The Unexpected

My mother is in the hospital again after suffering what doctors are calling a psychotic break induced by prednisone therapy. She spent the past two weeks or so staying awake for 72 hours at a time. Her blood sugars are out of control from the medication, and when she arrived at the ER Friday afternoon, she was, in highly technical medical terms, absolutely bananas. I'm pretty sure the ER staff is still talking about the tiny-boned lady who screamed terrible things at them before they could sink two shots' worth of sedatives and anti-psychotics into her backside. I went to the hospital to see her today, and the first thing she demanded of me was that I bathe her. The nurse gave me a sympathetic look as she darted out of the room. I'm not freaked out by my mother's nudity or her bodily emissions, but the IV line and cardiac monitor leads made the task harder, not to mention her constant flinching and hissing and corrections to the way I was washing her skin or wringing out the washcloth or, you know, breathing. It's not a secret that my mother and I have had a difficult relationship. There have been times when I wished for a different family, for siblings, for witnesses to some of the things she's said to me, for someone to stick up for me when she'd spin one of her stories with me as the villain and herself as the victim. But today, when I saw the way her bones showed beneath her skin, when I saw her distress as she lost control of her bladder and urine ran down her legs, all of that disappeared, and all I felt was this huge helpless love for this woman. I wanted to take her suffering away but I couldn't. All I could do was wash her and dry her and smooth baby powder on her back and tell her jokes about how I pee on myself because of the stupid diuretic I have to take. I made her laugh and distracted her from the indignities of her failing body, and I kept seeing not the bird-boned tiny wrinkled woman with wild hair but the dark-haired beauty of my childhood who loved to dance to disco and thought Donna Summer was the bee's knees. I've been crying on and off since I left the hospital because it finally hit me, after all of our fights and bitter silences and standoffs and threats that I love her beyond all reason, and when she is gone from this world, I will miss her so badly in a way that defies all measurement. I've wasted so much time. Tell your Mom you love her. Do it now.

A true conversation

One more thing...

I talked to my Pop last night...or at least, I tried to. This is the conversation that took place when I called him.

Me: "Hi, Dad! How are things?"

Dad (sounding rushed and stressed): "I'm having a time right now."

Me: "What's wrong?"

Dad: "Your mother is having a gas attack, so I gotta go. I'll try to call you back later."

Honestly, I wonder about my family.

TMOM*

*That Mother of Mine acronym was created by Lythrum. ;)

It's Crazy Mother Story Time, y'all.

My cousin Diana is flying across country with her husband to visit my mother. Those two are, as the saying goes, thick as thieves. Diana is my least favorite cousin. My childhood interactions with her were rife with friction. She was loud, bossy, and mean as hell. (Some would say that description fits me too. Hmmmm....) As an adult, she's more of the same.

The funny thing is that Diana and I share eerily similar family histories. She has a difficult relationship with her own mother, who has a fractious relationship with my mother. (Are you sensing a trend here?) Diana relies on my mother for comfort and advice and calls her at least once a week to vent about her problems, gossip about her brothers and her own mother, and so on. Like my mother, Diana is a drama queen, so every little thing is a Big Freaking Deal. Those two are peas in a pod, I tell you.

Let me go ahead and get this out of the way: I'm envious of Diana's relationship with my mother. My mother gives her the compassion and attentiveness that I wish she'd show me. Plus I'm willing to bet Diana gets none of the grand guilt trips I get. The way I see it, if she gets the benefits, she should also get the adverse side effects. I'm just sayin'...

So whenever I talk to my mother these days, I get to hear about Diana. A lot. Diana's allergies were acting up a couple of weeks ago, and my mother went on and on about how sorry she felt for Diana and how much she suffered. I was so tempted to chirp, "Oh, she's young, she'll bounce back quickly," which is my mother's standard answer for me whenever I slip up and mention that I'm not feeling well or have to undergo something minor but unpleasant like gallbladder surgery.

I made the mistake of talking to my mother on the phone yesterday. I hadn't made it a point to ask to speak to her during my last couple of phonecalls to check on my parents, so I figured I'd better do the right thing. Of course, the conversation returned to Diana and her impending visit. My mother ordered me to not tell my aunt that Diana and her husband were visiting should my aunt call me. Apparently, It's a Big Sekrit, OMG.

About a month ago, my mother called me at work and demanded to know if it was true that I had talked to her sister recently. Diana had blown the whistle on us, and my mother wanted to verify the details. You'd think I'd been talking to, you know, people with shady connections instead of a family member. She even asked what we'd talked about. When I queried her about the third degree (but in much nicer terms), she turned huffy. Hmmm. She went on to tell me that my aunt had told Diana that we'd spoken, and according to Diana, either I or my aunt had told the other "everything." Ohhhhhhkaaaaay.

I have no idea what "everything" constitutes. My aunt tells me things my mother tells Diana. Like how my mother thinks Diana should have been her daughter. Like how R and I are "rich" and fly all over the country whenever we want. (This was in response, no doubt, to our February trip to Alabama to visit Lythrum, Mawavi, and Quickbeam.) That sort of thing.


I wish I could find a copy of the last letter Diana sent me years ago. It was a humdinger, full of accusations about my coldness towards my mother, my horrible treatment of her, etc. Diana's mother has told me stories about things she's said and done to her own mother that don't exactly put her at the top of the list for Daughter of the Year. Then again, I don't know what to believe whenever I talk to someone who shares my mother's DNA. Diana has proven herself to be a champion fibber, right up there with TMOM.

So I'm in the middle of crazy-making family sh*t right now, and it's getting to me. I gave in to the emotional ache inside and ate junk food and promptly felt guilty and disgusted with myself. I had really weird, mixed up dreams all night long and woke up feeling like an alien in my own skin. It's thundering and lightning outside, and the clouds match my mood. So yay me.

Righto. Enough with the wallowing. I'm going to get ready for church. I'm going to go and ask for forgiveness and pray for comfort and give thanks that I have a crazy mother because there are folks who don't have any kind of mother at all. And maybe, just maybe, I'll figure out a way to deal with all of this crazy-making family sh*t.

Maybe.

Toxicity and Its Antidote

Don't you love Saturdays? Don't get me wrong---Fridays are awesome too. Fridays are all about anticipation and plotting and planning. But Saturdays are awesome. Especially when you tell yourself that you're going to do something you don't really want to do but feel like you have to, and then you decide to let yourself off the hook.

That's what I did. I was going to drive down to Beaufort and spend the day with my mother so she would leave my Dad alone. He's in Delaware taking care of my ailing grandmother. My mother is one of those unfortunate souls who is never happy unless she is the constant center of attention. So with my Dad in another state and, even worse, paying a lot more attention to someone she considers her rival in many, many ways, it's only a matter of time before my mother explodes. She'll get "sick" or hurt herself or somehow finagle a way to get my Dad to leave his mother and come back to take care of her. This is an old pattern, oft repeated.

So I was going to take one for the team and go stay with her and let her use me as the proverbial punching bag. I'd pay attention and let her say all the terrible things she's been storing up all week---things about my Dad, my grandmother, my aunt, my uncle, me, my husband. We're all her targets because we're all guilty of...well, something. Everything. Who knows. I just know that when she gets going, we're all The Bad Guys, and she's the Helpless Victim.

I probably don't have to tell you that as the days crept closer to the weekend, I started feeling crappy and resentful and depressed. And then my husband, whose soul is much kinder and generous than mine, had a talk with me about the difference in being a good person and being a martyr.

I felt pretty bad about being called a martyr. The word has uncomfortable connotations for me because if you look up the word martyr in the dictionary, there's probably a picture of my mother's face creased in a rictus of suffering. She suffers terribly because of us, and she tells us on a regular basis that she does it because she loves us. She tells me every now and then that she would die for me. You know, I hate it when she says that. I really do.

R and I talked a little more about this martyr thing, and he explained that what he meant was that I could be a good person without putting myself in an unsafe situation. Sad to say that spending time alone with my mother is considered an unsafe situation in our family, but there you have it. The woman is toxic in ways you can't even begin to imagine, and despite years of exposure, therapy, medication, and prayer, I still haven't found the antidote to her poison.

And finally, I figured out that my plan to go spend time with her would accomplish nothing at all. She's still going to crack at some point and insist that my Dad come home. She's still going to make him pay for leaving her behind. She's still going to say terrible things to and about all of us, including my poor grandmother and my stressed-out aunt. So why sacrifice my Saturday and my mental well being to a lost cause?

It might seem like such a little thing, but this realization is huge for me. Despite knowing that my mother is a pathological liar and a toxic person, I carry around a significant amount of guilt about her and our relationship. I've felt guilty for not going down to see her more often, for not talking to her more often when I call every week, for not being more present in her life. I've felt guilty for protecting myself from her.

Did you notice the use of the past tense in that paragraph?

I'm not saying I'm completely free of guilt, that I won't give my mother a second thought today. But I'm not feeling guilty or deficient in my duties as a daughter for not going down there to soak up the poison on my dad's behalf. Nothing I can do will change what's going to happen. And honestly, this is more my Dad's problem than mine. He has a choice in how he responds to her behavior. I can't be the one who pays for his choices.

Whew. Heady stuff for a Saturday, yeah?

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to take my husband out to lunch. And then I may hit the bookstore. I want to get some more writing done today, and I've got a couple of books calling my name.

Don't you love Saturdays?