Oh my word, thank you for all your wonderful, supportive replies. I thought that not many people would reply with it being New Year’s Day. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for replying on a day that is regarded as a family day. I did write this post because of mother being unkind and manipulative yet again, and I know I should rise above it and accept she’ll never change and it’s how I deal with her that must change. I want to address some of your questions, but it may take a while, and so I’ll start with the questions about my sister.
Life is never straight forward is it? My sister has been very badly damaged by the way she brought up, and by subsequent treatment after her marriage. As a consequence she suffers very poor mental health and has done for years. About thirty years ago she cut off the whole family. She was mentally ill and alcoholic. She remained non contact for seven years. The final two years she spent under the care of her psychiatrist and she gradually improved, to the point that she wanted to resume contact with her family. Unfortunately some ten years ago her husband died. She was just sixty years old. Since then she has deteriorated again to such a point that a normal relationship with her has become impossible. However, conversely she has gradually become more and more involved with mum, even though she rarely sees her because she lives 250 miles away. They speak for one to two hours on the phone every day. She doesn’t do anything practical for mum because she’s so far away, and I understand that and have no problem with it, especially since the last two years have been in pandemic. My sister has gone from frequently ignoring mum, and never visiting her even when they lived close to each other, to now phoning every day. As my niece says, Nana (my mum) is now on Team G….. In other words, after all these years and all the damage inflicted on my sister as she grew up, my sister is now, for the first time ever, very close to our mother. So it is difficult for us to present a united front to mother because I’m the one who gets the flack now. We used to both get it, but now it’s just me. Maybe my sister is protecting herself, so when the inevitable happens, she won’t feel guilty.
After saying she was ill for a few weeks, though eating and drinking normally (according to her carers) and refusing to get out of bed at all, mum eventually had a meltdown last night. She demanded the carers got her a doctor. Her own doctor had already assessed her and said she had a suspected, mild flare up of her diverticulitis and prescribed antibiotics. She refused to take them saying she didn’t have diverticulitis. So when the out of hours doctor came last night he diagnosed a suspected, mild flare up of her diverticulitis and prescribed more antibiotics, saying she had to take them this time. The care home didn’t let us know so we know it’s not serious. However mum decided to tell the care staff to ring her daughter 250 miles away and tell her, but she didn’t answer my text from last night. Sister then asked her son to ring me and tell me that mother is ‘very poorly.’ This call arrived just as the visiting family and ourselves were sitting down to lunch and upset me. I really don’t need anyone, family or not, to tell me that mum is very ill, especially when she’s not, from 250 miles away and having not seen mum for the last three years. What’s mum playing at? Well she’s just manipulating the situation again to bring the focus and attention on to her. She knew I was making a special New Year’s Day lunch for my family, and mum knew she wasn’t invited (because of her lack of mobility and the ability for her to be safe in my house) and so it goes on.
You’ll understand why I said it was complicated. Nothing about mum is straight forward, everything is about manipulation and about seeking attention on to herself. But I’m going to put my best foot forward and take your advice. One poster is correct, I have said about the difficult relationship I have with my mother before, but it has always been on other threads, so only half addressing my problem, but rather responding to similar problems others have had. I’ve used my difficulties as examples because I know how many of us are out there, judging by Gransnet alone. And the example of the knife has been mentioned once before. That baby is now 44 years old, and the fact that it still hurts me today is testimony to the horror of that little scene in mother’s kitchen, where she laughed so cruelly at my shock and horror of her pretending to offer baby a kitchen devil knife to play with.
