mishmash emotions.

my brother's wedding is this weekend. i love him and his wife-to-be so much. it hurts that he asked me to find some recent pics of my mom so he could leave them with security at the front desk of the wedding venue.

finding pics of my mother is hard. out of 12,000 photos on my computer, there are only five photos from the last ten years that i have of her. 3 were with me at my college graduation (where i lean into my brother and away from her. no surprise.) 1 was at her grad school graduation (when we were still talking.) and 1 was her head shot from her online "bookstore" on lulu.com. i snatched this one on my own.

as a typical paranoid schizo, my mother has given herself a new name as well as her birth name. she actually changed it legally to this "second name" - so, using her old name, her new name, and google, i found more than i wanted.

she wrote poetry last year about me. about my brother. and it's heartbreaking poetry. when i see what she writes, or thinks, it hurts me because i know that there is a part of her that feels that way. but in the next sentence, there is more proof that she is still completely out of touch with reality. i cannot let that back into my life. i just can't.

in the meantime, there was a recent pic of her on one of these websites. she has longer hair than i remember. and she freakishly looked like me. i never thought she looked like me before. (or is it that i looked like her?)

either way, i feel depressed a bit now. the wedding is going to be bittersweet. it's an affair she wants to be at, but is not welcomed. and all i can do is pray to my g-d that she doesn't make an unscheduled appearance... how could i protect my brother from that?