I’m talking about dementia wrapped in family dysfunction. In the last post, I ended by mentioning that dementia is seen as a moral failing in Taiwan, which has added to the stress of my father’s situation. The problem is that my mother has absorbed that message to some extent. Plus, she’s still in denial that it’s a progressive medical issue that only goes one way. She still thinks she can find a way to reverse it, which has lead to some not-so-great actions on her part towards my father. Like pushing him to do more exercise than he wants to do, for example.
Look. My father is turning 85 in less than 2 months. He has dementia and is in a rapid decline. Let the man do what he wants to do at this point! If that means lying in bed and sleeping all day long, so be it. My mother has said that she doesn’t know what she’ll do when he dies. She has cried that she is not ready for him to die. Which, I get. She’s lived with him for over a half-century. Her life IS him. But, and I cannot express this strongly enough, she is not doing HIM any favors by denying reality.
This is something I’ve thought of several times over the decades. How abuse creates more abuse. I know people don’t like to talk about it, but poeple who are constantly abused adapt in ways that may be considered abusive in response. Not just to the person who is abusing them, but to other people around them (such as their children). I know that some of the coping skills I learned from growing up with my parents absolutely made me abusive in return. It made me a terrible partner in my teens and twenties, and I am still undoing the damage decades later.
In this case, my mother has–oh, by the way. This is going to be more about my mother’s dysfunctional ways than dementia in general, but I’ll still probably talk about the latter–adapted to the aubse she suffered in a very maladaptive way. It’s in part because she was raised in a very dysfunctional family (abuse is generational) in which she felt like she was not loved or wanted. Her mother should not have been a mother, either, which seems to be something else handed down in the family.
A story my mother told me when I was in my twenties has haunted me since. When she was a kid (I don’t know what age, but I’m thinking 10 or 11), the wife of her pastor took a real shine to her. I’m guessing the pastor and his wife did not have kids of their own. The wife wanted to adopt my mother, and my mother actually considered it. In the end, she decided she couldn’t do it because it just wasn’t done.
I always thought it was a weird story, but I did not think much about it until I told it to my last therapist. She gasped and was very shocked. I didn’t know why until she explained it to me. She said that kids were predisposed to want to stay with their family of origin, even when the parents are terrible and abusive.
She said that for my mother to actually consider moving in with her pastor’s family, well, that indicated just how bad her home life was. Once I thought of it from that point of view, I was able to look at my mother a bit differently. I knew that she was the ‘bad’ daughter in her family because she was the most like my grandmother. Sporty, strong, ‘masculine’, and not very interested in stereotypical feminine things. My grandmother preferred the daughter who was repeatedly called the pretty one. (My mother had seven brothers and sisters.)
This is the irony of family dysfunction–everything my mother felt about her mother, she turned around and did to me. Even though it caused her (my mother) so much pain. that’s one of the worst things about abuse–one way of adapting to it is by absorbing the toxic messages. My mother told me once when I was in my twenties that one big reason she wanted to have a daughter was to right the wrongs her mother had inflicted on her. My mother wanted to have a better relationship with her daughter than she had had with her mother.
Oh, the great irony, then, that she did the exact same thing to me that her mother did to her. Tried to enforce strict gender roles on me. Tried to get me married and pregnant by twenty-five (when she got married) and twenty-six (when she had my brother). I cannot stress this enough–she waged a 15 year war to get me pregnant and irreparably harmed our already frayed relationship in doing so. She made it very clear that I was worth nothing more than my ability to spawn babies. Repeatedly. This was mostly after she moved back to Taiwan, and every time we talked–she pushed me about having children.
It wasn’t just ‘hey, it’d be cool if you had children.’ I will say that she was pushy about it with my brother as well, but not nearly to the extent that she was with me. Probably because had made it clear that I did not want them. Ever. I learned that when I was 22, and I remained steadfast in my refusal to have them. This was in a time when it was considered unthinkable for a woman to not have children, let alone ADMIT she didn’t want them.
My mother broke something in me during that time. I was already severely depressed and anxious at the time. I saw no point in living, but I was too cowardly (I felt) to kill myself. Her repeated berating about my lack of doing my womanly duty really did a number on me. I am just so glad that I had never been more sure of anything in my life than I was about the fact that I most emphatically did not want children. I am so grateful that I stood up for myself in that instance because I cannot think of anything worse for me than having children. Not just for me, but for the hypothetical children I didn’t have.
Let me be clear. I would have been a shitty parent. I would have continued the abuse. Maybe not in the same way (certainly not with such rigid gender expectations), but I am just as rigid as my mother–in my own way. I have a bad temper that has gotten worse since my medical crisis. I am moody and prickly, and I can be demanding of other people in a way that is unpleasant. I manage to keep a lot of it to myself, but it does escape me from time to time. I have a low frustration threshold. I have spent my whole life being my mother’s emotional caretaker, which means that I never wanted to do it again.
I’m done for now. I will probably write more about this tomorrow. Or maybe I’ll write about something else. We’ll see.