her legal threats

In August 2012, in an email I  only just discovered and read, for it was sent to an email box I don't really use anymore but I keep it for the old letters, and I note that my birthday is in August, she wrote to tell me she 'loves' me but I have to stop harassing her.  She turned 30 that year. I may have sent her six chocolate covered roses that year. I don't send her birthday gifts every year but turning 30 was way up for me.  Or maybe I sent her some notes, left her some after hours messages on her work phone for it is the only way I have to communicate, other than mailing her at work.

I don't remember what I did that year to get her to threaten to get a restraining order against me. as if she could get a TRO in IL for someone in CA. IL does not have personal jurisdiction over me. And she also wrote "get a retraining order like I did before" but she never actually got a restraining order because I have never been served.

Fuck the restraining order. How it cut me to read, even six years after the fact, her threat to get a restraining order.  Why would she think I'd read her emails when they are so full of unkindness and I am already listing from my grief?

When I saw her in person, and I believe it was her although I actually did not recognize the screaming dervish who threatened to have me arrested for trespassing. She kept saying I was crazy but I remained calm. Someone who works in the building had let me in so it was not a trespass and it would have been negligent, perhaps even a misdemeanor, for her to waste Chicago police time on false allegations that I was doing anything wrong. I was leaving. I just couldn't leave while my only child, and my brother had whispered that it was her -- she looked so thin and sounded so nasty.  In my heart and soul, she is a good person with a good sense of humor, a lightness of spirit with which I always 'see' her in my mind's eye. I genuinely could not recognize the angry, screeching dervish. She was all fluttery gestures, angrily unkind threats. She did not even say hello and that was first time she had laid eyes on me since 2002.  NB:  It finally dawned on me, she sounded just like her aunt the medical doctor cunt bitch, without the thick lisp that her auntie has.

I  could have just skulked out the door with her threatening to try to cause me harm, to sic cops on me, even though I knew I was facing zero legal trouble from the Chicago police.

And, on that screaming day of hers, she would not have even laid eyes on me if she had just stayed in her office suite. Another person who worked in that building had let us in because it was fifteen below outside and I was ashamed to tell him my daughter worked there and would not see me so I pretendd I was going to her suite. I would not have said anything on her floor if her receptionist had not called out to me and I am pretty sure the receptionist was talking to Katie, with K out of sight, because the receptionist was talking to someone and in the direction form which Katie eventually and angrily burst out. If she had just stayed in her hole, Dave and I would have been gone in, maybe, sixty seconds. We were waiting for the elevator.

She was a cat on a hot tin roof, a feral cat accustomed to clawing her mother, I guess.  I was leaving but it was humiliating to hear her legal threats.

I doubt she understands why it is particularly demeaning to for her make legal threats to me, esp. since I know, since I am a lawyer. She may not realize her legal threats are empty threats. . . . . . I've chewed this cud before, now I am running on. Diarrhea of the mouth, as my dad would once have so ingallantly put it.

It is humiliating for her to come running out from a life I helped her arrive at and hear her unkind legal threats.  Maybe she is upset and wielding a weapon to compensate for her feelings, maybe her fear of me. 

I am on fire about my daughter these days. I can't shake thoughts of her.