My life is pretty content, if you take the bigger picture. But the buggar is the ongoing issues that need sorting. Its good to parcel them up and see them as projects that need to be dealt with - like work: clock on for a bit, form a plan, do stuff, and clock off and go walk up a mountain. Mind you its taken me most of my 62 years to realise that!
This wonderful contentment has crept into my life over the last year or so - after a lifetime of looking for it, and failing miserably (don't get me wrong, there's been lots of fab stuff, but it was up and down, up and down, and down again, at times seeming relentlessly) - suddenly it became my default state of being.
But right now I'm feeling a bit vulnerable because for the first time I am considering ratting out and not being there for my mother. It would be good to talk it over, but not something I can discuss with just anybody because it involves saying things like I don't like her, I don't love her, she's been horrible to me all my life, has said horrible things about me to everybody around her, she has affected who I am and how I relate to the world (all negative, I am afraid) in a big way. And now she's old and vulnerable and on her own. She's on that upward curve of neediness, the one that starts gradually and gets steeper and steeper (til you think you'll fall off backwards) and we're just on the cusp of where it gets steep.
She got very ill 2 years ago and since then I've known that in a way the party is over: she will need more, she is my mother and felt I could not live with myself if I turned my back on her. So I have done my daughterly duty which mostly consists of very practical things like sorting papers and ferrying her to and from hospital appointments.
But she played me last week - she has it to a T - she got me running over there for something I could have done over the phone in seconds, and which certainly didn't merit "[pathetic wavery voice] oh I can't go on like this......please can you come and [long pause] well i can't really wait til tomorrow [when I was due to go anyway]". I arrived, having put my life on hold to sort out her living arrangements, to curt dismissals of my offers to do even the smallest thing.
So, I could do with a bit of support. I could do with having a bit back - specifically from my son who is on the other side of the world busy proving he doesn't need a mother - but who instead of a sympathetic ear gave me a litany of complaints about me as a person and about my perception of my mother (who has played him as well. its what she does. divide and rule).
So, this week its been exhaustion.
No comments:
Post a Comment