Yes, I noticed that bit. Yes, I worry and stress about my friends in Iraq, and yes, I would imagine that if I had a child in Iraq I would be considerably more worried and stressed. I don’t expect the poor woman to be chipper and tear-free. And I do understand that people deal with worry in different ways. However, if she is literally (as reported) making herself sick with grief and so upset that any mention of her son’s deployment is enough to cause uncontrollable weeping, then she needs some kind of help. That level of dysfunctional upset is unhealthy, particularly if you remember that the man is still hale and whole.
Mothers often are like that. They keep hoping that this time it will be different and that their children will love them back. This son is emotionally abusive and a coward. He needs to tell her straight out what his plans are and stick to them. And she needs to respect what he wants.
To the OP: Can you talk to your Dad to let him know what this is doing to the family? If not, I would blackmail the brother. Either he spents pleasant time with Mom or you rat him out to his C.O. If he doesn’t want a lot of family around or a party, that’s fine.
I’ve been lurking in this thread for a while, and, while I sympathize with the mom and think that the son is being an asshole, I agree with the above. This woman reminds me very much of my own mom, who cried so hard when I was mugged that, even though I almost got shot in the head, I found myself having to comfort her first before I could deal with any after-effects of my own. It pissed me off to no end and made me not want to see her at all for a long time. When it happened, everything was about her. “I was so worried. I was so scared. I’m so upset.” She never even bothered to ask me if I was okay and how I was dealing with it. She didn’t care - she was just worried about how she felt.
After a while, I couldn’t have cared less how she felt about it. In fact, I was so upset by that experience that I never told her that I was mugged a second time at gunpoint because I didn’t want to have to deal with her shit while I dealt with my own emotions. It just wasn’t worth it to me to have to comfort her even though I was the one who could have gotten shot.
Obviously, being shipped off to a war is a far different situation, but if you constantly have to comfort someone else when you’re the one being put in danger and you’re the one who’s seeing the atrocities of a war, it seems normal to me that you wouldn’t want to be around that person, even if they are your family.
In my opinion, that’s one of the things you do for the people you love - when they go into a situation where they’re probably scared shitless, even if you’re scared for them, you need to be there for them, not the other way around.
On a side note, do the mom and dad not communicate at all? I know they’re divorced, but it seems like the dad could have told the mom as well about the early flight or at least called to coordinate a little bit. At least that’s what my parents do for holidays and they’ve been divorced for years.
If he’s going back to Iraq, he probably needs to steel himself a little. I don’t think seeing his mother dissolve into tears regularly is going to help him.
