My mother called the other night. She wanted to complain about my father again. She knows she shouldn’t, but she can’t help herself. I tried to be sympathetic/empathetic, but we’ve been doing this dance for forty years (ever since she made me her confidante when I was 11). This time, though, instead of dancing around it, she flat-out said that kids should be their parents’ confidantes as part of taking care of them. I was flabbergasted because she had never actually said it out loud before.
She mentioned her clients helping out their parents (taking them to appointments and such) and she slated being a ‘confidante’ fell under that. I’ll counter that in a moment, but just wanted to comment as I did to her that it was women doing this , which was sexist as hell. She got that sour tone in her voice that said she did not like what I said. She did admit she needed a therapist, but then said a million reasons why she couldn’t get one. And why she can’t leave for the one hour a week a woman comes to take care of my father. She says how upset he gets when she leaves, which irritates me every time.
Here’s the thing. Intellectually, I know that abuse warps the mind and enforces a learned helplessness. But at the end of the day, people still have to take some autonomy. And if not, don’t dump about it constantly on their children. My mom is never going to leave my father. I realized that when I was fairly young, and it only gets stronger the older I get (the feeling that she won’t leave him). Fine. Whatever. It’s her life. But I don’t want to hear about it. At this point, I’m just sick and tired of it after being a forced confidante for nearly a half-century.
Here’s the other thing. It may have been beneficial to her that I’ve been her confidante (which I think is dubious, anyway), but it most emphatically hasn’t been for me. Which my mom knows. She’ll apologize for dumping it all on me, but continue to do so. Once in a while she’ll say she won’t do it again. She said it more than once the last time she was here. I told her angrily to not say that because we both knew it wasn’t true. That actually made me angrier than the initial dumping.
Her trying to justifying making her confidante only underscored her own narcissism. Her comfort and need to vent superseded my comfort and need to not have her vent at me. In addition, and I didn’t realize this until much later, her constant venting about my father made me feel even more negatively towards him than I would have without it.