Follow up on Family

I exchanged some emails with my mom about the racism argument from last week.  I'd been considering posting them here, but I feel like that would be a breach of her privacy.

Basically, I sent her an email explaining why I said what I did, and why her arguments shocked me.  She's replied that she and my stepfather see my point and apologized.

But then I had to raise the issue on what she said about me, personally.  Her response was to take a day to think about it, and then reply that she didn't know what she meant by it at the time.  But that she would never intentionally hurt me and doesn't think badly of me.

So I guess it works out.

Except that I still feel betrayed, and there's guilt mixed in there too.  Because I feel that she might think I don't have a right to feel this way at this point, after she's apologized, or might hold it against me.  Maybe she doesn't.  Maybe she wouldn't.  But after last week, I can't just blindly trust in her anymore.

Part of the issue is that at the end of the argument, she treated me like a child.  Telling me that if I didn't want dinner, I could wait in the car.  We were ten minutes from my house.  My mom and I tried to talk about this on the phone last night, and she seemed angry.  As if she couldn't understand how I would leave in that situation when she was being nice enough to give me a ride home from central MA in the first place.

But I'd asked her to take me straight home after the argument.  She could have stopped for dinner after dropping me off - only ten minutes away.  But she'd rather I wait in the car like a stubborn child or a dog while they had dinner, because I'd disagreed with her.

That's humiliating.  And she doesn't understand why I don't find it acceptable.  Yes, it was very kind of her to drive me home.  But that doesn't mean I become less of a human or less of an adult.

Now it's on me to decide what happens to our relationship.  How I want this to go.  Mom doesn't want anything to change.  She got upset when I said that this might have changed our relationship - How?

I don't know.