I’m back to talk more about dementia. At the end of the last post, I veered into talking about how my mother nags and nags until she gets what she wants. She’s been that way all her life, and she taught all of us, including my father, to give in more often than not. Maybe not my father. They had so many shouting matches over seemingly everything, and the environment flipped back and forth between angry yelling and stony silence.
My parents should never have married. I know that sounds harsh, but I honestly think that they would have each had a better life if they never married. No, wait. That’s not true. That’s assuming that they would have gone in different directions and grown as people. My parents are in their eighties and have been married for over half a century. They met in Tennessee where both were getting their graduate degrees (at different schools). My mother had been engaged to someone in Taiwan because her mother wouldn’t let her date unless she was engaged. Which is bonkers to me, but that’s Taiwan in the early sixties, apparently. At least my grandmother’s mentality, at any rate.
She was a piece of work–I’ll tell you that much. I met her maybe five times in my life, and she left a terrible impression on me. Stern, domineering, woman/girl-hating, selfish, and just an unpleasant person in general. My mother had a very rocky relationship with her (because they were very similar), and she was honest with me that one reason she wanted a daughter so desperately was so she could have a better relationship with her daughter than she had with her mother.
Which, by the way, is not a good reason to have a daughter. Or a child in general. My mother has told me that she wanted to be a mother since she was a little girl. She says it’s the most important thing in her life, but she doens’t act as if it is. She wasa dutiful mother when my brother and I were kids, She cooked, cleaned, took care of us, etc. She was almost a single mother in the way she had no help from my father.
My father definitely would have married another doormat to wipe his feet upon if he hadn’t married my mother. The cold hard truth is that he needed someone to take care of him because he wasn’t going to do it himself. When he was president of his company, he had a secretary who would print his emails out, put them on his desk for him to read, and then type up his handwritten response into an email.