Thursday, November 19, 2015
I don't know how to and I don't know how not to
The concept of leaving a parent is so complex and painful, it is hard to put to words what I am feeling. It feels terrifying to leave and it feels terrifying to stay. Either way, it is heart wrenching. I am just beginning to understand and accept why the relationship cannot continue, and still I am trapped in a state of intermittent fear, panic, guilt and worry. I have felt for my whole life that I am responsible for her. I didn't speak to her of childhood emotional abuse until I had a child myself. I was worried she couldn't handle accountability. I have worried my whole life she would kill herself. When I left home, I really left. I split away from her. I wrote in more journals than I could count. I allowed myself peace, travel, love, self acceptance. I relished in the safety of living away from her. I loved that nobody ever woke me up yelling and slamming things around. Nobody ever shamed me for who I was in my own home. Nobody made me feel like I was not enough. She still called, but she didn't ever come over and I rarely went there. We had some rough times despite the distance, but compared to living under her roof, I felt free. Over the years, I do remember some terrible conversations. I remember begging her on the phone to let me live my life. To support me rather than tear me down and criticize me. I begged for her acceptance. Those times were consistent enough to keep my guard up high enough to keep a healthy distance. Our relationship remained fairly superficial for years. She knew as little as I could possibly share about my life. Interestingly, I don't think she ever realized that, and that was probably why it worked. In my late twenties and early thirties, I felt a change. I felt almost accepted. Not completely, but almost. She had always been proud of me, but that pride was always rivalled by some very big disappointment in all the ways I was not who she wanted me to be. But suddenly those disappointments seemed to fall away and what was left was a proud mother. She liked how I looked all grown up and no longer 'embarrassed' her by looking like a hippie, she liked that I was experiencing success in my career. I was able to do things that I had always wanted to do for her. She loved me extra. I met my husband and began a relationship with someone who fit her approval. She was thrilled. I still was careful what I told her, but bit by bit, I began to let her in. I began to look to her for support - something I really had never done for as long as I have a memory.
What happened to change all of that is like a perfect storm. The first thing that happened to disrupt our brief lapse from the destruction was that my grandmother passed away. That loss coupled with my mom retiring left her in a bad place. I did my best to be supportive, but the loss was so huge for her that there was nothing I could really do. She was like a deep, deep, dark hole. Nothing I did could ever hope to fill it. Months and months after my grandma's passing, nothing improved. She would call and tell me she was sleeping all day. If I couldn't give her what she wanted, if I couldn't give her something in my life to keep her busy, she would tell me that she would just go back to sleep. She would just take another pill. If I couldn't give her a job to do at my house or have her over, or go somewhere with her, she made me feel guilty. I am sure she was not aware that she was doing it, but it felt clear to me - her grief was mine to fix. I had no idea how to fix it. I asked her to get some help. I encouraged her to get a part time job, volunteer, focus on a hobby. She did not want any of that. I was her hobby.
Next, my brother betrayed my husband and I. Without getting into all the details, I will just say that it had been coming for years, there was a lot of resentment behind it and I don't believe it will ever be fixed. My mom could not accept that my brother and I were no longer speaking. I tried tirelessly to explain how important it was for her to let us feel what we were all feeling. To stop pushing because betrayals like that take a long time to heal, and even longer with no apology from my brother, and no sign of him wanting anything to do with us, or his niece I was pregnant with. She pushed and pushed and pushed. Back came the shame. The 'how dare you be angry after all he's done for you'. The denial that what I was feeling was valid. Despite acknowledging how wrong it was, she still somehow made it at least partly my fault. She maintains to this day that I am somehow responsible. He would love to be in our lives, but we won't allow him. He has never, ever, reached out to me to make an attempt to see us. We have been very clear that we would be able to move past it if he wanted to repair things with us, but he has made no attempt. And my mom firmly believes that I am at fault for that.
The final thing that changed this was that I was pregnant with her first and only grandchild. I had no idea how powerful of a change this would cause. The hard part was that both things were going on at the same time. We discovered my brothers indiscretion while I was pregnant and it catapulted a very very negative time between her and I. I was beginning to feel the protectiveness of my child and the sinking realization that if my mom would subject me to pain and destruction, even with a child growing inside of me, there was plenty in store in the years ahead. She kept cranking it up. When she wasn't getting what she wanted from me, she began reminding me more and more often that she had tried killing herself twice and ended up in the psych ward before they adopted my brother and I. In one fight, she told me that she was molested by my uncle as a child. This was an uncle she had left me with when her and my dad went on a trip when I was 3 or 4 years old. She later tried to back peddle that, I still don't know how to process it, or what the truth is. She would tell me that my grandpa burned her with cigarettes. She took a photo of my grandma and went to her room crying that she should just go 'be with grandma'. I was pregnant and absolutely destroyed by these fights. I feel guilty to this day for what my daughter heard and felt while in my belly between my mom and I.
Since that time, there has been more and more destruction and fighting. We're coming up on 4 years of it. Things will be fine for a few months, and then something else happens. Now our issues revolve around my daughter. She is at the centre of all of it. We didn't speak for months because we wanted my aunt to watch our daughter instead of her. She was welcome to be there, but I wanted to give instructions to my aunt and have her be the person we would deal with about her care because I couldn't handle how many of my concerns my mom would disregard and how flippant she was about the things that mattered to me as a new mother. She would refuse to remove pins from the bottoms of her curtains, which were pinned to be hemmed and were in the room our daughter was always in. She just said no. "We'll watch her. We would never let her get hurt". Until I refused to bring her there, she would not remove the pins. When in an effort to stop all of the tension, stress and fights that this stuff would cause, we asked my aunt to watch her, my mom lost it. Completely lost it. She let loose on me and wouldn't let up. When one round of shame and guilt wouldn't work, she would take it to the next level and then the next level and then yet another level. She sent an email pretending to be my dad telling me that I was causing him more pain that he had felt since his mother died. I called to talk to my dad the next morning and he said, "what email?". She told me my late grandmother was disappointed. Her friends were disappointed, nobody could believe what I was "doing to her". It went on for weeks that way until I shut down every form of communication with her. I had my husband let her know that they could make arrangements to visit our daughter by having my aunt call. I wouldn't speak to my mom. She refused to see our daughter under those terms (she had already been refusing to see her if she had to go to my aunts to see her) and she allowed people to believe I was withholding her granddaughter from her. When I blocked all forms of communication with her, she began to call my husband and pass along messages through him. I eventually asked him not to relay any more. My aunt continued to help us, but my mom punished her for it too much and she finally called and said that she couldn't help us anymore.
Next, my mom ended up in the hospital. She had cellulitis on her forehead and it was a very serious case of it. I of course felt completely responsible. Despite the very disapproving looks from those closest to me who knew what I had been through, I let my mom back in. I told her she needed to be seeing a therapist, which after refusing for many years, she had finally taken that step as a result of my pulling out of her life. Things began to improve, but never for long. Every few months, it would all come back. She would go back to the issue of my brother, or somehow find something new to not accept about me and try to shame me into different choices. At one point, being desperate for a daycare solution when we needed to remove our daughter from a bad centre, she agreed to watch her 2 days a week. Looking back, I know that was a big mistake and don't understand why I didn't see that more clearly. She loved being there so much, it was taking a lot of pressure off of us and it seemed to be really improving my mom's state of mind. Even as I type this, I have the sick realization of what I was creating. Our daughter was now in charge of keeping her happy. As long as she had her to take care of and plan activities for and take photos and videos of, those two days seemed to keep her pretty happy the rest of the time too. She had what she most wanted. I had no idea how dangerous that was.
Over the time that she had our daughter for those days, I kept seeing pills being left within her reach. I addressed it over and over. I kept saying, you can't leave this stuff out and getting her to move them, and didn't even question that she would not put them back in reach as it seemed so obvious. After asking her over and over, I could see that she was rolling her eyes and acting very put out any time I asked her to move the medications, and tended to move them somewhere that was still in reach, like in a drawer instead of on the dresser at the lake. One day, I came into the kitchen when picking my daughter up, saw two containers out on the counter, in full reach of my daughter She said, they are only out because they are being refilled today. I pointed right next to them to the little container with the days of the week on them with flip top lids filled with a weeks worth of pills for her and my dad. If my daughter had ever tried the colourful little pills, she would have likely died. I was furious. I had addressed the issue of that specific pill box again and again and I couldn't believe she was leaving it out still. I opened the cupboard and saw all of their prescription meds (they both take quite a few pills - heart medications, sleeping pills, antidepressants and/or anxiety meds, etc), all of these major heavy duty meds were all on the bottom shelf of the cupboard. Our daughter goes into our cupboards at home all the time and reaches the bottom two shelves with ease. She just pulls a chair over, stands and takes stuff out. I told her that if that stuff was not moved to a place Ivy could not reach, even with the help of a chair, I would no longer bring her there. The next time I brought my daughter there, it was all still there. Bathroom medicine cabinet also full of meds. Cold medicines and gravol in pill pockets, a large container of Tylenol with the lid off, a baggy with little yellow pills, you name it. I put it all on the table and said that this is all the medication that you have been leaving in her reach. She will never be here without me again. She told me that my daughter is 'not a climber', that they 'watch her' and would never let her get hurt, that they are not a day care, that I have to 'remember that this is their home', they were just trying to do me a favour but if we don't like how they do it, we are more than welcome to put her into daycare. She said, I guess I've been doing it wrong for 40 years, with an eye roll. I couldn't believe it. I was so angry, disappointed, flabbergasted. I moved all of the medications out of reach and let them keep her that day because my daughter could see that we were fighting (also makes me feel sick that there were times she witnessed our discord with one another) and she didn't understand why she had to leave. I picked her up at the end of my workday and never took her back. Immediately, the situation that caused it was edited to be a few empty and near empty pill bottles with 'childproof' lids that were on the counter only because they were going to get them refilled. The story she told made me seem like a lunatic helicopter parent who needed to just chill out. Over the last few months, the story has evolved. Now she takes full responsibility for the fact that she and my dad didn't think that a few pill bottles in childproof containers on a second shelf of a cupboard was a big deal and that they should have moved them when I asked.
When I stopped bringing my daughter there, it all started up again. How I was breaking their hearts. How could I do this to her. Maybe she should just 'disappear' and everyone would be better off without her. She did apologize over and over. I'm sorry I ruined your life. I'm sorry I'm such a horrible person. Sandwiched between cutting remarks about how it really is all my fault and "I have apologized over and over, what more do you want?!". She refused to see my daughter for weeks, so then my dad and aunt also did not see her for that time. My aunt has only seen her once (on my daughters birthday) since this all happened and it has been two or three months. She used to see her every week. She still will only see her if invited by my mom so as not to upset my mom by having a relationship with us independent of her. I am learning that this is very common with people who have issues like my mom, but it has been hard to accept. I do finally accept it now, but it hurts. Accepting it has been one of the things that has brought me to a place where I feel that I am getting more and more ready to go no contact. I have already lost everyone I would lose by doing it.
This last round was the end for me. I can't let her back in again. I have allowed the destruction of that relationship to affect my daughter already too much in her short 3 years. I can't do it anymore. I tried pulling back and just not responding to anything negative that she would send or say. It made it worse. She ramped it up. I don't sleep when she ramps it up. I am not present for my daughter the way I would like. I am coming unraveled. I miss work, miss time with my family, go long stretches without proper sleep. My husband had to take holiday time so that I could just go away for a few days to be able to try to work through my emotions about it all away from our daughter. He has taken so much time off of work to support me through the hard times with my mom. It has to stop. He is such an amazing man, but I know that I need to take care of my marriage. There are only so many years that I can expect him to keep picking up the pieces when my mom's presence in our lives causes so much chaos and yet I continue to allow it by giving her access.
It's so hard in this day and age. Technology has made it so hard to have healthy boundaries with someone who doesn't do well with respecting boundaries. There are so many different ways she can get to me. It doesn't matter where I am, she always has access. At the park with my daughter, she can send an absolutely rotten text and take me out. Out for breakfast with my family, she can call and call over and over (literally - call, no answer, hang up , call no answer, hangup, call no answer hang up) and dampen the mood with the stress I feel when I feel hunted down like that. At work, I can refresh my email and have my whole day change. When I shut down all forms of communication with her and blocked her from contact for a short time two years ago, I felt immediately safe. I slept so well the night I did it. I had expected to be up all night feeling guilty, but I wasn't. I just felt this immediate sense of safety. I knew she couldn't get to me. I didn't have to brace myself when checking my emails. I could post on Facebook a photo of my husband and I on a date and not get grilled about who watched our daughter. Every time my phone rang, I knew it couldn't be her. I really truly felt home-free. I knew it couldn't be forever at the time. Now, I don't know. Now, I think I need that safety or I will continue to expose my daughter to something that can only damage her. I need to get myself healthy. For my husband, for my daughter and for myself.
What happened to change all of that is like a perfect storm. The first thing that happened to disrupt our brief lapse from the destruction was that my grandmother passed away. That loss coupled with my mom retiring left her in a bad place. I did my best to be supportive, but the loss was so huge for her that there was nothing I could really do. She was like a deep, deep, dark hole. Nothing I did could ever hope to fill it. Months and months after my grandma's passing, nothing improved. She would call and tell me she was sleeping all day. If I couldn't give her what she wanted, if I couldn't give her something in my life to keep her busy, she would tell me that she would just go back to sleep. She would just take another pill. If I couldn't give her a job to do at my house or have her over, or go somewhere with her, she made me feel guilty. I am sure she was not aware that she was doing it, but it felt clear to me - her grief was mine to fix. I had no idea how to fix it. I asked her to get some help. I encouraged her to get a part time job, volunteer, focus on a hobby. She did not want any of that. I was her hobby.
Next, my brother betrayed my husband and I. Without getting into all the details, I will just say that it had been coming for years, there was a lot of resentment behind it and I don't believe it will ever be fixed. My mom could not accept that my brother and I were no longer speaking. I tried tirelessly to explain how important it was for her to let us feel what we were all feeling. To stop pushing because betrayals like that take a long time to heal, and even longer with no apology from my brother, and no sign of him wanting anything to do with us, or his niece I was pregnant with. She pushed and pushed and pushed. Back came the shame. The 'how dare you be angry after all he's done for you'. The denial that what I was feeling was valid. Despite acknowledging how wrong it was, she still somehow made it at least partly my fault. She maintains to this day that I am somehow responsible. He would love to be in our lives, but we won't allow him. He has never, ever, reached out to me to make an attempt to see us. We have been very clear that we would be able to move past it if he wanted to repair things with us, but he has made no attempt. And my mom firmly believes that I am at fault for that.
The final thing that changed this was that I was pregnant with her first and only grandchild. I had no idea how powerful of a change this would cause. The hard part was that both things were going on at the same time. We discovered my brothers indiscretion while I was pregnant and it catapulted a very very negative time between her and I. I was beginning to feel the protectiveness of my child and the sinking realization that if my mom would subject me to pain and destruction, even with a child growing inside of me, there was plenty in store in the years ahead. She kept cranking it up. When she wasn't getting what she wanted from me, she began reminding me more and more often that she had tried killing herself twice and ended up in the psych ward before they adopted my brother and I. In one fight, she told me that she was molested by my uncle as a child. This was an uncle she had left me with when her and my dad went on a trip when I was 3 or 4 years old. She later tried to back peddle that, I still don't know how to process it, or what the truth is. She would tell me that my grandpa burned her with cigarettes. She took a photo of my grandma and went to her room crying that she should just go 'be with grandma'. I was pregnant and absolutely destroyed by these fights. I feel guilty to this day for what my daughter heard and felt while in my belly between my mom and I.
Since that time, there has been more and more destruction and fighting. We're coming up on 4 years of it. Things will be fine for a few months, and then something else happens. Now our issues revolve around my daughter. She is at the centre of all of it. We didn't speak for months because we wanted my aunt to watch our daughter instead of her. She was welcome to be there, but I wanted to give instructions to my aunt and have her be the person we would deal with about her care because I couldn't handle how many of my concerns my mom would disregard and how flippant she was about the things that mattered to me as a new mother. She would refuse to remove pins from the bottoms of her curtains, which were pinned to be hemmed and were in the room our daughter was always in. She just said no. "We'll watch her. We would never let her get hurt". Until I refused to bring her there, she would not remove the pins. When in an effort to stop all of the tension, stress and fights that this stuff would cause, we asked my aunt to watch her, my mom lost it. Completely lost it. She let loose on me and wouldn't let up. When one round of shame and guilt wouldn't work, she would take it to the next level and then the next level and then yet another level. She sent an email pretending to be my dad telling me that I was causing him more pain that he had felt since his mother died. I called to talk to my dad the next morning and he said, "what email?". She told me my late grandmother was disappointed. Her friends were disappointed, nobody could believe what I was "doing to her". It went on for weeks that way until I shut down every form of communication with her. I had my husband let her know that they could make arrangements to visit our daughter by having my aunt call. I wouldn't speak to my mom. She refused to see our daughter under those terms (she had already been refusing to see her if she had to go to my aunts to see her) and she allowed people to believe I was withholding her granddaughter from her. When I blocked all forms of communication with her, she began to call my husband and pass along messages through him. I eventually asked him not to relay any more. My aunt continued to help us, but my mom punished her for it too much and she finally called and said that she couldn't help us anymore.
Next, my mom ended up in the hospital. She had cellulitis on her forehead and it was a very serious case of it. I of course felt completely responsible. Despite the very disapproving looks from those closest to me who knew what I had been through, I let my mom back in. I told her she needed to be seeing a therapist, which after refusing for many years, she had finally taken that step as a result of my pulling out of her life. Things began to improve, but never for long. Every few months, it would all come back. She would go back to the issue of my brother, or somehow find something new to not accept about me and try to shame me into different choices. At one point, being desperate for a daycare solution when we needed to remove our daughter from a bad centre, she agreed to watch her 2 days a week. Looking back, I know that was a big mistake and don't understand why I didn't see that more clearly. She loved being there so much, it was taking a lot of pressure off of us and it seemed to be really improving my mom's state of mind. Even as I type this, I have the sick realization of what I was creating. Our daughter was now in charge of keeping her happy. As long as she had her to take care of and plan activities for and take photos and videos of, those two days seemed to keep her pretty happy the rest of the time too. She had what she most wanted. I had no idea how dangerous that was.
Over the time that she had our daughter for those days, I kept seeing pills being left within her reach. I addressed it over and over. I kept saying, you can't leave this stuff out and getting her to move them, and didn't even question that she would not put them back in reach as it seemed so obvious. After asking her over and over, I could see that she was rolling her eyes and acting very put out any time I asked her to move the medications, and tended to move them somewhere that was still in reach, like in a drawer instead of on the dresser at the lake. One day, I came into the kitchen when picking my daughter up, saw two containers out on the counter, in full reach of my daughter She said, they are only out because they are being refilled today. I pointed right next to them to the little container with the days of the week on them with flip top lids filled with a weeks worth of pills for her and my dad. If my daughter had ever tried the colourful little pills, she would have likely died. I was furious. I had addressed the issue of that specific pill box again and again and I couldn't believe she was leaving it out still. I opened the cupboard and saw all of their prescription meds (they both take quite a few pills - heart medications, sleeping pills, antidepressants and/or anxiety meds, etc), all of these major heavy duty meds were all on the bottom shelf of the cupboard. Our daughter goes into our cupboards at home all the time and reaches the bottom two shelves with ease. She just pulls a chair over, stands and takes stuff out. I told her that if that stuff was not moved to a place Ivy could not reach, even with the help of a chair, I would no longer bring her there. The next time I brought my daughter there, it was all still there. Bathroom medicine cabinet also full of meds. Cold medicines and gravol in pill pockets, a large container of Tylenol with the lid off, a baggy with little yellow pills, you name it. I put it all on the table and said that this is all the medication that you have been leaving in her reach. She will never be here without me again. She told me that my daughter is 'not a climber', that they 'watch her' and would never let her get hurt, that they are not a day care, that I have to 'remember that this is their home', they were just trying to do me a favour but if we don't like how they do it, we are more than welcome to put her into daycare. She said, I guess I've been doing it wrong for 40 years, with an eye roll. I couldn't believe it. I was so angry, disappointed, flabbergasted. I moved all of the medications out of reach and let them keep her that day because my daughter could see that we were fighting (also makes me feel sick that there were times she witnessed our discord with one another) and she didn't understand why she had to leave. I picked her up at the end of my workday and never took her back. Immediately, the situation that caused it was edited to be a few empty and near empty pill bottles with 'childproof' lids that were on the counter only because they were going to get them refilled. The story she told made me seem like a lunatic helicopter parent who needed to just chill out. Over the last few months, the story has evolved. Now she takes full responsibility for the fact that she and my dad didn't think that a few pill bottles in childproof containers on a second shelf of a cupboard was a big deal and that they should have moved them when I asked.
When I stopped bringing my daughter there, it all started up again. How I was breaking their hearts. How could I do this to her. Maybe she should just 'disappear' and everyone would be better off without her. She did apologize over and over. I'm sorry I ruined your life. I'm sorry I'm such a horrible person. Sandwiched between cutting remarks about how it really is all my fault and "I have apologized over and over, what more do you want?!". She refused to see my daughter for weeks, so then my dad and aunt also did not see her for that time. My aunt has only seen her once (on my daughters birthday) since this all happened and it has been two or three months. She used to see her every week. She still will only see her if invited by my mom so as not to upset my mom by having a relationship with us independent of her. I am learning that this is very common with people who have issues like my mom, but it has been hard to accept. I do finally accept it now, but it hurts. Accepting it has been one of the things that has brought me to a place where I feel that I am getting more and more ready to go no contact. I have already lost everyone I would lose by doing it.
This last round was the end for me. I can't let her back in again. I have allowed the destruction of that relationship to affect my daughter already too much in her short 3 years. I can't do it anymore. I tried pulling back and just not responding to anything negative that she would send or say. It made it worse. She ramped it up. I don't sleep when she ramps it up. I am not present for my daughter the way I would like. I am coming unraveled. I miss work, miss time with my family, go long stretches without proper sleep. My husband had to take holiday time so that I could just go away for a few days to be able to try to work through my emotions about it all away from our daughter. He has taken so much time off of work to support me through the hard times with my mom. It has to stop. He is such an amazing man, but I know that I need to take care of my marriage. There are only so many years that I can expect him to keep picking up the pieces when my mom's presence in our lives causes so much chaos and yet I continue to allow it by giving her access.
It's so hard in this day and age. Technology has made it so hard to have healthy boundaries with someone who doesn't do well with respecting boundaries. There are so many different ways she can get to me. It doesn't matter where I am, she always has access. At the park with my daughter, she can send an absolutely rotten text and take me out. Out for breakfast with my family, she can call and call over and over (literally - call, no answer, hang up , call no answer, hangup, call no answer hang up) and dampen the mood with the stress I feel when I feel hunted down like that. At work, I can refresh my email and have my whole day change. When I shut down all forms of communication with her and blocked her from contact for a short time two years ago, I felt immediately safe. I slept so well the night I did it. I had expected to be up all night feeling guilty, but I wasn't. I just felt this immediate sense of safety. I knew she couldn't get to me. I didn't have to brace myself when checking my emails. I could post on Facebook a photo of my husband and I on a date and not get grilled about who watched our daughter. Every time my phone rang, I knew it couldn't be her. I really truly felt home-free. I knew it couldn't be forever at the time. Now, I don't know. Now, I think I need that safety or I will continue to expose my daughter to something that can only damage her. I need to get myself healthy. For my husband, for my daughter and for myself.
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