I’m talking about dementia wrapped in family dysfunction. In the last post, I ended by mentioning that dementia is seen as a moral failing in Taiwan, which has added to the stress of my father’s situation. The problem is that my mother has absorbed that message to some extent. Plus, she’s still in denial that it’s a progressive medical issue that only goes one way. She still thinks she can find a way to reverse it, which has lead to some not-so-great actions on her part towards my father. Like pushing him to do more exercise than he wants to do, for example.
Look. My father is turning 85 in less than 2 months. He has dementia and is in a rapid decline. Let the man do what he wants to do at this point! If that means lying in bed and sleeping all day long, so be it. My mother has said that she doesn’t know what she’ll do when he dies. She has cried that she is not ready for him to die. Which, I get. She’s lived with him for over a half-century. Her life IS him. But, and I cannot express this strongly enough, she is not doing HIM any favors by denying reality.
This is something I’ve thought of several times over the decades. How abuse creates more abuse. I know people don’t like to talk about it, but poeple who are constantly abused adapt in ways that may be considered abusive in response. Not just to the person who is abusing them, but to other people around them (such as their children). I know that some of the coping skills I learned from growing up with my parents absolutely made me abusive in return. It made me a terrible partner in my teens and twenties, and I am still undoing the damage decades later.
In this case, my mother has–oh, by the way. This is going to be more about my mother’s dysfunctional ways than dementia in general, but I’ll still probably talk about the latter–adapted to the aubse she suffered in a very maladaptive way. It’s in part because she was raised in a very dysfunctional family (abuse is generational) in which she felt like she was not loved or wanted. Her mother should not have been a mother, either, which seems to be something else handed down in the family.
A story my mother told me when I was in my twenties has haunted me since. When she was a kid (I don’t know what age, but I’m thinking 10 or 11), the wife of her pastor took a real shine to her. I’m guessing the pastor and his wife did not have kids of their own. The wife wanted to adopt my mother, and my mother actually considered it. In the end, she decided she couldn’t do it because it just wasn’t done.