remember particularly well because it was the first time that I realized that there was something wrong with her.

We went to Las Vegas to see a Jimmy Buffett concert. We had made these plans months in advance, without her, so we only bought four tickets for our family. We got to town the night before, and checked into our hotel. Then, we took the kids for a walk to the Ethel M. Factory that we were told was just a half mile away. It wasn’t. It was five miles away. We were gone for hours.

When we returned, Bonnie’s mom was a pissy bitch because we hadn’t fed her dinner. Are you fucking kidding me? I thought. You’re a grown ass fucking woman. Surely, you could figure out how to feed yourself. At the very least, she could have walked out into the hall and put a couple of bucks into the vending machine, but she didn’t. She didn’t do anything. To expect us to take care of her on that level was too much, and my sympathy and patience for her began to sour.

It was around this time that she began lying in bed, watching TV all day long. She was gaining weight, losing health, and becoming visibly depressed. Bonnie had a talk with her, and it became known that she had regretted never having lived on her own, so Bonnie, of course, made all of the arrangements and got her a little apartment of her own. We were finally free! For a few years, anyway.

She hated living alone. When one lives alone, one has to make all of one’s own decisions; not ideal for someone who has relied upon someone else telling them what to do their whole life. (We saw how well she did for a few hours alone in a hotel.) She lived in her little apartment for two years, and then decided to go on a mission for her church.

She lived at the Salt Lake City Temple for about nine months, but had to come back home to have eye surgery. The surgery required her to lie face down for 3 weeks. She couldn’t do it, so she had to have the surgery again. When she finally recovered, she transferred to the Santa Monica Temple, where she served her mission until she started getting weirder than normal.

Besides her showing obvious signs of mental decline, we were in the middle of a global pandemic, and it just seemed easier to deal with her in our own house than to have to drive all the fucking way down to Santa Monica every fucking time she needed something. An added bonus was that moving her in meant that Bonnie’s nephew and his kid had to move out. Bonnie offered her brother their mom, or nephew and grand niece, and he chose his nephew and grand niece. What does that tell you?

It was during all of these transitions from living with us to an apartment to the missions that we learned that for the first twelve years that we were together, Bonnie’s mom would use us as an excuse to get out of doing things with her other kids.

“Mom, do you want to come to our house for dinner?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I’ll have to check with Bonnie. She might need me for something.”

She never needed her for anything.

You can imagine what kind of a wedge that drove between Bonnie and her siblings, who already thought that she had an easier time growing up than they did, because their dad didn’t beat her as much as he beat them.

It’s no wonder they have all abandoned their mom and sister. Who could blame them? Well, me for one. It’s not just that they refuse to help us out with their mom, but the disdain they have for her and Bonnie. They’ve told Bonnie that they can’t help out with their mom because they have their own families to worry about, as if we don’t.

I imagine a lot of that comes directly from Bonnie’s mom. Whenever Bonnie would ask why she had a kid when she was so fucking old, she always said the same thing: “When I turned 40, I began to worry about who was going to take care of me in my old age, so I prayed and prayed, and Heavenly Father sent me you.”

How fucked up is that? Bonnie grew up thinking that she had been born into servitude. I used to hear that, and I always thought it was fucking weird, but I just thought it was some spiritual mumbo jumbo. It wasn’t until I turned 43 and realized that since turning 40 it had never once crossed my mind to think about who was going to take care of me in my old age, that I realized it was just a way to rationalize to herself that she had yet a sixth child, she did not have the means – financial, mental, or emotional – to properly raise.

So, naturally, none of her siblings ever questioned the narrative, and they were happy to go along with the idea that their sister was their mother’s caretaker. Obviously, this has led to resentment and bitterness toward Bonnie’s whole family. Her siblings all get to focus on their own families without having to give a thought to their mom, and her mom doesn’t have to take any responsibility for her life.

Her sister shows up on Sundays to take her mom to church, but she can’t get out of here fast enough when she drops her off. Bonnie had to nag her for three weeks to get her to take her mom to get her haircut. She finally gave in today, and despite Bonnie telling her for years not to make plans with their mom more than half an hour in advance, she called her an hour before she planned to be here. Her mom spent an hour running around like a tweaker, packing her purse like she was going on a day trip.

One day last year, she made plans with her in the morning for the evening. She told her she would be here at 6 p.m., so her mom went outside at 4 p.m. to wait. She paced back and forth outside for 45 minutes before she wore herself out and came back inside. Forty-five minutes of pacing is a lot of exercise for someone who doesn’t walk further than the distance between her bed and the refrigerator.

So, while I watched her running around the house gathering everything she needed to get a haircut, I couldn’t help but think about how much easier my life would be without her in it. I suspect most people would cringe at that last sentence, either because the concept of a family member being a burden to them is so foreign or because they’re not honest with themselves about the realities of family dynamics.

I won’t apologize. She is a burden, and she always has been. Right now, she’s Bonnie and my burden, but before we came along, she was someone else’s burden and someone else before that. I understand that she suffered severe trauma, but who hasn’t? At some point, you have to take control of your own life and want more for yourself than the hand you were dealt. If you won’t, you’re at the mercy of someone else’s goodwill.

If you’re lucky, you’ll end up with someone like Bonnie who will take better care of you than you deserve. I recently learned that that is a definition of “grace.” On the other hand, you could end up rotting away in an SNF with no one around who cares about you at all. That’s the gamble you take.

It’s nothing I want for myself, and I’m sure if she were capable of self-reflection, she’d agree that it’s nothing she’d want for herself either. More importantly, these lives that she and I are living are nothing I want for my own children, and that’s what sets us apart because she’s never given a second of thought to what her poor choices have done to her children. Why wouldn’t Bonnie want to take care of her in her old age? It would never occur to her that she didn’t want to take care of her mom at the end of her life. That’s why she coopted the responsibility to Bonnie.

So, whenever Bonnie starts feeling sorry for her mom, I remind her that if she wanted more for herself at the end of her life, she should have come up with more of a plan than Bonnie will take care of me. She didn’t, though, so we’re all stuck here waiting out the clock. Eventually, she’ll fall and be bedridden, and her life will rapidly accelerate into its inevitable conclusion, and that will be the end. Nary a thought will be given to her again.

If there is anything positive to come from all of this, it’s that through this experience, I’ve come to appreciate my own parents for handling their business and not being a burden to their children. It’s a low bar, but I hope I can do the same for my own children.