PP, I relate. One thing I noted in your piece was that your father actually, imo, shared a very intimate confidence with you. That comment sounded to me as though it was a true thing, and perhaps very similar to how he felt about being a parent (and being spouse to your mother must have been awful):
I know what's happening but I can't talk about it any more.
One thing in the last 8 years that I only occasionally stopped to think of, is that for all my mother's incessant demands and pouting and complaining and maneuvering and manipulating and craving attention beyond anything I can describe, I often forgot that she never lived with her parents even for a week after she left home at 18. She never went for long visits, and missed her mother's funeral.
Yet for decades, she convinced me I owed her more than any child could reasonably give. (And I bought the story.) Pretty staggering how she could hoist that inconsistency in front of me and I'd never question it...
Hops
Hopsy,
Our parents have burdened us with a huge double-standard. My mother hated her own mother and did as little with or for her as she possibly could. All my childhood I heard the stories about her unreasonable mother, my grandmother, and it was all true. All the daughters saw the truth about their mother and none of them was close to her. But now I think, well, how come you never felt any sense of duty toward her? She expected me to be dutiful toward my parents, but she exempted herself from those duties. I'm sure she believed that since I had a wonderful mother, that it simply wasn't the same thing at all. But I picked up on my responsibilities as a duty that did not seem to depend on whether my parents
deserved such treatment. Whereas it seems to me that the message she gave about her own mother was that she didn't
deserve dutiful daughters.
When my grandmother was diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer, my mother did visit her in the hospital and talk to the doctors and things like that. But she rarely visited to check on her once out of the hospital (gramma was a widow by then) and refused to invite her to our house for dinner after gramma made the mistake of hinting that she would like to be invited over. My mother would, however, drop
me off to share a meal or an evening with my grandmother. My mother was too busy with her boyfriend to be bothered with being a dutiful daughter. And apparently I was being groomed for that role anyway.
I would say that you also were groomed for the role of dutiful daughter. I suppose that idea comes naturally to the N-istic ones. They don't owe
their parents anything at all, but
they are all-deserving of the worshipful chores
we can perform for them.
Oh, I so did not want to become a bitter person!!
Now this is where the slight difference between Asperger's and Narcissism comes in. My father was just the opposite with his parents. We spent many Sundays visiting my paternal grandfather during my childhood. We celebrated his birthday each year. The last month of his life we decided to invite him to our house for dinner once a week because he was lonely after the death of my uncle who had lived with him. The last week of his life, my father and his remaining brother and sister took turns spending the night with him to keep watch. They were with him when he went to the hospital and died. My father was a willing participant in this care of his parent. And I don't think they were particularly close. My father wasn't easy to get along with. He hinted that his father wasn't easy to get along with either. But he could still be reciprocal with his parent and family in general. My mother is more one-directional. Very one-directional.
As
unfair as it is that you have given up so much for your mother's care, I tend to think that it is a very normal, human, loving thing to do. You may have been groomed for it, as I think I was too. But it just seems natural on some level too. But then again, maybe I'm just brainwashed!
Interestingly enough, my mother has decided that my
sister is the one who will care for her in her old age. The reason she gave me? My sister will be caring for her, because I don't understand my sister as well as she does. Huh? Because I don't get along with my sister, my sister has to take care of my mother? Does anybody know what kind of triangle that is?!? Why, that doesn't make any kind of sense at all. But.....it does get me off the hook
. So, I haven't tried to talk her out of it at all. Slowly learning.
The day my father admitted that he understand he was terminal but could not talk about it anymore was quite a terrible day. The social worker had the whole story as far as what kind of care he was getting, palliative. We knew only that one week ago he was getting an IV bone strengthener with the intention of then beginning chemo. The doctor never gave us the real scoop in so many words. We were just feeling our way around in the dark in some respects. I don't know if no one had the guts to break it to my ever-hopeful father or if this particular group of people just handled all terminal patients this way. I mean, hospice would have been real helpful to us by this point. But the social worker laid it on the line and my father got real mad at her and basically kicked her out of the room after asking me if I "knew". But I hadn't known. I told him I suspected it because some things didn't add up. But no one had told me anything that they hadn't told him.
And right at that moment, the funeral directors walked in. I had asked my father to pre-pay his funeral in preparation for entering the nursing home, so that his money wouldn't be used up on his care. I had no idea he was really that close to the end of his life. And I had hated to even ask him to help me with that. But he got all excited about the idea of the prepaid funeral and treated it like a project. Called all the funeral homes in town, found the one who sounded the nicest on the phone, and made an appointment for them to come to the hospital and start planning. And they arrived at the worst possible moment. Somewhat funny in retrospect. There they were in the doorway with their beautiful suntans, black suits and black briefcases. And the social worker is yelling at them to wear masks and gowns because my father was contagious with MRSA (staph). So, I go down the hall into another office to make these plans and my father stays in bed and watches TV.
I really don't know how anybody does these things. It seems to me that those last three weeks I was just carried along by that greater force. In some ways, it was good that I didn't really know for sure just how close the end was. My sister is a nurse, and she saw him about two weeks before he died, when he was his most lucid, and she predicted he would make it to Christmas. He made it until October 29th. I think it was his own belief that he would last until spring(!) that had most of us fooled. You could see his belief before you could see his wasted away arms which should have been a clue just how close it was.
We went to NYC this weekend to visit our son. He suggested we go see the exhibit called "Bodies" which is being held at the South Street Seaport. I won't describe it here, because it is actually very disturbing. But it does examine the human body underneath the skin. We saw one body that showed bones and tendons and I instantly remembered how wasted away my father's arms were at the end. You couldn't see the tattoos on his arms very well anymore because of the wasting. Two years later and I'm in NYC looking at an exhibit from China and it brings back that memory of my father's arms again. He had been very muscular as a young man. On his deathbed he maybe weighed sixty or seventy pounds. It's hard to comprehend.
I think my father had some capability of relating that my mother does not have. I'm so close to it though. It's confusing. At this time I'm letting things take a natural course. Actually I don't contact my mother any more than necessary. Sort of like with my N-co-worker. She doesn't even complain any more that I'm "screening" her. All caught up in her own dramas at the moment. I bet she would be totally shocked to think I believe she has a personality problem. And it would be nice to think that she could, somewhere down the line, reveal an ability to recognize me as a real and separate person if something were to change in her life. But it doesn't seem like the memories add up that way.
Lots to think about.
((((((((((Hopsy)))))))))))
That's for being such a dutiful daughter. It really is a big deal.
Love, Pennyplant
