There is still no news about Dad. It seems no one knows what is going on, the doctors don’t have a clue what is happening and why Dad is the way he is. This is frightening Dad and Mum is turning to me for support. I’m feeling really worried for Dad and trying to be a good daughter. But I admit it is hard. Mum rings and wants my support, cries down the phone to me and I try to listen, to offer her what I can, and yet at the same time there is all these emotion. We spent a week hating her, being angry at her and dad, it is really hard to shut that off. I know it isn’t showing, or even if it did my mother is too caught up in this crisis to notice which is a good thing, but it is stirring all sorts of shit up for us. I wonder if this makes me a bad person that I am not just concentrating on Dad, and being there for Mum, that I can’t just put aside all those other emotions and thoughts.
She says things that spark off this furious anger. They don’t even seem to be big things. They might even be overreactions on my part. She said the other day that she still believes what is happening to him is medical. I wanted to respond, so you are worried he is crazy like me. I mean from everything that she has told me it does sound like he has had some neurological event, it isn’t that he suddenly woke up one day and lost his marbles, it isn’t delusional thoughts, it’s memory and information processing that is happening. It reminded me of what Badger was talking about in therapy last week. How my mother has never asked, never wanted to know what we are dealing with. There is some relief in that but also anger. She doesn’t care, she doesn’t want to know. I read about families dealing with mental health problems of one of their members, I read the information out there about the consumer movement in mental health and how families should be part of the process. I understand the importance of that, the support that they can bring, and how any disability can affect all members of a family. But with my mother, she doesn’t want to know. Even when we were at our sickest, when we were in and out of hospital constantly, barely able to function, all she ever said was she wished we would just kill ourselves and get it over with so it wouldn’t keep screwing with her life. My mother doesn’t have a clue what we are dealing with, she doesn’t understand or want to hear about our anxiety issues, about our fears of leaving home, about the dissociation. Of course she won’t want to hear about the multiplicity or the post trauma, but those other things can happen without abuse, our dissociation, agoraphobia, anxiety disorders, they can occur just because. But when we try to explain it, like explaining how we need to drive ourselves places, how we can’t take a bus, she brushes us off. My mental health disability is a secret shame in her mind and she will continue to work to keep it at that.
Mum makes hints about me coming up and staying with her whilst this is going on. We are avoiding even acknowledging the hints let alone having to say no. It wouldn’t be a good idea. I don’t mind doing the good daughter routine by phone or if Dad comes down to the hospital here, but to pack up and stay with her for a couple of weeks. Well it wouldn’t be a good idea. It also triggered someone pretty badly last night and we had a series of flashbacks about our mother’s behaviour when our grandfather was dying of cancer. I really can’t go into details about that as it isn’t my memory, it isn’t something I experienced and it is up to the person to write about it if or when she feels comfortable. But it was horrific and although I am sure my mother wouldn’t do the same thing now, the similarities are too close.
I just got an email from my Queenstown man. Just saying he is missing me and thinking of me. We were talking last night (we talk nearly every day on the phone or online) and I was venting a little bit about the whole Dad situation and having to be a good daughter. He asked if there was anything he could do to help and I said just talking to me helps. I wanted to say, to ask that he lets me know I’m in his thoughts at times, but I was too nervous to ask, too messed up with my own sense of entitlement so I didn’t make the request. He’s probably got no idea what that 3 line email meant to me but it made me feel special.. no not special, it’s more like I am real to him, I am someone in his life that he cares about, not just out of mind, not just someone to have lots of bizarre sex with.
I just got a text from my mother to say that Dad isn’t coming down for the brain scan today. It frustrates me. I want to drive up there and demand that they find out what is wrong with him now. I want to push them aside and say, ok I will fix it. I don’t have a medical degree, I wouldn’t have a clue where to start, but being the control freak I am I want to get in there and get it done. I don’t like relying on other people, having to wait and be patient. They are probably doing all that can be done, but it isn’t me doing it so I feel useless and irritable.
There’s a lot going on, a lot of it is about my own stuff. It isn’t that I don’t care about Dad, that I am not worrying about him and waiting anxiously to know what is going on. It is just that alongside that I can not put my recovery stuff on hold. I can not stop trying to process my past and work on getting the future I want. I worry sometimes that makes me selfish, that I should be solely focused on him.
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