Digging Down
I've been holding back. I write long posts, some that bring tears to my eyes and then I delete them. I don't want to seem bitter to others, even though I've no plans to promote this blog. I don't want to make my parents seem to be horrid people. I don't want anyone to think I'm being unfair.
Yes, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I appear to others. It's the way I was brought up. My mother's and father's opinion of me, the opinions they felt others drew of me...I can't just stop and say this is how I feel, this is what I think, without hearing "What will people think?"
Not my story but a friend's. She came home again, after living and traveling all over the world to rural mid South and lived with her parents. Failed marriage, broke, depressed as well she might have been, prone to starve herself. She told me one day that her mother didn't want her to fill her anti-depressants locally because "What would people think?" And it made me so damned angry to hear her say that she drove three hours to go pick up the prescription, if she had money to buy them then...She took her own life a year later. And I wondered if her mother thought then "What will people think?"
Well I'm angry at myself for letting what others might think hinder my healing. I can't shut this stuff within me forever and not have it eat me up inside. I don't want to go in the opposite direction either and spew it at every given opportunity. I've done that. It makes me feel just as ill when it's all I allow myself to think and speak. To be crude it's a bit like the swings of bowel functions from one thing to another. I have to let this go. I want to lay it down. I want to walk away from it and leave it somewhere.
So I'm going to try to stop restraining my thoughts and just do that.
Hand in hand with narcissism are so many other mental issues. Compulsive shopping, compulsive eating, addiction, hoarding, chronic lying, abusing others...Just to name a few. There are likely more.
With my mother it was all of the above.
I was the scapegoat. The one who had to pay for her pain, her anger, her sins. I was also chosen to be her partner in crime. I was the one who had to take the blame for it all. It was MY selfishness, My ugliness, MY issue, MY lacks, My unwillingness to fall in line with HER plans. Me. I was the one who was broken and wrong.
And that is what formed who I became. A goody two shoes. A worker drone bee. A giver who refused to be a taker in any form, even the most healthy ways. A get along girl. A quiet figure in the background of others lives. The abused. And for all that some of those things I was told were wrenched into opposites, I did become broken. I was wrong in too many ways.
So all that to share a very simple thing, a small revelation, a tiny bit of light shining on something that has eaten at me.
This week was shopping week. It's all grocery shopping these days, at least on the surface. Now truth told it's not all the compulsive spending she does anymore. She has renewed her interest in mail order catalogs. New clothes. Cheap gadgets. Truth told it's all very cheap things and all very well hidden in the depths of a closet, or under a bed, or deep in a drawer or even under a couch cushion. But for public viewing, for family, she 'only' spends on groceries these days. She spends far too much money on that. Not just a personal opinion. Based on government guidelines for a single senior aged female her spending is triple what a LIBERAL spending budget should be.
I accepted her list and the task of going into the store to get the items upon it. And she said to me "And I have candy on my list. I want it ALL and in the BIGGEST bags. I know what it costs. I don't care just get it. I can afford it!" She wanted six different candies, to the tune of an average of $12 per bag. Moments earlier she'd been complaining over a utility that cost the same amount for a month of usage. And this candy will not last out the month.
I kept asking myself as I did her shopping, piling things into the cart, knowing full well that in two weeks I'll go back and do the same again and in the between week she'll have my niece doing the same, "Why does this bother me so? Why does it make me feel angry and guilty at the same time? What does this have to do with me?"
When we came back to her home she made it plain as she has in the past that I was not to put things away, simply to unload them and she'd do it. But she went off to the bathroom and I thought I'd just put the ice cream (three cartons) into the freezer and discovered that she had multiple boxes of a breakfast pastry she'd asked me to pick up, too. I quickly shut the freezer and told myself "It doesn't matter. They might not even be full boxes...and likely they aren't" But then she came back into the room and said "Oh this box of crackers can go there in that cabinet. I opened the cabinet and it was packed full. Not with unopened boxes but with open ones.
She isn't keeping a pantry. She will periodically go through and toss boxes because the best by date has arrived or is about to arrive. She throws away perfectly good foods. But she also is compulsively eating. There is no way she should be eating her way through six giant bags of candy in two weeks or even a month. As well as three cartons of ice cream and frozen pie slices and bags and bags of chips (full sized).
It hit me later this week that what she's done, under the guise of expecting me to 'help' her, is made me a partner in her bad habits yet again. We're right back to my youth when she'd go off on a Saturday to shop and literally fill the trunk with new clothes and shoes and sneak them into the house on Monday morning after Daddy left for work and hide them in the closet. She always bought something for me as well but ordered me not to wear it until she said it was okay, "So your Daddy won't know..." It was right back to my childhood when we'd diet for weeks and then she'd suddenly fill my plate with a second helping or hand me a bowl of dessert that encompassed three servings worth and said "Let's splurge!"
When confronted by Daddy about the new clothing or shoes she'd say "Oh I've had it for months and months! It was in the back of the closet all this time...Ask your daughter..." Or when the scales would gradually return to their former level of weight "I don't know why you can't just lose weight! You just must take after your Daddy's side of the family. They're all fat on that side..." Never mind that her own weight was back up as well.
I don't want to be co-dependent in her life any more. I loathe the role I've been pushed into by her senior age.
She does need help getting the groceries. She needs someone to do the shopping and to do all the lifting and carrying. Physically she needs that help. I don't know how to stop this particular pattern under the circumstances. I don't feel it's up to me to tell her what I will and won't buy, what she ought to have and what she oughtn't. It's one reason I've loved the shortages during this virus thing. I could legitimately return to the car, hand her the list and say, "I couldn't get the things that aren't marked out." There was some satisfaction in being restricted by circumstances.
Maybe, just maybe recognizing that this is the role she's tried to thrust upon me once more is enough to step back from it and acknowledge that it's HER problem. The overspending is her issue. The over eating is her issue. The hoarding and waste are her issues.
They are not mine, not a single one of them. I have overcome all of those things long ago. I have won the battle of trying to find balance in those areas and I am maintaining it.
Face it. Sociopaths are children mentally. You can throw reason out the window.It's always going to be,I want,I want. Give me, Give me,Give me and what have you done for me lately.
ReplyDeleteYou really should walk out of your mother's house ,proud of what you have become. You have literally raised yourself, without her help. You were the mother and she was the child.
I didn't realize that would filter through as unknown. MY Email was showing when I began. You know you are a really good writer. You should write a book.
ReplyDeleteShell
Hello, I found your blog and while I was reading I was really into your story. You write really well.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry for your childhood and part of adulthood.
I have a father like that and it was a hell, now I fight back with the same force. when a person is mean, he will never change, he likes to belittle people, make them feeling like crap. I stopped that, my father has no right to do that.
Healing will never happen, basically I try to live with painful memories, not easy but so far I was and I'm succesful. Writing was a huge help, if something can be written and be contained in a diary page is manageable :)
I send you a big hug!!
Federica