Linda58

I just recently got my surgery date, and my excitement is tempered by the drama going on in my family right now because of my mother.

My older sister died about a month ago. She had cirrhosis and was in the hospital waiting for a liver transplant, when her body just gave out and couldn't take anymore. She had some peace before she died, for which I'm thankful. Her husband and son had been at her side for over a month. About 2 months before she died, my sister called my mother to try to mend the rift between them that had been going on for over 4 years.

Background: My mother quit school in the 7th grade. I believe that that is where her mental and emotional development and social skills stopped. She acts very much like a grade-school child. "She doesn't like me, so I don't like her." Since she didn't go on to high school, or go to work (she said her eyes were so bad that she couldn't drive a car, she had no choice), she never developed the skill to manager adult relationships. She married an alcoholic and even though she says she never wanted kids, she had 5, 3 girls and 2 boys ("There wasn't any birth control. I didn't have any choice.") She was a cold mother, sometimes mean. When it was time for me to go to kindergarten, she walked me the 2 blocks to the school and told me that when it was time to go home, which direction to walk in. After school, I got turned around, got scared and started to cry. My teacher ended up driving me home, and my mother scolded me. All my life, I felt pressured to make my mother my best friend. She never wanted me to have a boyfriend, or any friends. She wanted me to spend all my time with her. Even now, if my little sister and I do something without her, she gets mad and won't speak to us, so we sneak around. Somehow I got the feeling from my mother that I was supposed to save her from my father ("There wasn't anyone else for me to marry. I didn't have any choice. And I can't see, I can't drive a car or get a job, so I can't leave him.") (Thank God he didn't sexually abuse us, just emotionally abused us.) She never held us or told us that she loved us or even talked to us, except to give an order. My father wasn't home much, he was out drinking. When my little sister was 2 and I was 12, my parents bought a restaurant, and they were hardly ever home. This was one of the times my mother was drinking with my father, thinking that would make things better. My older sister always managed to get out of the house to be with a friend or boyfriend. I was left at home with my brothers and little sister, so I tried to mother her the best way I knew how. I held her and read to her and played with her. To this day, we are extremely close. My mother would come home drunk and want to talk to me about her sex life with my father. For many years, I didn't know how screwed up my family was. I am 49 years old, and there are still things I'm realizing.

One of the things my mother does is to cut people off who "hurt" her or disagree with her. So she's 73 years old and has no friends. She's done that with all of her kids at one time or another, but we've always forgiven and crawled back to her. She never apologizes or takes responsibility for her behavior. And all her relationships are one-sided. It's like she's a queen and we are her subjects. There is no effort made on her part to keep up the relationship. I have always called her, she has never called me. This is the way she is.

Four years ago, my older sister, Toni, asked Mom if she could borrow some money. Mom said no. So they weren't speaking to each other for the next 4 years. Toni and I had never been very close, we were just so different. We got along, we just didn't have a lot in common, so our lives were very separate. When Toni learned how sick she was, she reached out to her family to reconnect. She and I were getting to know each other again, and spending as much time as we could with each other. One of the things that puzzled her was how my mother could ignore her when she knew how sick she had become and had almost died a couple of times in the hospital. I told her I was just as puzzled as she. So Toni called her to make amends. They got together, decided not to talk about the past, just to put it behind them. Even after that, my mother never called Toni to see how she was doing.

When Toni ended up in Duke Hospital and her kidneys were failing one time, the doctors called the family in. When my little sister went to pick up my mother, my mother acted like they were going on vacation, she was all chipper and gabby. My sister was shocked, because she was worried that Toni was going to die. But we never call my mother on her behavior, so she let it go. When we were all together in the waiting room at the hospital, she was having a lively conversation with my brother Eric about cereal, she was oblivious to the mood in the room. Toni made it through that crisis and was back on the transplant list, and then a week later, they decided her body couldn't take anymore, there was nothing else they could do for her. So we all went up there again. Everyone except my brother Marc, who said he just couldn't deal with it. I was annoyed with my mother because of the way she'd been acting around Toni's illness, and I wasn't impolite, I just avoided her. My sister is on her deathbed, and in a waiting room full of people, she turned to my little sister and said, "You know, you forgot to pay me this week for watching the kids." (She had been watching my nieces after school during the week.) Everyone in the room looked at each other, we were speechless, but no one said anything. So I continued to try to avoid my mother whenever possible. I did end up taking her in her wheelchair to the rest room ("I can't walk, I have bad knees.") She is in a wheelchair because she has arthritis in both of her knees, and she's obese. I have had countless conversations with her for many years now about getting her knees replaced and losing some weight so she could walk. I've offered to take time off work to help her through the rehabilitation part of it. She gets angry when I bring it up. I've also offered to take her to the eye doctor, since they've made such progress in vision correction. She gets mad when I bring that up too, as if we expect her to learn to drive a car if she gets her vision corrected. She just refuses to discuss it.

After Toni passes away, I head to my home town for the services. Her husband, Charles, had set up a meeting with all the family and the minister so he could hear stories about Toni's life. The minister knew her, but didn't know much about her childhood or yound adulthood. I thought it was a great idea. I was not able to attend, but I called in on the phone, they put me on speaker phone and I was able to tell some stories about our childhood, things that others may not know or remember. I was so grateful to participate in that. I found out later from my little sister that my mother was there, and that she sat in a chair in the corner of the room with a scowl on her face and her arms crossed and said nothing. When Charles asked if she had anything to add, she said no, that everyone had covered it. I was surprised. She had time with Toni as an infant that no one else on earth had had. And she couldn't come up with one good thing to say about her first-born child. Not only that, but when she got in the car with my sister, she started to rage about Toni. She said she didn't have anything good to say about Toni, because Toni hadn't spoken to her in 4 years. Toni's husband, Charles, was upset by what she did at the meeting and so was his whole family. They said they'd never seen anything so disrespectful. Our family is sort of used to her behavior, and we have insulated her from the world for many years, so I feel we are partly to blame for her not acting like a grown-up.

When we picked her up for the family visitation, I spoke to her, loudly, because she's hard of hearing (and won't discuss getting a hearing aid), and she ignored me. I tried one other time over the weekend, and when she didn't acknowledge me, I quit trying. She also wasn't speaking to my little sister or her husband, and of course, she never spoke to anyone in Charles's family.

After that weekend, I went back home and tried to deal as best as I could with my sister's death and the drama my mother had been causing.

Last week, she wrote a letter to Charles, blaming him for Toni's death. She said a lot of viscious things to him and to Nick, Toni and Charles's son. They were never there for Toni, things like that. Nick had moved back home to help take care of his mother, and Charles was home with her every night. Charles lived in a hotel across the street from the hospital for over a month before she passed, and Charles and Nick were the two people she wanted to see first when she was awake.

The next day, I got a letter of my own. She said thing like--how could I understand how it feels to lose your first-born child, because I only have cats. In the end, Toni only wanted to see her mother, not me. She had always felt that my affection for her was not real. She also criticized Charles and Nick and chastized me for being friends with them. My little sister and I had had conversations agreeing that one positive thing that came out of Toni's illness and death, was that we were in touch with her husband and son and Charles's family again. We had enjoyed getting to know them again in the long hours spent in the hospital waiting room. And we intend on keeping up those relationships and Toni would have wanted that.

I did not respond to the letter my mother sent me, it was mean and hurtful. She put a P.S. on it that said, "Too bad you cannot pick your mother. Maybe you can adopt one."

I did not respond, but my nephew, my mother's grandson, responded to the letter his father got. And he pretty much blasted her for what she'd said. She's used to lashing out and not getting anything back. So she is very angry and trying to get her son, Marc, to beat up her grandson.

All of this has stressed me out like never before. I'm having a hard time with Toni's death already; she was only a year older than I am. Then with this family drama on top of it. I've had two migraine headaches in the last week, and I haven't had one of those for over 6 years now. I spent the whole hour crying in my therapist's office this week. I want to be excited for my surgery and it's hard to think of anything except that my family is falling apart. I don't want to be around my mother anymore, and my little sister is still scared of her, so she'll be at my sister's house for Thanksgiving. So I may have Thanksgiving dinner at Charles's family's house and spend the rest of the weekend with my little sister and her family without my mother. This has just become one big mess.

So today I got another letter from her. I am not going to open it. I wish I had had the willpower not to open the other one. I am sending it back to her unopened. Anything I say, she would be defensive. She's not going to start taking responsibility for her actions at this late date. I just wish I could get my own mind straight so I go into this surgery and my life afterwards with some peace and optimism.

I know this is long and I don't know if anyone will read it, but I needed to say it. I do feel better having typed this out. It's therapy of a kind. I am so envious of other who have real mothers, who act like mothers are supposed to act. I've never had that and I never will. I have to get to a point of acceptance of that. I pray I can do that.

__________________
Linda

Surgery date-10/31/07
233/228/184/150

44 lbs. gone so far