Just got back from the annual ordeal--a fun-filled week in lovely Door County, WI. It is really one of my favorite places on earth. If only I didn't have to be there under the circumstances we always have.
Its late now; in fact my husband just got UP to go to work and I am STILL up, not a good sign. So I am going to re-post a letter i wrote to a friend about the trip. I will fill in some details later. Let me jsut add that this board had become an amazing and handy place to keep track om my ongoing issues with Madame Puppet-Master and the rest of the gang.
Here is the letter:
Thank God it's over.
SIL and her kids are getting as fed up with Mom as we are. Bro-Whatever is apparently practicing for the ass-kissing Olympics. He is a champion among enablers. His relationship with my mother has always seemed extremely peculiar to me, partly as a stand-in for my dead brother, partly sexual. On this trip, however, they reached a new level of creepiness.
Mom has a couple of legitimate health problems, to be sure, but she works them and exaggerates them to the point of being both ludicrous and disgusting. She mostly refused to walk for herself, preferring instead to have Bro-Whatever push her around on a walker. But....when she got mad at us, she stood up and walked just fine! She kept refusing to eat her food or drink beverages for some reason or other, many having to do with her faked or exaggerated blindness. She kept demanding we stop what we were doing (attempting to have fun) to cater to her demands (hungry, thirsty, bathroom, etc.) She wanted Brenda and me to give up days of our vacation to take her shopping for clothes (she had plenty) or a swimsuit (she never gets in the water). Every breakfast was started late because she could not get her shit together (except the one morning where Ted and I went for a bike ride and got back late--that day they were right on time!). The list goes on...and on...and on.
She also has 2 new problems--drooling and incontinence--which she also exaggerates. Why anyone would purposely make themselves disgusting is beyond me, but she seems to revel in it. I got fed up with her one day because she kept drooling on my hand while I was trying to help her with one of her numerous wardrobe malfunctions. I simply told her to quit drooling on me because it is disgusting. She started whining aobut how she can't help it. I told her if she would stand up straight the spit would run down the back of her throat where it belonged. Funny, but I didn't see her drooling the rest of the day! She also peed on a jacket I lent her, and I was afraid she had peed in my car. Lucky for her she didn't, because there is almost nothing I hate the smell of more than human piss.
Bro-Whatever is also maneuvering to further entrench himself as the "golden child" in Narcissistic Personality Disorder parlance. I noticed a couple of times on vacation where he arranged things so that he was going somewhere with Mom and purposely excluding me. Its interesting especially since we made ourselves fairly scarce for most of the trip. There really seemed to be no need to further try and separate us.
Apparently (according to Ted and SIL) the worst outbursts occur when Bro-Whatever or I am present, and the very worst (on the level of temper tantrums) happen when Bro-Whatever is around but not me. If she is simply alone with SIL or Ted or the kids, she is less goofy but still odd. I suspect this is because she still would like to control me, but recognizes that Bro-Whatever is the true narcissistic supply goldmine. However, I don't take her shit. I tell her quietly but firmly that I do not believe she is as sick as she pretends to be and that I resent her attempts to exert control over people by pretending to have problems she does not really have. I also tell her, when she starts playing the victim of her illnesses, that many of her problems are the direct result of her refusal to care properly for her body and therefore I don't have a lot of sympathy for them.
I feel really bad for SIL. Ted witnessed a couple of moments where Bro-Whatever completely ignored her to tend to Mom's imaginary problems. I can guess what is going to happen. Since Bro-Whatever is the only one who will treat Mom with the ass-licking deference she feels she deserves, I predict she will continue to call him and make up reasons he needs to come to Joliet to do stuff for her. It will start to consume his weekends and time off, and before long he will be spending all his days off wearing a dent in the pavement between his house and hers. She tried several times to put enough pressure on me to ruin my marriage, and I am sure she will do the same to Bro-Whatever. She will not quit until she has become the most important person in his life, and even then it won't be enough. She will continue to make demands on his time and attention until he has nothing left to give.
Maybe Mom will die soon and release all of us from her shit.
