Sorry. I Have Mommy Issues

Dear God,

Well, for someone who was wondering about stored up emotions, I do believe I have found a few that were stuffed in a drawer or something, because I was a hot mess this last weekend.

Basically, my mom decided to do her ‘bad daughter, guilt, guilt!’ thing with me. My mom learned to be a master guilt artist from her mom, who used to use guilt to manipulate people into giving her what she wanted instead of just asking directly for what she wanted. My grandmother twisted my mom into emotional pretzels for years. It was horrible to watch, and I swore that I would never let my mom do it to me.

Let’s all stop for a moment and laugh at how naïve and hopeful I was when I was younger.

Back to the plot: my mom called me this Sunday because she was “all alone with no one to talk to”.  She complained at length about being alone all the time, even though I hired a caregiver to be with her five days a week. She complained that her neighbors all have families to be with even though her friends Jim and Cathy, a childless couple who are the same age as my mom, live only two doors down on the same street.  I asked her if she had gone to church. She said no, and then complained that she doesn’t want to go to church anymore because no one knows her there. I invited her to consider joining a group at her church so that more people would get to know her, but she refused. I asked her if she had called her friend Donna. She got very snippy saying that Donna never calls her, so why should she call Donna? Then I asked if she had called her best friend. She told me that she called her best friend, but best friend was out to dinner with her family like they always do on Sunday.

“At least she has her family to go out with.”

Excuse me for a minute while I breathe deeply and unclench my teeth.

By the time I got off the phone with my mom, I was livid. I immediately went to my husband and told P about the phone call and vented my frustration.  My mom has spent the last 10 years of her life in increasing isolation, having pulled away from her friends while my father was still alive because of his dementia. She refused to go to caregiver support groups, because “what are those people going to tell me that is going to help?” She refused to hire caregivers because “your father would never allow it!” When I broached the subject with my father, he told me that my mother would never allow it.  When I offered to spend time with Daddy so that she could go out with friends, or just run errands alone, she told me I was too busy. When my father would get out of control because of his dementia, she would call me, screaming at me that I didn’t know how hard it was for her, that I just didn’t care. After my Dad died, I invited her to go to a grief group with me.  She told me that she didn’t want to go and listen to other people whine about their grief. When I took her to my grief group’s “Surviving The Holidays” seminar, she openly mocked other people’s grief (quietly to me during the seminar, and then loudly in the car on the way home.)  Now that my father has been dead for three years, she tells me that I have no idea how hard it is to live without my father and that she can’t get over his death. When I suggest a grief group, she says “What are those people going to tell me that is going to help?” 

By now you know the tune of the song I’m singing, so join in the chorus with me:

“Victim…your mom’s a VICTIM! And as a VICTIM, her life is not her fault. (Oh yes it is) She’s such a VICTIM….”  Everybody sing along!

Yes indeed, folks. Yes she is. And this Sunday, she wanted to blame me for her victim status, because my husband and I aren’t taking her out to dinner so that she doesn’t have to be alone on the weekend. Not that she has done anything to end her loneliness. Not that she has reached out to re-establish connections with the dozens of friends she dropped while caregiving my father. Not that she reached out to ask me to spend time with her. She just dropped a guilt bomb and hoped that I would respond accordingly. Despite the fact that I refused to accept the guilt, I ended the call extremely perturbed and went to vent my anger to my husband.

I spent most of Sunday evening livid.

On Monday I woke up and immediately started crying.

You see, anger is a secondary emotion that occurs when pain, sorrow, fear, and/or dread are there. We use anger to marshal our energy to fight whatever it is that is causing our sorrow, fear, pain, or dread.  If we want to stop being angry, eventually we have to feel whatever is feeding the anger (pain/sorrow/fear/dread) so that we can let the whole thing go.

Apparently, what was underneath my anger was sorrow and pain.  Good evening, ladies and gentleman! Without alcohol it appears that our little lady here has feelings about her mom’s behaviors and a lot less patience for them than she originally thought.

While I was drinking it was easy to numb myself to my frustration with my mom’s refusal to take responsibility for the loneliness of the life she built, with her refusal to deal with her emotions and her grief. I thought I had patience for her endless complaints and her evident misery combined with her unwillingness to do anything to remedy that misery, but that patience came out of a wine bottle. Moreover, drinking made me numb to the pain and sorrow I felt because of my mom’s choices, her actions, and the way those choices and actions impacted me.

I thought I was good at dodging her guilt bombs and the blame they carry…but I’m not as good at it as I thought. I seem to be able to avoid the guilt, but apparently I am unable to avoid the pain that comes with being blamed for not remedying my mom’s misery. And believe me, she blames me. Even my husband thinks that she blames me.  

She blamed me for not saving her from my father’s dementia when he was alive (that would take a book to explain it to you) and she blames me for not being the remedy to her loneliness and misery now.

As much as that hurts, I am unwilling to be her remedy. There are things that I can do that will temporarily ease her loneliness and grief, but in the end, only she can make the choice to own her sorrow and process it, and sadly she is running out of time. Eventually her dementia will seal off her ability to change anything, and she will be trapped in the misery she has created for herself, without sufficient cognitive power to process much of anything. I am genuinely afraid of such a thing happening to her, and of how much she might blame me for the decisions I will have to make about her care in the aftermath. Sadly, her cognitive decline is like a train coming at both of us, and I can’t manage to get us off the tracks.

For a while now I’ve been asking you for help with my mom’s care, God, for help with the decisions that we need to make in order to take care of her. It’s just me and my husband dealing with my mom’s cognitive decline (that will soon be re-diagnosed as dementia) and I need all the guidance and help from God that I can get.

It turns out that I am having to turn my mom…not just her care, but her entire person…over to you. I am second-stepping my mom multiple times a day right now, and to be honest I’m probably going to hand her over to you again as soon as I’m done writing this.

Please help me not to resent her for the pain that she causes me.  She is the adult child of an alcoholic father and a narcissistic mother, and so many of her issues stem from her childhood. Like the Big Book says, she is sick. I am sick too…I’m just starting my recovery. I still have time to free myself from the patterns that might hold me tight to my misery. I don’t want to be bitter and lonely when I grow old. As crazy as this sounds, thank you for alcoholism, because it just might be the thing that keeps me from growing up to be just like my mom.

So please God, help me to make wise decisions about my mom’s care, her finances, her housing, and her caregivers. And please take care of my mom, because there is only so much that I can do, and she is really miserable.

Thanks for listening.