Mickey Channels Emmett Till Plus Serial Mom

The autoimmune disease seems to get worse when it's cold out.

I've read up on it. This appears to be par for the course for the dermatological part of the condition. Since the thermometer dropped, I've also developed the arthritis symptoms that 20 percent of the people who have it develop – fingers swell to the size of sausages overnight. It's painful. I tough it out. It's the other thing, this utter feeling of enervation that's unexpected.

I try to walk first thing every morning, then again in the afternoon. Try to do eight miles total a day – that may look like a lot but really, it's not. And what I'm noticing over the past few days is that I feel very weak when I walk. Almost as though there's a cardiovascular element to the autoimmune disease that's compromising oxygenation. Or something.

This morning I had to have a long telephone conversation with B over the last item in my mother's will, her bequest to RTT, disbursable when he hits 18, which he has. And I almost felt breathless while I was talking to him on the phone, like I wanted to stop and sit down.

Of course, the whole business of dealing with the bequest is mired in melancholy because it makes me think of my mother, my poor mother, who had such an unhappy life and who was utterly insane, of course, undiagnosed borderline personality disorder says her know-it-all daughter. My mother is a very hard topic for me because I see her simultaneously from two different perspectives – from the perspective of the child I was, still am, who was so grievously damaged by her neglect and abuse; but also from the perspective of a more-or-less sympathetic adult who understands the damage that was done to her and feels compassion.

When she was dying, my mother used to sit in her window seat and watch the comings and goings of her neighbors. "Look at them living their crumby little lives," she'd say. "That's all I want to do – live my crumby little life. Why can't I?"

It's funny, you know. When Tom died, I felt him hanging around me for a long time. He'd checked into that business executive suite in Bardo just so he could fax me and email me from the afterlife. He kept looking after me for years.

When my mother died, it was like poof! She's gone.

I don't think she learned much from her Lynn Vogel life. I fear she's going to have to repeat that class.

As for me, more and more I suspect my only accomplishment in this lifetime is that I very deliberately broke the chain of abuse that had been visited upon me, and my mother before me, and her mother before her, back to the grim shtetl along some nameless Eastern European frontier. Maybe back to the cave Cro Magnan Man stole from the Neanderthals. Who knows?

I may have made mistakes with my kids, but they were not the same mistakes my mother made with me.

Given the magnitude of the mistakes my mother made with me, I'd say that's a huge accomplishment. Uncelebrated. But huge.

Meanwhile, here is a gruesome photo of Mickey Mouse channeling Emmett Till. I don't honestly get why people put up Christmas decorations that look so shitty in the daylight hours. Do you?