I’m back with one more post about family. Here is yesterday’s post in which I talked about how sad my father’s life is now. I feel a little bad for him, but at the same time, it’s the logical consequence of his previous behavior/attitude.
It’s something I contemplate from time to time because my parents aren’t going to be on this earth for much longer. I mean, none of us are guaranteed any given time on earth–I know that all too well.
I was saying to K how sad it was that my mother had given her life to my father. K is an optimist and said that it seemed my mother had made a pretty good life for herself professionally. Which, true. She broke ground by bringing sandplay therapy to Taiwan. She is called the grandmother of sandplay therapy, and she’s been giving a lifetime award in psychology for it.
When that happened, she asked me to record a video talking about the work we’ve done together. I wrote some things for her and edited all her works. That included her dissertation and her book. She also did a chapter in an anthology of how people came to sandplay therapy, and she needed help writing it. I came up with the idea that I would ask her questions about her journey, and she would answer them. I wrote it all up, and she gave me a credit in her chapter.
In other words, it made sense for me to do a video about working with her. My father threw a fit until she let him do one as well. It was embarrassing to watch, even though I didn’t know exactly what he said. He had nothing to do with psychology, and it was just so out of his lane. But it’s typical of him that he had to insert himself into the middle of things because he could not stand being the center of attention.
I feel so tired because I’ve tried to tell my mother that she should get more help. It’s too much for her to handle alone or even with her in-house aide. She’s eighty-three years old and tiny. My father has more than half a foot on her still, even though he’s shrunk quite a bit in the last few years.
My brother and I have urged her to put him in a facility, but she has a million-and-a-one reasons why she can’t do that. Some of them are valid (such as there not being good facilities in Taiwan), but many of her excuses just boil down to she would feel like a bad wife if she did that.
This reminds me of when I was eleven. She would cry and complain every night for hours about how terrible my father was and how badly he treated her. I would tell her she should divorce him, and then she would give me a million reasons why she couldn’t.
Think of that. I was begging her to divorce my father when I was eleven. That’s really unusual thinking for a kid at that age. Even when a kid is being abused, they will cling to the abuser. I don’t know when I realized that my father didn’t love me and had no interest in being a father, but it was pretty early on in my life.
Even as a preteen, I knew that life would be better without him–though I could not put it into words. All I could do was beg my mother to leave him, knowing that she would never do it. At some point, I gave up hope. At some point later, I began resenting her for dumping her shit on me, especially since she would never actually take my advice.
I feel the same now. Not the life would be better without him, but the frustration at trying to give her advice that I know she’ll never take. I do my best to keep it to myself, but when all she does is complain, it’s hard not to let some of my impatience slip through.
The situation is incredible difficult; I don’t want to gloss over that. Dementia is terrible in so many ways, and it’s hard to watch someone–anyone–disappear by the inch (or the foot in the case of my father because I don’t see/hear him that frequently). When we talked on Zoom last week, I could see the blankness in his eyes. He was not there and has not been for several months if not a year or two.
I think in some ways, my broken brain is helpful here. I tend to hop from subject to subject in my thoughts, and it’s hard for other people to follow what I’m thinking. When I write, I have to consciously write transitions because they’re so evident in my brain, I assume other people can see them as well.
So when my father jumps from topic to topic, I can sometimes hang with him. Because I know that most of what he wants to talk about is me to visit him, it’s pretty easy to connect things to that. I don’t usually get the full brunt of his delusions, which he seems to save for my mother.
The problem is that my mother has her own unique way of looking at things. It took me way too long to realize that I could not trust her description of an event. Not that she would lie on purpose, but she has a way of twisting things as she sees them through a very distorted lens.
I read a very thought-provoking piece about The Missing Missing Reasons that estranged parents elide over when they tell a story about how their child is being so mean to them–and they have no idea why. Except, even as they try to claim they don’t know why, they let slip that they actually do. They just glide over those reasons because if they were to acknowledge them, they would have to look inward and admit their wrongdoings.
Instead, they bury everything ten feet deep because it’s too scary and threatening to admit any of it. I was struck by the explanation that the parents were in deep denial and truly made themselves forget what had happened. I had realized that years before I found this post, but it was so reassuring to read the post in validation of what I had struggled to figure out for myself.
Even as I’ve mostly made my peace with my childhood, the anger still flares up every now and again. It’s usually when I’m already tired and at the end of my rope. After a half hour of my mother unloading on me, my patience wears very thin. She’s taken to thanking me every time for listening to her, which makes it worse. She says plaintively that she has no one else to talk to, but that’s on her.
I have suggested talking to her friends. Nope. They know my father, so that’s out the window. I have pushed her seeing a therapist. She is so resistance to that, I have given up. I would even settle for her talking to her pastor, but she would not want to do that, either, because it might get back to my father.
I have more to say, but I’ll wrap it up here for tonight.