The Purse (backstory).

My life has been punctuated by odd behaviors from my mother.

When I was in high school, and our relationship was at its most volatile (and miserable) my mother started dating her now husband (her first and only relationship since we got rid of her). For many months I was convinced he was made up. I lived with her at this point and had never seen him. She would just point new things out (books, necklaces, so on) and say in a teasing voice 'my boyfriend gave this to me'. One day she inexplicably changed the locks on her house while I was at school and refused to let me back in and told me I loved my dad more than her and that in doing so I forfeited my right to live there. Dad had to come beg to be allowed to pack up my things.

At one point there was a man's voice on her answering machine saying 'You have reached the (our last name) residence, please leave a message'. Which made me supremely angry as I felt she did not have a right to our last name any longer, and because even if she insisted on keeping it, why would this other mystery man be using it? Anyway, she brushed off my anger saying it was just a guy from church and she asked him to do it for 'safety reasons'. (To this day, I am certain this was but another one of her mind games, but that's neither here nor there.)

I was absolutely certain she had made up this boyfriend. No one, NO ONE could possibly love my mother. Of that I was certain. She was evil incarnate.

Apparently this was not the case, and she had somehow gotten a boyfriend.

About a week before my senior prom I got a card in the mail. It did not have a return address on it, and the card inside was a four panel cartoon entitled "how to fold a cat to fit in a sweater drawer". It then showed a man folding the cat up like a sweater and closing the drawer. Inside it simply said, 'I hope you'll be joining us this weekend. - J.'

I was puzzled. Totally bewildered. I thought, maybe it was some sort of bizarre prom thing, or possibly someone from school who was messing with me. I walked around for days with it in my bag, trying to make sense of the note. I attended my prom that weekend, and forgot all about the note.

Until my mother called. That card had apparently been her way of inviting me to her wedding. She was pissed that I had not attended. I was pissed that she had the audacity to be mad at me when I hadn't even been properly informed.

Strange events like this became common place.

I attempted to cut her out of my life the summer after high school. But she showed up at my work on my birthday and dropped off balloons and a large brown box. Inside of it was a very small box. It contained the book 5 People That You Meet In Heaven and a mothers day card I had made for her when I was four. Stuck to it was a post-it that read "What happened to you?"

When I started at ASU a year later she and dad agreed that I would not work and they would split the rent on my apartment in return for my attending university (instead of community college). The first month after my move in my mother demanded parent teacher conferences with my professors before she would hand over any rent money. She did not get a conference, and dad was left to pay the rent.

That semester my sister came home pregnant and I was left to break the news to my parents. My mother was furious that I was the one my sister came to and our relationship deteriorated from there. By the spring I'd had a massive nervous breakdown, attempted suicide, failed out of college, and totally and completely dedicated myself to severing contact with my mother.

This was a huge turning point for me, and the point where my life stopped being a sea on endless misery and started being a real life, one with happiness and joy and all the other wonderful things one misses out on when they have the devil clawing at their organs all the time.

At any rate, things went along pretty well. Then one Christmas my mother sent me a present. It was a Macy's box, as all 'gifts' from her are (which has now come to instil an intense sort of terror in me). In it were several shirts, one of which was metallic gold, and all of them were XL. Again, I sat baffled, as I was a tiny little thing, maybe 100 lbs and there was no way anyone could ever possibly think I would ever fit a shirt that big.

Other events like this have occurred. At one point she called me, about five years after we'd stopped talking and left me a message asking if she could 'borrow' a computer she had bought for me many years earlier. Occasionally she'd just leave taunting messages on my machine.

These things, they leave me rattled because I can never see them coming. She's not playing with a full deck, her games never follow any sort of coherent logic. Things are going along nicely, and then there she is. Looming somehow on the fringes of my life.

In the back of my mind I'm always just waiting for the other shoe to drop. I know that she's out there. Plotting strange things to throw at me. Things that I will never understand. Things that won't make any sense at all. And much like a brain aneurism, she could strike silently at any moment.

To be continued...