Elections are coming up, my mom is still sick but it's a lot of little things and not anything debilitating, she can drive and talk and move around and though I can tell something is off it seems to me that it's almost entirely anxiety+normal aging+nostalgia for her pre-PTSD days. I mention this a little but never press it, she's in a place now where it seems the world is not believing her and I'm her only ally.

I've been taking care of her for years now, not physically but helping with everything from reminding her to pay bills on certain days, driving her everywhere, picking up groceries, talking her into leaving the house, and basic little things mostly reminders. The point is that for nearly a decade she's been joking that I'm a better adult than she is, and at first it was an actual joke but now there's a bit of resentment? not quite but like a grudging respect almost, like it's still a joke but it tastes bad in her mouth.

On a good day we're barbecuing and having a nice lunch on the patio talking about this and that and I say something, a small random something, that ruins my mother's life completely. I casually remark that I think I'm gonna vote this year. She smiles, she looks proud, she's patriotic and respects the process and has never hassled me to vote but always thought I should. She asks me who I'll vote for and I say I'm still deciding, I'm actually paying attention this time, I'm reading and researching and I'll probably vote Sanders.

I think that was the last REAL conversation I had with my mom. She lost her shit, called him socialist scum, don't I know what it's like in Russia cause they're socialist, they take your house and your car and give it to the higher ups and take your 'wealth' and spread it to the wealthy while you starve, etc. from that point on it's like it was her life's mission to prove me wrong. I jokingly told her I didn't really think there was a wrong choice as long as we didn't end up with Trump (there were still about 12 candidates at this point) and we laughed. At the end of the conversation she asked me why not Trump? So I sent her a link to a post on reddit, someone had compiled a list of pretty much every reason he shouldn't be president, hundreds of links in one post of everything from his failed businesses to scandals to his links to organized crime and allegations of sex with minors, all with sources and links to every article. She sat down and read the entire thing and somehow (mostly just to drive me fucking crazy I think) decided to vote Trump.

I'm gonna skip ahead now, because I'm sure you've all read or dealt with how fanatical trumpsters evolved and it's pretty much the same, the only difference being that my mom has literally no one else and so as much as I hated (HATED HATED FUCKING HATED) every second of the hateful bullshit she began slowly spewing from that point on I stood by her and shrugged it off. I smiled and shook my head disapprovingly while saying "Welp we're gonna have to agree to disagree on that" gritting my teeth so hard they have LITERALLY broke.

We saw another doctor, they thought she had MS, an MRI revealed no MS but brain lesions, she's so far down the rabbithole of facebook/trump/magaMD that she's convinced it's from all the depleted Uranium in the burn pits her tent was by in Kuwait, oh and Elites eat babies and fuck babies, not sure which order probably both simultaneously, Bill and Hillary take turns with kids in their private jet because there's no laws in the sky, and NASA moved the moon and the large hadron collider is trying to knock Lucifer off of Saturn but that's ridiculous because everyone who's read the bible know's Jesus has Lucifer stored away? And She's EMF sensitive, heavy metal detoxing epsom salt baths to death buying alex jones infowars vitamins but even they have silica and propelyne glycol, did you know thats what they use to de-ice airplane wings? and the wifi is making her dizzy, the 'smart' waterheater talks to the cable box and the light bulb and the signal is killing her plants and making her cat sick so she unplugged her entire house and when that wasn't enough........

She moved. she bought a cheap ass trailer and stuffed her cats in her truck and moved to the middle of bumfuck nowhere on about a weeks notice, leaving me to deal with everything. and I hate her. and I miss her. I have no one other than my husband. I'm an anxious introverted basement dwelling asshole with 4 cats and a wonderful husband but literally not a single friend and the only person I could talk to went crazy.