I hear my friends complain about their parents sometimes. I see movies where middle aged people are having problems dealing with their difficult parents. They're all soldiering through helping their parents deal with life all the while being shit on or yelled at or badgered in ungrateful ways by the very people they're trying to help.
It doesn't seem odd. It seems commonplace. Parents get old and need the help of their kids and apparently, often, they are not very nice about it.
All of this imagery confuses the hell out of me, because I simply don't feel it. I am not compelled to continually lay myself bare for my mom in an effort to help her and be slapped in the face each time. I don't have the, what, the connection? I don't have the familial innate urge to hold on to that relationship at all costs. I feel guilty about it too, I really do, until my mom makes me feel justified in my actions, like she always does.
My mom is in horrible condition now as a result of her burst aneurysm and resulting emergency surgery to save her life. She barely weighs 98 lbs, she sounds like she's 80 years old and she's only 58 years old. She has no spleen so she can't fight bacterial infection. The worst part is that somehow, and they can't figure out why, she has lost the use of her right arm completely. It is dead. It hangs lifeless at her side or resides in a sling now, unusable and more of a hindrance than a help. Her left arms is starting to lose feeling as well. She's had a spinal tap, she's seen neurologist, she's doing what she should to figure this out but no one can tell her exactly what happened.
Add to this that she is also trying her hardest to reconcile with her husband who in turn will not tell her if he is or isn't still planning on divorcing her. He's a charmer. He keeps telling her he'll decide in February and that's a long time away, which it totally is since it's only the second week of January.
She can't make a decision without asking his permission, we can't stop by she has to ask him, we can't take her shopping she has to ask him, she can't see the grandkids she has to ask him. It's beyond frustrating.
Part of my moms reconciliation process is that my wife and I treat her husband nicely. I hate him. He's a 50 year old mama's boy spoiled brat who resorted to alcoholism because, in his own words, my mom paid more attention to their daughter than to him. This is the man I am supposed to just welcome back into our lives with open arms; I usually tell this sort of people what assholes they are right to their faces, I don't know if you've met me, I can be a tad abrasive.
So now here we sit, we KNOW she needs us, we are certain he will indeed leave her with that distant date of "February" rolls around. We know she has nothing but $100,000.00 hospital bill and some clothes from 1987 to her name and we know we are her only family. We know all of this but she is apparently not aware of any of this. I don't know what the fuck she's thinking and I can't ask her because I can't stress her out. If I push, she could lose it and end up back in the hospital, the one that doesn't take her insurance (all of them).
I want to walk away from this. I want to leave her to take care of herself so badly, like she did when she left us to the monster that is our father. She's a grown god dammed woman. I want to never return her calls and never call her back.
I wish the movie would end now and we would reconcile and the credits would roll.
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