Posted by Abby on May 16, 2000, at 0:15:48
MOTHER'S Day.
I don't know how much I've written about my mother, but I'll try to give you the short version. I know that the Nature vs. Nurture debate is pretty much a moot point, but even without any genetic vulnerability (and I've got it on a couple of counts) I think that the environment I grew up in could induce depression in almost anyone.
My mother was pathologically disorganized. (Noa, your apartment could never have been as bad as our house was.) Most annoying was not what she didn't do in the way of cleaning, but what she couldn't restrain herself from doing e.g. putting away dirty dishes or dumping plates in the dishwasher which still had food on them, so that the drain would clog and overflow. Or my personal favorite. We had a cleaning woman from whom I learned as much as I could. She would tease me sometimes about the state of my drawers. So, I got into the habit of keeping them tidy. I took great pride in having my bed made neatly. I always felt better if I could get it done before I left for school. Often enough, I would come home to find that she had napped in it, and there would usually be an empty coffee cup on my night stand leaving a ring of liquid coffee on the furniture. Returning from camp late in the evening I would find my room a disaster zone. (Martin Seligman--here's your learned helplessness.)
When I was 15, she dropped a step in her progressive deterioration. (We had moved.) She turned back to Roman Catholicism and used to argue bizarre Catholic theology (none of it orthodox) in an attempt to convert him. She started to get grandiose ideas in a kind of grim determination to save the world. Our phone bill to Washington was enormous. She knew we hated those calls. So, she always waited until everyone else was out of the house before phoning. She took to watching TV late at night and was particularly partial to the 700 Club. (This really embarrassed me and my father, and it was a complete about face from the social environment in which she was raised.)
Then, while I was in college my parents moved essentially down the street from my dorm so that my father could go to divinity school. That October my maternal grandmother died. My mother then got extremely paranoid; she was unhappy about some aspects of how my grandmother's estate was handled, both in terms of substance and style. She was partially right, but she continued to harp on it, and she became convinced that the lawyer had murdered my grandmother. She also saw the Episcopal church being taken over by lesbians, and everyone of them was hitting on her.
We tried to get her into treatment. She tried to turn it into marriage counseling and was foiled, because her obsessions came out much more easily. (She'd been playing those kinds of games for years. My father has a lot of problems himself--from ADD irritability etc. Then she went into overdrive, went up to see a house we had bought on an island, which was still in the progress of getting structural work done and decided to stay, but she couldn't run away. When my father got sick, the island doctor asked him about stress (not answerable) and then if his wife was OK. She had stopped going to doctors long before. He started talking to her, called a psychiatrist, and then suggested she might have a treatable medical condition at which point she hit him. That and the fact that people were worried she was going to cause an explosion the way she would leave the gas on before lighting it allowed us to get her committed for 5 days. In the end she only spent one day. We got her to see a psychiatrist, but she did manage to manipulate her way out of that. To get a quicker appointment my father went with one, and the guy was a real bozo. All he did on his own was prescribe Ativan, and he was completely uninterested in the diagnoses made by hospital doctors.
My parents went to a small island in the Caribbean for the winter. (My Dad's schooling had gone part-time and then there were some leaves). The islands offered pleasant weather and a lower cost of living with the possibility of servants. Then some of the ideas that she had been holding in let loose. She also transferred all of her money from a discount brokerage account which my father had been managing to a full service broker who is now churning her account. (This despite the fact that we could never get her to pay a professional lawyer to write a will---see the aforementioned paranoia.) My father took some money and left to go back to school, because the stress was just killing him. We're living together in Maine right now in a house owned by a friend.
This past fall, my mother showed up in Massachusetts declaring her intention of taking some courses as a spouse etc. and completely derailing my father's plans. She stayed in a hotel and then switched to some sort of weekly B&B accommodation. Her new theory was that all of her illness was caused by her being raped when she was 17. The supposed rapist was her favorite Catholic priest in the Eastern Caribbean who had probably never been to the northern U.S. or Canada. She found our telephone number and knows the address. She used to send a lot of letters and she gives our address as her U.S. address.
SO with all this history, on Saturday I got a call from the B&B network saying that her credit card hadn't gone through properly. I'm sure that my mother didn't mean to stiff the people, but she is very bad about paying her credit card bills. She used to let all her bills go and then overpay the phone bill, and even in the best mood we could never get her to understand why this was bad. Intellectually, I had dissociated myself from this, reconciled myself to the fact that I had done all I could.
I told the woman that I was not in contact with her. The woman was very irritated and said "well this is a lot of money, about $400, what are we supposed to do just not get paid?" I said I was sorry, and that she might try writing to her care of General delivery...X island. Then the woman kept saying that her husband (my father) was legally responsible, which he isn't--- Massachusetts not being a community property state among other things. So I hung up.
It was a small thing, really. Her sudden arrival in the States could do far more harm to us, and she's now safely out of the country. The woman had no power over me or my father, but I was overwhelmed with sadness at the lost promise of my mother and the lack of appropriate treatment when she was a girl and my own lost childhood. From about the age of five I didn't really have a mother, but the existence of my Mother prevented the kind of attention a girl whose mother had died might receive. In later years there were a couple of older women who became good friends, but nobody stepped in to act as a mother when I was young, and I mothered my younger sister as best I could. And of course it was Mother's day.
poster:Abby
thread:33557
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000508/msgs/33557.html