I’m still musing about my dysfunctional family, and today I want to focus on the fact that everyone in my family has a bad memory, but for different reasons. In yesterday’s post, I talked about my truth and how important it is to me. Today, I’m going to talk about how difficult it is to hold onto my truth when my family doesn’t support that. At all.
Side note: One thing I learned about having autism is that people with autism can be easier to manipulate because they just assume that other people are right and they’re wrong (because they’re told so often, implicitly and explicitly that they are wrong). And because it doesn’t really occur to them that someone would deliberately lie to them. I have difficulty with sarcasm for that reason. The deadpan kind, I mean–when it’s out of the blue. I’m very used to reading people intently for clues as to how to react to them, but deadpan gets to me. My brother is really good at deadpan, which means I miss his jokes more often than I would with other people.
It took me a long time to realize that everyone in my family (including me now, to a certain extent) are really bad at remembering things–but for completely different reasons.
With my brother, he just has a bad memory. Could it be related to ihs neuroatypicalness? Maybe. Could it be related to his face blindness? Maybe. Could it just be a very bad memory? Maybe. But it’s something I’ve come to accept about him.
Here’s a recent example. About a year ago, I had an issue with Xfinity and my internet.
Side note (yes, again. Deal with it!): I fucking hate monopolies. It’s so fucking hard to get customer service at Xfinity unless you have a billing issues (which I just had–this week. Got a person then, right away. Funny, that), that it makes me actively angry.
Anywaay. It had to do with my data usage. One of the issues turned out to be my modem. I bought a new one and had my brother come over to hook it up for me. He spoke to the representative for forty-five minutes before we drove to the nearest store and talked to them there (that did it).
A month or so later, I mentioned to him that it had worked as a hack (not completely, but good enough), and my brother said, “Oh, you bought the new modem?” I was gobsmacked into silence. Several seconds later, I said, “You installed it for me. You talked to the rep for forty-five minutes.”
He remembered when I mentioned it, but he had completely forgotten it before that. And it had been at most a month earlier. As hard as it is for me to grasp, he truly forgets things soon after they happen. Not all things, but many things.
Then there’s my father. He’s a different story now, of course, with the dementia. I don’t expect him to remember stuff now. Before his dementia, though, he didn’t forget things as much as he didn’t hear things that didn’t align with what he believed/knew/thought. My mother and I have talked about how it makes it difficult now because there are still times when it’s more he doesn’t want to listen than that he doesn’t understand/forgets.
For example. When I was a kid, I didn’t get cold. At all. And I live in Minnesota, so that’s a pretty mean feat. It turned out that I had hyperthyroidism, which was the main reason for that. At any rate, I never wanted to wear a coat or anything like that. My comfort zone was 0 to -10F, and I was actively unhappy at anything over 70F.
My father would constantly tell me to put on a coat because he was cold. Not because he thought I was cold, but because he was cold. In his mind, everyone is like him (or should be). I used to protest because why should I wear a coat when I was not cold? I usually got overruled, though.
Why do I mention it? Because my father would bring it up from time to time. He would frame it as a joke, but by the forced smile on his face, I could tell that he didn’t think it was funny. He was still offended by it, and this is the way he told it. He said that I would refuse to put it on because he didn’t say please when he asked (ordered) me to put on a coat.
Was he right? I don’t know. I could see myself saying that now and again because he would never ask me to do it. He would definitely just order me to do it as if I were a minion who had no choice in the matter. I can guarantee you, though, that every time we argued about it, I would say that I wasn’t cold because that’s something I would have stood my ground on. When I said that I hated heat, I wasn’t being hyperbolic. It made me feel physically ill in a way that I could not fully explain. It’s like menopause cranked up to a hundred (I’m currently experiencing that, much to my chagrin.) We’re talking dripping with sweat, red face, pulse racing, etc.
When my parents were here for my medical crisis, I started going on walks with them in the morning a few weeks after I got back from the hopsital. This was late October to late November, and the nagging about me not wearing a coat just got worse and worse. I’m a grown-ass adult human being who has been taking care of myself for over forty years. I know how to dress appropraitely for me.
Now that my father has dementia, though, I just let it all slide. Or I try. I know that part of dementia is forgetting things, but the issue with my father is that it’s hard to tell when he’s truly forgetting and when he’s doing his ‘I’m not listening to you because I don’t like what you say’ thing. Sometimes, I can tell by the look on his face and the tone of his voice (when he was here). Now that it’s jsut phone calls, however, it’s much harder to discern on occasion.
That’s all for now.