I’m so tired. Not physically, though that as well, but of being my mother’s emotional dumping vessel–which has been my role in her life since I was eleven. You know that saying, “Not my monkey, not my circus”? My mother would trounce all over that statement and throw it in the trash. She once complained about my last therapist because she (my therapist) was turning me against my mother (in my mother’s point of view).
“We were so close,” she lamented, with thet unspoken addition of ‘until SHE came along’. Which was completely untrue. We were never close. She meant that I was more docile before I saw my last therapist–but that wasn’t true, either.
The reality is that my mother and I have never been close in the sense of knowing, trusting, and respecting each other. We are close only in that she has made it a lifetime habit of dumping all her shit on me and acting all hurt and victomized if I dare say that she should not do that.
To make it even worse, a few decades ago, she apologized for it and said that she should not have done that to me when I was a kid. Which, fine, but it didn’t stop her from doing it. In other words, it was horseshit. It’s the same as when she was last here. She would complain about my father and then say that she shouldn’t do it. Then she said she wouldn’t do it again. I finally had to tell her to stop saying that because we both knew it iwasn’t true. And it was just making me angrier for her to keep apologizing with no intent of stopping.
It was the only thing she knew how to do, and it had served her…not well, but she deluded herself into thinking it did. Here is my post from yesterday wihch is tangentially related. The thing is that she has learned she can often get what she wanted by simply persisting. Basically, nagging me into submission. I had to learn that it was better for me to stand up on the big things and give in on the small ones.
Yes, it reinforced her belief that it was the way to get what she wanted, but it also gave me peace about the big things. So going on the cruise for my parents fiftieth anniversary? That was a hard no. Going back to Taiwan with my brother’s family? Hell to the no. I nearly killed myself the last time I went to Taiwan (and that is not an exaggeration), and I was not going through that again.
The story I always give about the last time I went to Taiwan to show how little I mean to my mother is that I asked to do exactly one thing on that trip. I wanted to go to the National Palace Museum because I love museums. I had been there once before, but of course once was not enough. It was the only thing I asked to do in the ten days we were there.
My mother pushed back against it, and I said, fine. I’ll go myself. That wasn’t acceptable, so I had to insist on going. When we did, the AC was broken, unfortunately. My brother and nibling were also complaining about it. I forgave my nibling because they were eleven or so at the time. But my brother was a grown-ass adult who could put up with being bored for a few hours. My mother also complained, so it ruined the whole experience for me.
Later, my brother wanted to do all this shit and my mother eagerly planned it for him. It told me quite clearly what she thought of my brother versus what she thought of me. And, yes, it was because he was male that what he said was golden whereas I, a mere female, should just shut up and do asĀ Iwas told.
Would my mother be appalled if I told her I felt that way? Yes. Would I be wrong? No. Would she acknowledge it? Most likely no. She’s too invested in her view of herself to accept that she has been a shitty mother in some ways. I will say that she did the basics. She fed and clothed my brother and me. She looked after us with no help from my father.
But did she love us? No. I can say that with utter certainty. It’s because she doesn’t actually see us as indivduals. My brother is her son and I’m her daughter, and we are supposed to act in very proscribed ways. My brother had fulfilled her brief until he got divorced. I never ticked off any boxes of what a dutiful daughter should be, and it messed with my head for thirty-plus years of my life.
One of the best things my last therapist said to me when I was talking about the fact that my I was nothing my mother wanted me to be. I was struggling with it because she had drummed into my head from day one that I was supposed to be a clone of her. My therapist looked at me and said, “She hasn’t been the mother you wanted or needed her to be, either.”
It was as if a light bulb had turned on over my head. My mother had so convinced me that my duty was to be what she wanted me to be, I had never thought about the fact that maybe she was supposed to do/be something for me as well. I know it sounds silly and obvious, but she truly had my head twisted about the nature of our relationship.
I was taught to believe that I existed to be the emotional support person of my mother. I was supposed to listen to her trials and travails endlessly without saying a negative word. The word ‘parentification’ was not in my lexicon when I was a kid, but that’s what she was doing. And if I dared to protest, she made me feel bad and guilty about it.
When I brought it up more recently that she should not be doing this, she snapped that he was my father so it was my problem, too. I retorted that the difficulties in her marriage were not, though, and that she had been doing this since I was eleven. Well before my father got dementia.
The bottom line is that she will say anything in order to get what she wanted. She had no issue with guilting and manipulating people (read my brother and me) into doing what she wanted. If that didn’t work, then it was nagging endlessly until you gave in so she would shut. the. fuck. up. My brother and I joke about how it’s better to answer her first call because otherwise, she’ll be calling all night long. If she wants something, it’ll never occur to her that maybe it’s not important to someone else.
I have tried to talk to her about the basics when it comes to dealing with my father’s paranoia, even though I should not have to. She’s a psychologist, and you’d think she’d know about dementia. You would be wrong. Or rather, she can’t handle what it means for my father. I want to stress that dementia is fucking brutal. I know that it’s so hard on her because she’s old and frail herself. It sucks for everyone involved, but my mother is not making it better by trying to drag him back to reality. That’s just Dementia 101, and it frustrates the hell out of me that my mother stubbornly refuses to do the basics that would make it marginally easier for her and my father.