About a year after college I moved back in with my mother, briefly, but I felt compelled to leave when my mother attacked me for my failure. I could either leave or possibly start beating her. I wonder sometimes if I made the right choice.

I didn't speak to her for about a year and a half after, and when I did it was a pretense so that I could collect some things I'd left at her house. Actually, that's untrue. I let myself in while she was out, but she came back before I was finished there. After that, I didn't trouble myself with her for several years.

My mother had this game she liked to play when I was in college, and she's continued playing it since I resumed communication with her. The game is that she will not be the one to talk first after we've spoken. She will wait and make me contact her. This was always accompanied by assurances that she loved me and missed me, something also brought up in association with a more casual game, the impending visit.

In the impending visit game, she was at home and I was situated at the university, four hours away; and at the start of my freshman year, she said she would occasionally visit. In fact she visited once in four and a half years, during my senior year. The visit was hurried and consisted largely of standing around in the disused living room of my seedy apartment. By that time I wasn't terribly interested in seeing my mother. I admittedly visited home often while I was attending school, so it wasn't as though she never saw me. Maybe she didn't relish the idea of spending eight hours in the car with my grandmother.

The game has been modified somewhat since I started talking to my mother again. The new rules state that even if I communicate first, she might not respond. Her statements of love and devotion continue unremittingly, but it's as though in the intervening years she has out of necessity learned to not care about me or what I might be up to. For my own part, I have no idea why I miss the attention of someone I don't especially care for. It's sort of hypocritical.

My father and I have an altogether more understanding relationship. Not long ago I wrote a long letter to him, telling him precisely what I thought about him, his relations with me and my mother, his role as a father, and so on. To summarize, I informed him that he was possibly the most despicable creature I've ever personally known. I also told him I was transsexual and not especially interested in giving him heirs, but that I might keep him around if he made himself useful to me. There was a lull, and then I got a couple of overnight letters from him. He asked my mother if I'd said anything about them. I haven't read the letters yet... I want to wait until a night when I'm drunk and have a good laugh.