I’ve been talking in the past several posts about my family, and here is something I rarely admit out loud. One of the reasons I get so frustrated when my mother goes down the negativity route is becuase it echoes the monkey chatter in my brain as well. I can ‘what if’ until the cows come home, and it makes it so it’s really difficult for me to make an actual decision about anything important.
When I was in my twenties, K and I talked about how different our mothers were. Her mother was very much a ‘things will work out, no matter what’ kind of person, whereas my mother had a ‘something will always go drastically wrong, no matter what’ mentality. This came out when K was taking me to the airport and joking about me having a roll of quarters, an umbrella, and a bunch of other things she thought unnecessary. I said you never knew what you might need when you were on vacation.
Years later, I realized t hat as long as I had proper Id and my credit card, I could buy anything I needed. A huge privilege, yes, and not something I wanted to abuse, but it really eased the anxious part of my brain.
That’s something I learned in my twenties/early thirties. I had to find ways to work around the destructive chatter in my brain. I had to build that into everything I did because it was just a part of me. It makes it harder for me to do things, but I’ve gotten better in the last few years. In some ways. In other ways, it’s gotten worse.
K and I talked about the pros and cons to our mothers’ ways of thinking. With K’s mother, a pro was that she did not have to expend too much energy on ‘what ifs?’. She assumed things would turn out ok, and that must have been a relief. On the other hand, when things didn’t turn out ok, she was ill-equipped to deal with it.
Whtereas with my mother’s Debbie Downer mentality meant that she was always prepared for the worst, but didn’t know what to do if things did not reach that point. In addition, in always looking at the negative side of things, it paralyzes her from actually making decisions because any choice seems bad.
This is what I hate the most because it’s how I deal with things as well. I can see a million things that could possibly go wrong at any given time, and I can’t see a way forward. Rationally, I know that every decision has consequences, both good and bad. I know that there is no choice that is completely positive.
And yet. My brain equates negative consequences with catastrophe, and then I can’t make any choice at all. I have to consciously push my way past that mental barrier in order to make a decision.
I tell my mother to get a therapist; I know she won’t. I know I should get a therapist, and yet, I don’t seem to be any closer to getting one myself. I just wallow in my misery and think that this is all there is to life.
It’s hard. I have various issues that makes me not want to interact much with the world. The first is that I’m allergic to almost everything on earth, including the air. It’s probably easier for me to list what I’m not allergic to, rather than to what I am. In addition, my eyesight is much worse than it was a decade ago. I have a hard time with my periphery, so I only drive to local places.
My mother has made my father her entire life. I mean, he has been a huge portion of her life for all my life, but now, he’s her only life. It’s understandable because of his worsening dementia, but at the same time, I hate to see her give everything to him.
It’s really difficult to be stern to her about it, though, because my father’s dementia does suck up almost all the air in the room. I can’t help thinking, though, that this my father’s dementia just feeds into the family dysfunction.
What do I mean by that? I mean that my mother already had a martyr complex and needed to be needed. This is how her narcissism plays out. A decade or two ago, she mentioned casually that she knew my father wasn’t nearly as smart as she was in a way that made me feel weird. I had just assumed he was really smart because my mother, my brother, and I are. Once she said that, the veil fell from my eyes.
He’s really industrious and hardworking. Or at least he was before the dementia hit. And he was studious, but it was with an eye to the goal of getting his PhD and making money. I’m not dissing that, by the way. If you’re going to get your PhD, you might as well make sure there’s money in it. I think he went for his PhD, though, in order to validate himself as a doctor.
It really showed me how it’s so easy to make assumptions that aren’t based in reality at all. And how once I learned the truth, things made so much more sense.
Another thing that was hard for me to grasp was how incurious he was. Again, my mother, my brother, and I all love to learn. Different subjects, certainly, but we are all eager to learn new things. My father was not at all. I never saw him reading for pleasure or at all, really. Nor did he want to discuss anything political, hobby-wise, or, well, really anything at all.
He did not take pleasure in anything, really. He had to travel around the world to participate in conferences pertaining to his work. He would tell stories about dinners he had to attend and how annoying he found them. He only liked Chinese/Taiwanese food and a select few American foods. One time, he had a conference in Hawaii, then flew to Minnesota to visit me and my brother. I asked how he liked Hawaii as so many people love it. He shrugged and said it was an island. He lived on an island, so it was nothing special.
I conceded his point, but at the same time, I thought it was sad that he took so little pleasure in all the wonderful places he’d been. On the other hand, I hate to travel myself. The flying itself is a trial for several reasons, and as I am allergic to everything and have several food issues, it’s always dicey going to another culture.
The difference is that I would love to eat the foods of all the cultures if I could. There are very few foods I don’t like–water chesnuts and kiwi are two, and that’s a texture thing–but there are so many that I cannot eat. I am GF/DF, and while I’m used to it by now, I will admit that I miss several foods from time to time like dumplings and pizza.
That’s it for today. I may talk more about this tomorrow.