Premonition – The Movie I Forgot to Remember

Watching movies with my mother is annoying. Watching a movie with her where there is a husband and kids in the plot is even more so. When she was still here, I made the mistake of watching the movie Premonition with her. I, unfortunately, did not remember enough of the plot from the time I had seen before to realize it was a landmine of issues. That is how I found myself in that situation. Oh, also, spoilers ahead if you haven’t watched the movie, so whatever.

There is a scene in premonition where the wife gets into an argument with the husband, and he starts saying that the blame of the daughter being cut was on the wife for not putting stickers on the window. At which point my mother then feels the need to lend me her “insight” about how husbands start accusing the woman of things when they’re cheating.

As the movie continues and it is clear that the wife (played by Sandra Bullock) is piecing together that something is in fact happening to her marriage and it isn’t her imagination, and as she wakes up each day in a different point on the timeline and she has concluded that the husband is definitely cheating on her, I start thinking maybe this is why I didn’t watch this movie a bunch of times.

My “healing” from the divorce is a grabbag of random therapy and steps on the processing through the grief. But am I actually healed? I dunno, guess that depends on what day of the week it is, and what’s been happening to me.

At the time of this incident, I was being stretched thin, my patience tried every day as La Llorona, narcissist mother extraordinaire, with her manipulation, and attempts at control of every aspect of my personhood. It is an exhausting tug of war. Most unfortunate is that everything she says and does is orchestrated to get on my every last nerve in the hopes that I will explode and give her the reaction and attention she craves.

The irony of her little speech is that situation, the wild accusations of malfeasance, was what I went through but she didn’t want to hear it when I was going through it. She acts like that shit didn’t happen and that even now the ex is supposed to be in my life. It’s hella annoying.

It’s also annoying when the movie shows the father spending time with the kids and she gets all sentimental. For starters I have zero memories of my father spending time like that with me. So it can’t be her getting misty eyed about her own relationship.

And I don’t like thinking about my own relationship because he was checked out after my eldest son was born and I hung on tooth and nail for 15 years trying to prove something to everyone and no one at the same time. It didn’t matter that I was miserable, on the surface I made it look like my marriage was perfect. That and many other reasons is probably why she was so obsessed with it.

And why she acted like I was doing something wrong when I divorced him. Because she was living vicariously through me and I somehow offended her by choosing to get out because it wasn’t working and I was miserable and unhappy and knew he was cheating on me.

I’ve read, and listened to different psychologists and other rational people discuss at length that this irrational and delusional behavior is typical of narcissist parents. Worse when it’s a narcissist mother and her eldest daughter.

Hearing these discussions validate my experience doesn’t make it any better. It doesn’t make having to relive her guilt trip and her judgement any easier.

Perhaps I needed to watch this movie with my mother present to be reminded of what I have struggled to overcome?

Because the movie is a painful reminder of how alone a woman can be in a relationship when the people around her are her worst enemies. For example, Sandra’s character, Linda, gets committed at one point because her own mother is convinced that this is what is best. And we know it’s bullshit.

There are plenty of situations where a parent is in fact colluding against their child for reasons that only make sense to themselves. Take my life for example.

This movie isn’t a big conspiracy, nor even explains anything about my life. It just served as a reminder that my mother is in fact my enemy, like Linda’s mother in the movie. Making choices she thinks are for the best, but not once considering if it was what the daughter wanted.

Ways in which my mother has disrespected me about my relationship, each one makes me simultaneously murderous and wanting to jump off the nearest cliff:

1. She told me one day that she knew he was no good for me but that she decided not to tell me because she knew I wouldn’t listen to her, because I was not a good daughter, so I deserved whatever happened to me because I was too stubborn to listen to her.
2. She told me that sometimes when my youngest son stops by her house, if his father happens to call when he is there, she will speak to him. And that she still considers him her son.
3. That she thinks he was the love of my life.
4. That she thinks we could still end up together, that I should just wait and see, he’s going to come back to me. (what the actual fuck? Did she forget the part where he went and married a whole other person, or the fact that I left him for GOOD REASONS?)
5. That when I decided to leave him, I hurt her, because now she had to worry about me. When I was married she knew he was going to take care of me and now that I am alone she has to worry about me again.
6. Every time she calls me, if there is anything adverse happening in the United States – a place she is closer to than I am – she will ask me if I have heard from the ex because she is worried about him.
   

The movie finally ended. Unsurprisingly my mother did not like the ending. She wanted Jim’s death (the husband) to not have been true, and for him and Linda to end up together at the end because as she put it “they had a nice family”. Did she miss the entire plot where he cheated on her and had been cheating on her when he died so it was clear he wasn’t as into being in the relationship as Linda was? Did she miss the part where he was a terrible father who DID NOT spend time with his daughters and had to have his parenting time “orchestrated” by his wife?

No, I’m sure she glossed over all of that. Sadly, these were all parts of the movie that only served to remind me of what and why I had left that relationship. It was eerily too similar. Down to the cheating. Only minus the dramatic premonitions and the untimely death of a spouse at the end.

But she’d never acknowledge any of that. No. Doing so would mean agreeing that I was right to leave. It would mean acknowledging that if she did in fact think I should have left, that she was wrong for actively encouraging me to stay at every turn. Because I know I mentioned to her when things started getting bad. I just realized after a while that there was no allyship in her and I was all alone in viewing the ex as the monster that he was. She would have to admit her failures as her mother, abandoning her daughter to suffer alone at the hands of an emotionally abusive man.

But that’s impossible. Because if there is one thing I know now, that took me decades to come to terms with, it’s that I married a man who was just like my father.

And considering that to this day I think my mother is still hung up on him, there is no way she will ever see the ex for what he really is. Because he is a monster, just like my mother.