Since I’ve been back in Lexington, I started watching episodes of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” on Netflix. I am using my iPhone to watch because I’m staying at my mom’s place; she has no internet or TV.

It’s hard to get lost in the details of a show when the picture is so small you can hardly make out the characters’ faces, but in Season 2, Danny DeVito becomes a central character in the show. He plays Frank, the father of the brother-sister duo who make up half of the quartet of main characters.

His role in “It’s ASIP” revitalized his career and opened him up to a whole new generation of fans. A generation that may not recall one of his paramount roles, that of the denigrated son, Owen, in “Throw Momma from the Train.”

In that film, he stars opposite Billy Crystal, a true titan of comedy, but DeVito steals the movie with his laughable and pathetic role. As a son burdened by his mother’s foibles, he daydreams of offing her and an association with Crystal makes it a mutually beneficial possibility.

I’ve been in Lexington for nearly six months and I’m beginning to wish I could spoof DeVito’s brilliance with my own entry, “Throw Momma from the Benz.”

[Note: my car is a 1989 Mercedes-Benz.]

As I’ve written before, I never wished to return to Lexington, except for maybe a quick pass-through and holiday as I’ve done in the previous 15 years. The few friends I have here are entrenched in their own lives and I’m merely in a go-between period in my own.

But my momma put out her regular distress signal and I felt compelled to answer. So rather than spending my go-between somewhere like San Francisco, Houston, Boston, or DC (each where I had a free place to stay and short-term professional opportunities waiting), I drove my Benz south from Columbus, OH to Lexington.

I acquiesced to her distress call, “I’ve been taking the bus”, because I couldn’t imagine my mother surviving a winter using the bus to get around Lexington. It is not like using mass transit in the cities I have lived in during the past five years: Miami, Boston, Chicago, or nYc. A reliance on the bus system in Lexington is completely inefficient and unwieldy. It’s for people who for one reason or another can’t afford to have their own form of transportation. My mother has several reasons.

Unbeknownst to me, her leased car had been repossessed months earlier because of delinquent payments. And as it so happened, this winter was unusually long and brutal. I’m certain that without the use of my car during the day, she would have never found a full-time job, been able to make minor strides in her social life, or even get her laundry done on a regular basis. When I leave in few weeks I am unsure how any of those things will be sustained.

After six months of being in a place I never wished to be, I am almost fed up; because her distress is regular, and it is completely self-induced/inflicted. I can say this honestly because I have been dealing with it for my entire life, been fully cognizant of it for my entire adult life, and been successfully coping with it for nearly as long.

However, when speaking to friends and colleagues over the years, I have almost always covered up her behavior and left out critical details, partially because I didn’t want to start a diatribe, but also because I didn’t think they could relate. I’m still unsure of the latter, but I have begun to give up on preventing the former (ex. this post).

When I have broached the subject with professional colleagues in medicine and/or behavioral health, most are quick to question the harsh picture I paint, often times noting how “normal” I seem despite the issues I relay. But I usually rebut their comments with my honest belief that I have succeeded as an adult not by following in my parents’ footsteps, but by avoiding them.

Maybe this is overly harsh on my part; maybe it paints me as a spoiled brat who can’t be thankful for having a relatively privileged childhood (especially in comparison to the countless patients I have cared for in the boroughs of nYc and ethnic enclaves of Chicago). If it does, so be it.

[I do feel unbelievably grateful to my parents for the opportunities my siblings and I were provided as children. They provided a foundation upon which we could build successful lives, but not without significant interpersonal and financial struggle. However, I find it beyond reproach that their personal and financial decisions as adults have led them to try to make our adult lives a constant mind-field of horrors.]

When I mention the number of times she has moved homes/apartments in the 18 years she’s lived in Lexington (7 at last count) or the numbers of jobs she’s quit or been fired from (well over a dozen), or the fact that she can’t financially support herself enough to afford a car, people usually start to give me a puzzled look.

And that’s why I want to Throw Momma from the Benz.

I want to help her, which is why I’m in Lexington, but I don’t want to do it because I’ve been coerced (which is how I feel). I want to help her because that’s what most appreciative children do for their parents. But I don’t feel like the child in this situation. I feel like the parent. And I find myself helping her due to my own self-preservation, trying to prevent an even more dire situation, and a desire to not become my father (who abandoned his own parents in their final years).

Admittedly, of my siblings, I have suffered the least from her behavior. At the first opportunity (college) I got as far away as possible, but still within a close proximity if I felt the need to be of assistance. Or if she felt it necessary to request my presence.

My brother and sister were not so lucky. Both of them were at one time living in Lexington as young adults, and both of them were “required” to financially support my mother, despite her being gainfully employed. She would tell them “you have no choice. I need you to pay for [insert anything that costs money… rent, car payment, utility bill, groceries, etc].” When they would ask why, she would say, “Because I am your mother.”

I avoided this fictional financial indebtedness to her by keeping my expenses and salary close to the vest. Being on the other side of the country made this quite easy.

Yet, she once broached the subject with me over the phone when I was only a few months from starting medical school. As usual, I avoided giving her any monetary values as answers to her probing questions. But this time, she responded to my vagueness by requesting that I give her a substantial amount of money. The same amount that had been left to me by a Great Aunt and Uncle when they passed away; it paid for my first year of college. I was so infuriated that I asked if she was purposely trying to sabotage my life.

She has not asked for any money since.

“You have no choice” was used frequently when I was in college and grad school two hours away from Lexington. She would tell me to come home to help her move from a house to an apartment or one apartment to another.

“You have no choice.”

I would simply and succinctly inform my friends and roommates that I would be away for the weekend to help my mom out. In the course of those six years, I helped her move three times, and she moved herself a fourth time [which was technically the third move].

I point out this third move, because this was the time she quit her job in Lexington, took a job back in my hometown of Wichita, KS, and showed up at my sister’s doorstep in Wichita. She told my sister, “I’m staying here. You have no choice.” When that job didn’t pan out, she returned to Lexington, though only God knows why.

On each of the moving occasions, I would arrive and no pre-planning or packing would have been done. It would all have to be done in the course of a day, relegating the necessary process of purging crap from one’s possessions to wishful thinking. Yet somehow, even the crap from a previous move would have been unpacked into a corner somewhere, only to be required to be packed back up for the next move.

What is a grown adult to do when your parent constantly puts you in positions to be less of an adult than you wish for yourself? In the study of human behavior, this is the truest definition of pathology.

Thankfully, both of my siblings were able to get out of Lexington and out from under her financial thumb (as far as I’m aware) and relocate to Boston, where I had created a life for myself and tried to make a place for them to start anew.

And so, without any of the three of us to pilfer money from, she has slipped into a place wherein she rents a small one-bedroom apartment with no basic amenities (washer/dryer, tv, cable, internet, etc), can’t afford a car payment, and still has belongings with some monetary value packed into cardboard boxes in every available corner.

A part of me is sad at how different her life is from the one I have created for myself over the last 15 years (ex. she tried to convince me NOT to become a physician before I left for medical school).

A part of me is infuriated that her behavior is self-inflicted (it is a choice to be so rude/nasty/inconsiderate that you can’t keep a job), even though it is pathological.

A part of me is curious as to how this whole situation will resolve itself (it won’t; my simple presence here is an admittance that it can’t).

A part of me is resigned to the fact that I can’t Throw Momma from the Benz. (I wish I could. I want to. But I can’t. Doing so would be repeating the sins of my father.)

So I’ll do what I can, when I can, for as long as I can. She knows this. And recognizes that my future earnings will make “what I can, when I can, for as long as I can” an indefinite amount, an indefinite number of opportunities, and an indefinite length of time.

But I have to be ok with that. It’s the price I’m willing to pay to not have to Throw Momma from the Train.