On Being Invisible and the Bendable Truth

Dear God,

Sobriety, as I understand it right now, involves getting honest with myself and with others. It involves learning to speak difficult truths about myself to myself and to at least one other person. I am also beginning to realize that it involves speaking my truth to other people, especially when I find myself saying ‘yes’ when I really want to say ‘no’, or vice versa.

I get all that, and while I am not there yet, I am working on it.

So what do I do when the other person wants nothing to do with the truth?

I’ve spent the last 10 years erasing myself from the room by medicating with alcohol.  I can do anything, be anyone, endure anything, as long as I am numb from alcohol. It makes me much more agreeable, but entirely dishonest about what I really want in life, and so I get that I need to be honest. But right now, my mom is not interested in my honesty. She isn’t interested in the truth, not even her own truth, and I don’t know how to deal with that.

I know you know this, but I need to say it out loud.

I call my mom “Miss Revisionist History”. I call her that because the truth on any given day depends on her mood.  When she’s in a good mood, the truth is lovely and smooth and attractive, although it frequently isn’t honest. When she’s in a bad mood…well, at that point her words are a lot like knives; they are sharp words not because she is accusing or hateful towards me (at least not consistently) but instead because she hurls ugly truths—real truth—at me without thought for how those truths impact me.  Sometimes she actually hurls truths at me to accuse me; sometimes to accuse me of not caring enough about her struggle, and sometimes to accuse me of being responsible for her struggle.  Don’t worry…I don’t take responsibility for my mom’s life, because her choices are her own. That doesn’t mean her word knives don’t hurt, but that they don’t convince me of my culpability.

The funny thing is that I only ever found out the more difficult truths about our family, about her marriage to my father, when she was angry. I took those truths in, even though I didn’t like them, because they were the truth. I have known for a long time that truth isn’t always pretty, but the funny thing is that once the truth is known and it doesn’t have to be hidden, it can be dealt with in productive ways. Real truth—not the objective truth, because only You know that kind of truth—but the truths that each of us hide deep in our hearts? That kind of truth will set us free. The Bible said that the truth would set us free and I actually believe that.  So I was willing to hear her hurl words like knives because I thought it might set her free. Sadly, she never stayed free for long, choosing to return to smooth stories and pretty lies. I guess it made her feel better about herself.  

The problem I have is that despite the fact that I know the ugly truths, my mom wants me to pretend that I never heard those words, that I am ignorant of those ugly truths.  Even shortly after she told me the ugly truth, her mood changed and she changed her story. She expected me to go along with the new story immediately. She expects me to go along with her lies, no matter who those lies are about—my father, my brother, even my own childhood. Yes, that’s right. She expects me to lie about my own experiences, things I remember experiencing, things that I remember as violence and abuse.

It’s like she only remembers the part of the truth that she wants to remember, and she expects everyone else to be on the same page of truth that she is.

Now that my father is dead and she can freeze his history and tell only pretty stories about him, she expects me to lie about her present.

This leaves me in an uncomfortable position in so many ways.

I am her Power of Attorney, and I take her to medical appointments.  She has cognitive decline, and I have written her doctor many notes about the symptoms of my mom’s cognitive decline as well as her obvious depression and anxiety, about her never-ending grief over my father’s death coupled with her absolute refusal to see a grief counselor or go to a grief group. Nothing I do seems to budge my mom from her pretty lies, lies that she tells the doctor. I can tell that he doesn’t believe her any more than I do, but neither of us can get her to tell the truth for the sake of her own health and her quality of life. Even in her medical care, I feel forced to be complicit in her lies, although I do write lengthy letters that are shared with the doctor before each appointment.

I can’t even be honest with her about my grief over my own father, because the only grief that seems to matter is her own. She constantly talks about my father, cries about my father, pours over pictures of my father. Her grief is unending. Yet when I mentioned this morning that I cried all the way to church, all through the service, and all the way back home this last Sunday, she says nothing, asks no questions, seems uninterested even though the anniversary of my father’s death is only three weeks away. She behaved like my grief was non-existent when my best friend died only three months before my father, and then ignored my grief and my needs when my father died. There was no space for me—literally no space for me—I stood in the hallway outside the room where my father’s body lay because she was busy in there with all the church members that came to comfort her. She didn’t have space for me then and doesn’t really have space for me now.

So what do I do?

I know that she isn’t going to change. She has been this way her whole life, although it wasn’t quite as evident when I was younger. She didn’t become totally self-absorbed until my father became demented; it became even worse after he died.

I tried praying the Serenity Prayer about her today. I am her POA and I’ll be taking care of her in one way or another until she dies. I need to be able to deal with this, and yet dealing with her makes me want to drink, big time!  I don’t know if her inability to see me is my trigger, or if she is a trigger, in and of herself. Either way, drinking to deal with her just isn’t an option.

So God, please grant me the serenity to deal with a person that I cannot change, the courage to accept her as she is and to continue caring for her as she declines, and the wisdom to know how to do that without drinking to numb myself. Grant me the wisdom to let the emotions flow, because it’s that or letting the wine flow, and that just doesn’t work well in the long run.

I know that looks nothing like the traditional serenity prayer, but it is the prayer that I’m praying today.

Thanks for listening. I needed to get that off my chest.