I had some stuff gel for me yesterday. I took my mother to get the first cataract surgery done yesterday. One of the nurses made a comment about how much my mother complains. Apparently, it is a lot. One of my friends said she is just old. Well, she was on the cataract surgery floor. EVERYONE was old. And yet HER complaining stood out. She complained from the moment she went back to get ready until she was in the car. And when I told her about it she said she had every right to complain and sited her complaints as justification for complaining.
The nurse asked what was wrong with her. I answered that she was not happy. But the question got me thinking.
Okay.
She doesn't just complain, no. She acts out if her complaints are not validated.
Narcissistic with traits of borderline personality disorder.
No, my degree is not in psych. It's in Elementary Ed. But let me just say that we do a lot of dealing with psych. Bruno Bettelheim thinks we should be even more trained in psychoanalysis. But then, he would.
But here's the story. Distorted as it might be by my own lens.
When my mother was married to my father and things were going the way she thought they should things were mostly cool. She did all the things she thought she should be doing and my dad did all the things she thought HE should be doing .
Then he stopped doing many of the things she thought he should be doing and things got much less cool. And mum got sicker. Physically and mentally. She had many ailments and injuries that required my dad to pay attention to her and take care of her.
Then my dad stopped doing ANY of the things she thought he should be doing and left to live with his girlfriend. Things got awful for a while.
mum locked herself in her room for a week. My brother was 9, I was 11. We took care of ourselves because she told us to go away. Then she stopped talking to us and we decided she was dead and called her best friend. She was not dead. She was drunk. She slowly pulled out of that and figured out what to do with her life.
Go back to school, get a job, find another man to pay her the kind of attention she wanted.
There were lots of men.
Now, my brother and I were getting older. We were finding our won ways to take care of ourselves. Not skillful ways but they worked then. And we did not want attention from mum and she did not want to give it. She left us to our own devices and turned a blind eye when she stumbled onto our drugs. She even went so far as to take orders for the state store and buy us liquor since we were too young to do that ourselves and she thought it was better if we drank at home with our friends. Not to mention that she would not have to fetch us from the police station or the park should drinking *out* go wrong. She thought this was a good solution.
But when we moved out she directed much wrath at whichever child got married or moved out. When we were both gone she settled down for a while with a long time boyfriend.
Now all the men are gone and we are the targets of her behaviour.
Now she drinks into a blackout when we displease her.
I don't play along as much as I can (sometimes I've played along before I notice it). She thinks I'm just mean or that I don't love her. ah well, I try to be kind and patient and when I can't I leave. Which she takes as my abandoning her. I totally understand. I just can't stay with her to the exclusion of my ow life.
So what was new to me was that this situation, this mental illness, has been playing out for a long time. Did it play out in her childhood? I have no idea.
What I found so interesting was the timeline and how this behaviour has been going on and building for years. Of course she is not happy. no one is doing what she wants anymore.
And then there is my Aunt Louise. But she would take up another whole post all of her own and I just don't care to go into it. Let's just say older than my mother with a marriage that lasted until my uncle died but VERY similar personalities. And she is a great complainer and judge.
This gives me pause to question my own mental health. But then I've got help with sorting that out. And I have been assured that I do NOT have Borderline Personality Disorder. Good! But then neither does my mother. At least not ALL the traits. But then the fact that she has taken up drinking so much more in recent years makes the whole *what is wrong with her* messier.
No wonder I never felt connected to her. I was not doing what she wanted from the very first day I arrived. separate a sick baby from an emotionally/mentally unstable mother for months? Hmm. that just sets up all sorts of issues. I was never really sure that she liked me. and it is probably true. This may also be why I do not find is as necessary as my brother to meet her needs. I've never been very good at it so why practice getting better at it now?
I don't have any idea how this may read. But it was jolly interesting to me to get it into a timeline and have everything laid out like this.
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