I’m having a bit of difficulty coping – I need someone to talk to, maybe some sympathy, and I’d love some advice. So as a long time lurker, naturally the Dope was the first place I thought of. Be warned, this is long and self-pitying, with little entertainment value.
My mother has always been a difficult person. She’s selfish, self-absorbed, irrational and occasionally cruel. Like many mothers, she’s a martyr, and absolutely nothing in life gives her pleasure. She’s miserable when things go right and worse when things so wrong. She has practically no friends as she is so hard to get along with, and no real interests or hobbies. I don’t think she likes herself and in incapable of being happy. I feel terribly sorry for her and I’m slowly grasping the reality that I can’t improve her life in any way – she is just beyond help.
The last few years mother has started to suffer memory loss. She is in total denial about this even though my father, her sister and I have discussed our concerns with her repeatedly. She won’t talk with her doctor about it. Mum has always been the kind of person who remembers things her own way, if you take my meaning. The memory loss and accompanying confusion are making her even harder to deal with, especially as she won’t admit that she forgets or confuses things.
Despite the memory loss and generally “getting old” she insists on keeping working. When she’s out of work she is miserable and moans and complains to me and dad constantly. When she gets a job, she’s great for a short time (literally – a few days) and then the complaints start again, with a different flavour. Dad has told her repeatedly that she doesn’t have to work. Financially, they are in a position where she can retire now as long as he works for a few more years. He loves his job and is happy to keep working. But for various confused reasons, she insists that she “has” to work – mum seems to think that they will run out of retirement money if she doesn’t.
Over the past few weeks the situation has grown worse. Mum is threatening to divorce my father over the money issue – she sends me hugely detailed emails (sometimes more than one, as she’s forgotten about the first one) about their fights. How can I possibly respond to that? I’m not going to take sides against my own father! The details are unnecessary – she seems to add them to prove she isn’t losing her memory. But then from email to email, the details blur and change.
After responding to the “I can’t take it anymore, I’m going to divorce him” email I heard nothing for DAYS. Then, I get an email and a phone call from my dad saying that I should call my mum as she’s worried about me and hasn’t heard from me in a while. I could have torn my hair out! So, I call my mother, who has now turned from worrying about her own financial situation to worrying about mine. Yes, my husband is unemployed. Yes, we just bought a house. Yes, it is tough. However, it’s been that way for six months and you’ve never shown an interest before because you are always so busy worrying about yourself! Forgive me if I don’t believe your concern is sincere, though I am polite enough to keep that belief to myself.
So within a couple of days of this conversation, my husband gets a job. I call my parents to let them know and end up having a long and pleasant chat with my dad. He promises to tell mum about the new job. A day or two after that I get another email from mum. Despite having been frantic with worry about my financial situation less than a week beforehand, she doesn’t say *anything *about the new job. In fact, her email opens with “Hello and how is the world treating you? I hope you are having a better day than I am.” A form expression of polite interest immediately segues into a rant about how my father is abusing her and how difficult her job is and how she doesn’t know why she bothers anymore and she just can’t take it.
Now I know she is probably tired and stressed and lonely and has no-one else to talk to, but I can’t help but feel depressed that my mother just has no interest in me or my life. Just about every phone conversation we have she tells me how much she misses me (I have lived in another state for six years). But she never calls (I’m always the one who initiates phone calls), she has never visited (in-laws have visited every year and are talking about coming here for Christmas 2009), she doesn’t remember stuff I tell her about my life here from one call to the next (even before her memory problems). She doesn’t miss me at all – she just misses having someone to moan at, take her shopping and indulge her nonsense.
My husband is a lot less tolerant of my mother’s bullshit than I am. When I tried to talk to him about how upset this made me his response was pretty much “Your mother’s always been like this. Why does it still bother you?” Well, I don’t know. I nearly lost my temper and raised my voice a bit at that. I think that the fact that a mother doesn’t love her only child is kind of a big deal, doncha think?
My close friends here have enough on their plates at the moment. Friend #1 is still grieving over her father’s death. This has been complicated by catching her husband trying to cheat on her with one of her good friends (it’s a long story – and entertaining, for those people who like relationship trainwrecks). Friend #2 has recently moved interstate twice for her boyfriend’s work – he’s now lost his job and she’s gone from 5 days a week to 2, so things are tough for them right now. And Friend #3’s father-in-law was just arrested and charged with soliciting a minor online. There isn’t anyone else I’d feel close enough to to discuss this with right now.
So that leaves you lovely people. If anyone’s stuck this out long enough to get to the end, thanks for listening. It certainly helps getting it off my chest. Advice is welcome, because I’m at my wit’s end.
