Maggie is very, very busy. People are coming in from the back and from the front. People go in and hammer, or they go in and come out with stuff. Or they put stuff in the backs of trucks and drive away. Or they pump heating oil into the basement.

Truth be told, we do not hear much, but Calvin is agitated and hops around the house when the security cameras ping. I dutifully check the social media feeds. Today this gem popped up, and I’m sharing it.

First the themes and then the details

Thanks for joining my Maggie seminar. I’ll email you the syllabus after class.

So here she’s hit some classic Ditmarston points: the drummer part refers to Calvin’s failure as a drummer (didn’t continue after a year in 8th grade of lessons) and the dancer part goes back to when I told Maggie she was a bad dancer. I had looked at the clips and thought she was a sullen, joyless dancer. I believe that’s been extended into a belief that I, Wendy Ditmarston, am a bad dancer. Is that true? Calvin says I dance like Thelonious Monk. Google it. It’s true. I think it’s good dancing.

Have Maggie and I danced together or just adjacent in the same room? No, never. She has never seen my moves and despite the fact that I won 2nd place in the dance contest at Talented & Gifted Camp in 1982, I have not hung my hat on my dancing ability. But we are not kind to her. That is very true. We are not unkind, however.

The heartbreak is in the deep analysis

This morning, at breakfast in Connecticut, which is where we are to watch Wyatt play volleyball, Calvin and I brushed past the dancing and the drumming and ended up wondering how Maggie’s children manage all of this. She went very and obviously crazy when they were teens and tweens, and I think she went very crazy, for the first time, when they were really young, like toddler/elementary-school aged. We didn’t live in our house then.

Calvin identifies Maggie with his mother, who turned inward in her later years and did some light hoarding, so this is a hard subject to talk about with him until we get past the hoarding and dementia and into the parenting. I do see the parallels between Maggie and his mother, but they are not very close. Sometimes Calvin gets hit by unexpected echoes of his adolescent sorrow and shame over his mom’s post-divorce behaviors.

We think the kids don’t read her postings. I hope they don’t. There’s something about the declarations—so grandiose and also insulting—that get to me. I have no idea how you shrug off a truly crazy mother who continues to broadcast at you. I was knocked a little in a 20 minute talk with my mom, and it took me a lot of hard thinking to see where I had been jolted in our conversation and why, which had prompted me into a category of mini-rant I’m so bored of hearing myself say.

Somehow from that tiny seed of maternal inception, I ended up at Maggie’s daughter, and I hope she’s doing well and finding friends who also have crazy moms so they can bond.