Caring for my mother

Probably long overdue for you @querentxyz ....

Enjoy ❣

I saw Mum today!

Part of me had somehow got to thinking that if I got some rest from Mum, that I could go back home again and just have everything be all better for me, like I could handle everything all over again, if I could just get a little rest first. But one more set of conversations about childhood rapes has shown me again that this is not the case for me. Talking about these matters truly exhausts me. I can't get a rest that will build me up and then go back to a situation until it wears me down and I use another rest, it's not like that. Talking about these things is always going to wear me down, no matter how built up I am. I need to face these things with the expectation that they will impact on me in a way that is difficult for me to handle. Maybe then I will be able to handle them better.

It is really difficult to negotiate with Mum! She doesn't negotiate, she just does what she wants. I learned today that it is better to just go along with whatever she wants to do, and to approach all interactions with her having completely given up any expectations at all of anything that I want from the interactions. If I don't do what she wants to do, she will just make things a lot more difficult, and in some weird and much more uncomfortable way, we will end up doing what she wanted to do anyway. I don't know why I never figured any of that out before, it seems obvious now.

I don't really understand why Mum doesn't love me. I don't know why she can't appreciate or respect that the way she acts hurts who I am. To me, that is love... when you recognise that another person needs certain things and you interact with them in a way that does not encroach on those parts of them. That's not at all the way my mother expresses her love towards me. She just acts however she wants, does whatever she wants. So long as she is satisfied, it doesn't really matter how she treats me.

I know this is terrible to say. But when Mum dies, I will be very sad. But I will also be relieved. It will be like as though there will no longer be a dark cloud over my life. Isn't that a horrible thing to say?

Wow, what a tiring day! It's at times like these that I'm not completely sure about anything. I feel confused.

Hi @querentxyz

I understand. My MIL is like that, for different reasons .... she lost her father in war circumstances ... and saw him after the fact when they brought him back to the family home to be dressed for burial .... he had been her world ....

And her mother lost two of her children in infancy ... and was retrying to raise her four remaining children in post-war poverty, and became quite hardened in the process of survival under those conditions.

My MIL is emotionally scarred in a way that means she can't express love in the form I know love to be. Relationships to her are power plays, and buying and selling people with material gifts .... or expressing appreciation through material gifts, food, platitudes, etc ....

A contributing factor perhaps as to why my husband is in the state he's in now ....

In any case, I hear you .... understand where you're coming from with that ❣

I am so angry, so furious I could break something. I am just feeling really angry and enraged about my mother coming to visit me yesterday. I told her and tried to make it really clear that I just wanted two weeks alone. And she was like "Well how about I come for lunch on the weekend? But only if you feel up to it," and I was thinking how ridiculous, it is ridiculous of me to need time, of course I am up to it. So I said "Well OK, why don't you come for lunch then." Lunch ended up turning into all day. All day talking about rape and grief, of trying to constantly distract my mother from her rages against service people and who ever got in her way.

I am so angry. It was supposed to be my two weeks to be alone without work or study. I made an enormous effort to clear it. I did all this extra work all at once just so that I could have a couple of weeks alone with my thoughts without being interrupted. The time I was doing all that work ate into my two weeks. Then I can't even seem to have a week alone. Obviously that was too much to expect.

I am so angry about this. Why can't she leave me alone? All I wanted was just two weeks without talking about rape and grief every single day. I have been thinking "No, it's OK, it was fine," but this afternoon, I just realise that I am completely furious.

I really need to try and make the experience of yesterday into a positive thing that I can learn from about how to really be clear in future about keeping to my plans and saying "No, lunch is not OK. No, I don't want to do that, I have other plans."

She doesn't care about me. Even when I said how much I need time alone. All she cares about is her hatred and grief.

OK. I feel slightly better now that I sorted out my emotions about this

Oops. Your mother is so in need and unfortunately turning to you for all support but in the process of doing this she is not being respectful of your boundaries. This is a very difficult situtation. Have you tried to enforce your boundaries? I mean have you vocalised your need for "time out" and your desire to not speak about rape etc? I have a daughter who very actively enforces her boundaries when we are chatting. She immediately shuts down any conversation that crosses her boundaries and is not backward about coming forward with this. Although this often feels like a slap in the face to me, I also totally appreciate where she is coming from and respect her stance. If you haven't already done this I think it's time to let your mother know that you are happy to connect with her, but not to talk about xx and xx and xx. Be clear in your communications with her. Tell her upfront that you do NOT want to discuss xx and xx. You need to enforce your boundaries and make her aware of them.

Only you can enforce these boundaries. Your mother has no idea what a boundary is by the sound of it. It may be worth you getting some support for yourself by engaging in therapy with a view on how best to handle your mother. Never feel that you have to do this alone. There is support out there.

Your mother has some serious issues which she needs to sort out and she needs to understand that you do not have the capacity to hold all her emotional trauma and grief. She needs a good trauma therapist to help her.

This is NOT your responsibility. She needs to take ownership over her own problems and refrain from dragging you into her maelstrom of emotional instability. Unfortunately this means you have to get tough and enforce boundaries which may potentially hurt.

All the best

Janna ❤️

Hi @querentxyz

I am not surprised you are experiencing anger like this ...

I think it is part of coming to terms with respecting your own needs and boundaries, when for a long time you have put these aside in the interests of supporting your mother as her carer.

It is a very important lesson to learn as a carer that your own needs are just spas important as everyone else's, that you matter just as much .... that fact is often lost when you are empathetic and giving by nature.

@Janna is so right though ... you cannot carry all your mother's grief and rptrauma, otherwise you will be burdened by it to the point where you need trauma counselling too ... but you do need counselling support to cope with caring for someone who has experienced trauma like your mother's and has spent a lifetime struggling with the grief aspect of that ...

Baby steps .... you are in the process of getting it sorted out. I am guessing that you can see for yourself that having your own living space has been instrumental in staring that process, and now you are experiencing ongoing stages .... a counsellor can help you to recognise and process through these stages too.

Does your mother have psychological and or psychiatric support ?

Have you spoken to your GP about all of this ? They would be your starting point ....

🌷

Thanks so much for the understanding!

This was a really upsetting one because I articulated how much I needed time alone, and Mum promised me that she would stay away from me. So when she called up asking to come for lunch I was too surprised and confused to refuse. What I realised that this all turned out to be about in the end was her wanting to do a maintenance drive for the battery of my brother's diesel engine car. As always, my baby brother is treated like a prince while my basic needs are trampled. She didn't care enough to listen to me, and she broke her promise. I haven't had a holiday in 5 years and I have become so saturated with my mother's memories and rage that I have nearly lost myself, and this was supposed to be my freedom to focus on my self. I was doing so well and I had all of my time planned out, but all that has been destroyed now.

It says something about how pathetic my life has become that the concept of being left in peace for a week is treasure for me, and that the loss of it represents something that can upset me so intensely. I think that when something disappoints you this deeply, you can either use it to turn your heart into a tiny compressed mass and to lock it down in chains, or to open your heart more, make it bigger and stronger. I choose to be bigger and stronger, but I also see that there isn't enough room in here for both my self, and for the infinite of my mother's grief and trauma.

I have never thought about telling my mother that she can't talk about her experiences and the outcomes. I am trying to support her to write a book about it, and I think achieving that is crucial, and is something she can't do herself, so I don't think I can shut down conversation about those things. What I am hoping to do though is to really clarify the boundaries about other parts of my life so there will be enough energy to talk about the trauma experiences when necessary. I am realising that I need to practice saying the word "NO", almost like I am one of those toddlers who becomes obsessed with that word.

I really appreciate the suggestions to try to find counselling help. I have experienced some difficulty in obtaining this kind of help recently, but the encouragement really helps. I had considered asking here whether it would be a good idea for me to seek counselling support, but it is much better @Janna and @Faith-and-Hope that you have both suggested to me without me asking that this is a good idea. It's not something that I will do RIGHT NOW, but I will do it.

Last time my mother insulted me badly, she realised that things were not going well for her and she found a dedicated GP and got herself onto a mental health care plan with 12 free counselling sessions a year, with a psychologist who seems to be managing not to alienate her. She says that the things that I say to her are much more effective for her, I am looking forward to encourage her to stop seeing me as an on call trauma expert. It just takes a lot of effort to get things through to her. She struggles to listen.

The idea of my own living space sounds like something that I am even a little bit afraid to imagine!

Sorry this is so long, thank you very much for the support. Have a wonderful week. querent

Yeah @querentxyz .... sounds like compassion fatigue .....

That's a lot for you to have inherited as a flow-on effect.

Its probably something my husband is going to have to go into with psych support at some stage. His parents were war-affected, and I can see now that there seems to be a flow-on of unresolved trauma ....

I think I need my own space. I don't think I can continue to cohabit with my mother long term. I was hoping it would be possible. I just don't think that I can make it work.

I think it was last week, or maybe the week before, @querentxyz your mother was giving the impression she was fine to be living on her own, and you were pleasantly surprised by that ...

This has been an experimental time for both of you, and it has helped you both draw some conclusions it seems. It has also broken the mold of your former dynamic, and it is clear you you that it can't be returned to .... that seems to be an insight you can work with. Is that correct ?

Can you begin working out the logistics for where you will live independently ?

Good to hear you are developing direction for yourself, and a sense of being your own person.

😊