Role Playing with My Dead Mother - v. personal thinky thoughts on the woman that brought me into existence.

 A bit of Delayed Grief and Gratification

Meant to post this up last month on her birthday but November was a deep abyssal depression that I am still in some respects, trying to scrape off of me as I climb out of it. She would have turned 72 this year, were she still in the land of the living.

This is not really a lit post though if I can salvage the MSG from poor Xanadu’s hard drive, this will pro’lly wind up slipped in there … somewhere.

If. If If If.

So many possibilities for failure….like in a proper tabletop RPG.

This gets hella personal so if that is also not your jam, maybe stop reading here. Thanks!  

CW growing up in an abusive household, light discussion of sexual issues, mental health issues, socially inappropriate musings on one's progenitors, tabletop RPGs

TW Dead Parents 

About my dead mother ...

I am pretty sure at this point that my mother started the Game of Life with the same character package I did, with just a few critical differences.

She came up a bio-femme in coal miner country KY, born in 1950. The youngest of two (three, but two living) girls in a family of seven older boys.

But the bipolar, the anxiety problems, the drive to do art, the love of history, all of these should sound very familiar to you, even those who did not know her, as well, I’m sure some others of you think I meant myself.

Also, but more difficult to talk about, the sluttiness, the lack of desire for a single relationship, and – I’m pretty sure – both the need to submit and the need to command.

But I ever got the better deal of the deck here.

Fun facts –

When I was a kid and tried desperately to get my parents to play D&D with me (as you do when you have no siblings to boss/con/beg/intimidate), once we got going she GOT INTO IT (it put my father off so it must have been pretty good)

After that first time she insisted on playing the same character. And any advantage she ran across she fucking took.

I kind of wish I could mentally share the funky weirdness that was trying to run (IIRC) Steading of the Hill Giant King (G1) for them. Because there she is a neutral evil 7th level fighter who uses those psionic powers she legit rolled (once she found out there were psy powers in the game she was all “How do I get those?” The dice just loved her. First psionic character in any AD&D game I ever took part in.

And she demanded the xp for every kill she got with those. She was RUTHLESS

I have very fond memories of this.

If only because I had not previously and seldom after seen this side of her.

My dad OTOH was basically “following the plot” with one of the pregens and I think he died when mom soaked that room on the basement level full of orcs and trolls with a barrel of oil (possibly wine. It was giant sized and found in the steading) and lit it up, spiking the door closed behind her.

She kind of left dad in there.