Love in Journal

Last week I did the inner work to receive the love from my parents that I was heretofore unable to receive.
Then my mom emailed me out of the blue the next day (within 12 hours) and apologized and admitted she was wrong for her behavior.
Now today she withdrew her apology and accused me of basically being just horrible, angry, bitter, set in the past, etc. so this is sort of freeing, isn’t it? I CAN have my mother’s love and she CAN still be insufferable and aggressive. And I don’t blame her- I actually feel like she’s just punishing herself at this point. She is cutting herself off from me and therefore the future. She is telling me that there is no place for her in my life, because she will continue to tell me I’m angry bitter, stuck in the past, etc etc blah blah. So this is the week of maturation, where I get to graduate beyond her choices and recognize that love comes independently of and in spite of her.
What will next week bring?

Will it represent the future? Of my emotional growth, my children and their relationship to me? Of compassion for not only my parents, but for J and all he has done, for my own not insignificant transgressions?

And yet I am a little embarrassed to say that I still recognize a tendency to respond or react to the negative and not the positive. I never responded to the apology email. I thought about it. Mostly I didn’t know what to say.
And that is something I blame my mother for, isn’t it? She kind of wants a big reaction and is a bit of a narcissist that way. So I, as her child, obviously never learned to respond to positive attention. I simply was never modeled that behavior. I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know that I should do it. I didn’t know it was a possibility. In fact I don’t think it ever entered my mind until just now.
Sure, I think about this with my children, a lot actually. But not with my mother… I expect her to model the behavior she wants to see. And that’s kind of natural isn’t it? I cannot parent my mother. She is the one who must parent me to respond to her in the ways that she wants to see. And she did not do that. And that’s, you know, just kind of the way the world works isn’t it? I can’t blame her and she can’t blame me. She would like to blame me, but I just toss that hot potato back. And leave, because playing this game is just silly.
If she wants a reaction and is provoking me to get it, and I only respond to negativity because that’s all she ever offered me… Idk. That’s sort of just her eating her cake isn’t it? If I have the free will to walk away from this negative merry-go-round, she sort of has to take that into account and risk losing her daughter in order to play that game. I suppose she rolled snake eyes on that one. It’s very unjust of her to blame me, but… I don’t care. Really. It doesn’t matter to me, whether she meets my standards or not. But for her… it is the gigantic loss of a child which is unavoidable and will confront her, probably, every moment of every day for the rest of her life.

I feel like I could have responded if I had really tried to engage with what she was saying. But… again, she has not earned that type of engagement from me. Hell, I expect people to pay me to attend to them in this manner. My time, attention, and love is not free. She is offering nothing except perhaps the withdrawal of her negativity. That is negative economics. It might work for dogs and horses, but it sure as shit does not work on me.
My love is not earned by the absence of aggression.
Good try, though.