In yesterday’s post, I mentioned James Blunt’s song, Monsters, about saying goodbye to his dying father (who is still alive, thanks to a miracle kidney transpalnt). The song is powerful and makes me bawl like a baby–but not for the reasons that most people would cite. Many of the reactors I watched talked about how hard it is to lose a parent and how this song brought all that back. Almost every reactor was taking it from the perspective of someone who lost a parent they loved. Only one man mentioned that he had a very difficult relationship with his father, but he didn’t get into it.
Jay from Rob Squad glancingly mentioned (or rather Amber did) that his father wasn’t around when he was young, but he mentioned his grandfather’s death and how mcuh that affected him. Amber talked about how her father was her safe place and got really emotional.
I want my father to die.
Some of ithe reasons are are compassionate (he is clearly suffering and he’s rapidyl getting worse. My mother is suffering as well, and she shouldn’t have to deal with this at age eigthty). But, if I am going to be brutally honest–some of it is for me as well.
I died myself a year-and-a-half ago. Twice. It wasn’t a bad experience and it wasn’t drawn-out like this. It was one night–a week unconscious, and then another week to recover. Two weeks. That’s not completely true. By recover, I just mean get enough strength to walk out of the hospital. I was weak and pumped full of drugs, but I had all my faculties. By the time my parents left two months later, I would have said I was as close to 100% as I was going to get.
That was one of the best things to happen to me in terms of changing my point of view on life. And it was the worst when it came to my family because it showed me clearly how little I meant as a person to my parents.
My father has had dementia for at least five years. Probably more. It’s become really obvious in the last few years. When we talk on the phone, it’s clear that he can’t track what we’re talking about. He can’t understand that he’s in Taiwan and I’m in Minnesota.
I try to go with whatever he’s saying, but sometimes, I can’t make that leap.
I don’t mourn him. I did that decades ago. The minute he asked why should he love me was when the last dredges of hope that he might actually give a shit about me were stamped out. He has never been a father to me, and it only got worse as the years went on. He’s selfish, narcissistic, quick-to-anger, thin-skinned, sexist, a nationalist, and a womanizer. But only of Taiwanese women because he has standards, damn it!
It’s funny. Roughly twenty years ago, I gave up on him. He’s never going to be the father I want or need. He was never going to love me as a person, and I was fine with it. If I had never talked to him again, I would have been fine with that, too.
Around the same time, I became aware that it was my mother who was more my problem. Why? Because I expected more from her. I didn’t expect anytihng from my father. But she was my mother, damn it! She was supposed to love me. ME, Minna. Not her ‘daughter’ whoever that might be, but me as a person.
What are we told about parents? That they love us unconditionally, protect us, and want what’s best for us. I don’t believe in the first, my parents never did the second, and they would not know the third if it bit them on the ass.
I have known all my life that my father is a narcissist, even if I didn’t know the actual word until I went to college to study psychology. He has never evinced an iota of interest in anything I’ve done in my life. Not playing the cello or being in theater or dancing or writing or Taiji. Weirdly, the only thing he cares about is my cat, Shadow. My father ADORES him. He’ll talk to Shadow and ask why he’s meowing. He’ll be concerned if he hasn’t seen Shadow in hours and could not understand that cats in general were solitary creatures. Shadow has been different since his brother died (more wanting to be near me), but that didn’t mean he didn’t need his alone time.
Other than that, though, he has no inteerest in me at all. I accepeted this when I was in my twenties. Not as well as I thought I had, obviously, because he could still break me by asking why he should love me, but I’m over that now. He’s a sick old man, and I feel sorry for him on that level, but I have no love for him.
The last few months have, though, given me more compassion for my mother. She’s an old woman who has devoted her life to my father. That was her choice, and yet, it probably didn’t feel like a choice to her. She came from a culture that relegated women to the roles of wife and mother. She had a mother who said these things while simultaneously being conspicuous by her absence because she was a senator. My grandmother was a cold and rigid woman. She made my mother feel unloved as a child and probably as an adult as well. My mother has told me that she and my grandmother had a fraught relationship. Then she went and married a man like her mother–which isn’t that unusual. Cold, distant, withholding, and rigid. Disapproving and narcissistic. They’re on the opposite ends of the political spectrum, but the same, nevertheless.
My mother is worn-out. Taiwan, unfortunately, believes dementia is a moral failing and not an actual ailment. I did some research into support groups and whatnot. I could not find anyithng. In Taipei, I mean. It’s really hard to find support for caregivers in general, and it’s doubly hard there.
My father is not going into dementia gently. He is fighting it with all his might, which is only to be expeced. But, and this is the important part to me, he’s hurting my mother in the process. Not just emotionally, but physically as well. I don’t fear him in that sense because I can take him, but my mother is tiny. He has already done harm to her, and I’m afraid he’ll do more.
In addition, he’s becoming increasingly confused. He went out of their condo at four in the morning a few nights ago because he was looking for his ‘little’ sister. Who is dead. In addition, he gets confused about things like what season it is–and would not let my mother open the windows or turn on the AC even though it was close to a hunderd degrees out.
Here’s another complication, though. He’s always been like that about the AC. Cheap, I mean. He refuses to let her use it, even though it gets deathly hot there. This is where it’s dififuclt to tell when he’s just being a jerk and when the dementia is kicking in. At this point, it’s mostly dementia, but he’s still a jerk. That’s not something I want to gloss over. My dad is an asshole. He’s always been an asshole. I have no love for him.
And yet.
He does not deserve this. My mother most certainly does not deserve this. Dementia is a jerk–and I want to kick it in the throat.