Thanks all for your support and stories, it definitely helps.

Emgreen - Yeah, our dog was more or less attached to the hip with me all day, always watching what I was doing, so the house feels so empty. We have another dog, but she kind of lives in her own world, doesn't interact with us as much. Yesterday would have been his 13th birthday, so that was kind of tough.

For some reason this memory of a situation with my mother keeps repeating in my mind. It happened when I told her that my ex and I broke up. She completely treated me like a child that couldn't take care of herself.

First of all, she assumed that I was completely destroyed but the whole situation when really the writing had been on the wall for a while, so I was over it pretty quickly. I only told her about a month later when I was okay with it all so I could handle it better.

Then, she had the idea that all our mutual friends must have sided with him and I was pretty much abandoned and alone. Again, not true at all, I had plenty of support.

Also, she assumed that he made more money than me and I must not be able to pay the bills on my own. I actually made more money than him and was fine financially. The ex wasn’t even contributing to the expenses much since his parents were going through a divorce and he was helping out his mother with money.

She started on this whole spiel about how I needed to consider moving back to my home country to stay with them “while I got back on my feet”. Apparently she thought I was only living here because of him and my life revolved around him, when in reality I have a whole life here, friends, pets, my career.

They live in a touristy area with mostly just minimum wage jobs in tourist businesses, so there were no opportunities there. This was when the world economy was a mess, so it wouldn’t be easy to find a job in another area while living with them with so many people looking for work. I doubt in that climate many companies would pay for me to travel to an interview, for example.

I guess to me this was the perfect example of how she always tended to assume the worst about me and treat me accordingly. Also, and this relates to her NPD, I think in this specific situation she thought she could sweep in and help me “get my life back together” and be the hero of the situation, a story which she would later tell to everyone who would listen.