Damnation and Hope

A month ago, I praised the skies because Mother was moving closer to me. A positive start to the next era in our lives ...

Now, I am damning the gods because Mother is not committed to her decision. She cannot see past the difficult time of waiting for a house sale and living in my (very large) sitting room to the better times afterwards.

Mother is moving back to her house. She decided this within the week of arriving at my place and I have not been able to stop her slide into damnation of everything about me and my locality.

So, No Change? apart from the loss of about £2000 on a round-trip for her things? It is not as simple as that.

A Disaster? Mother wants to re-establish her status quo; it will surely be further entrenched. Being based on a behavioural disorder, her status quo is not happy.

I am accused of coercion. Although a month ago I said "the decision was forced by having to book the date with the removal firm", it was actually the time of the decision that was forced. She did have the choice to move within her town so she could get away from her new neighbours rather than move closer to me. Thus, she has rejected me, my attentions to details as well as the bigger picture, my execution of her wishes, and asserted that she herself is "the only one" who knows what she needs. She is confirming what I have long suspected but was hoping I was seeing the end of, a lack of trust in her daughter. No one has yet been able to be her advocate and the shell around her will only be reinforced.

Also a month ago, I was "expecting other instances of uncertainty": I knew she would be anxious about what was going to happen next, and indeed such a major change is fraught with difficulties as well as delight. What happened was that I could not maintain a delightful life for her for sufficient time -- I became a workman in her home, then a mother herself with her children visiting -- and Mother could not maintain her enjoyment -- therein lies the story of her life.

So a potential Disaster? No end to the frantic calls telling her daughter the latest atrocities against her? No end to her fight against the world? No decrease in the risk that she will be upset and fall again (a real possibility which has happened once this year). I wait to see. I have little hope of a new and positive attitude.

Yet I damn the gods mildly. One can only try, and I have lived being damned if I do and damned if I don't. I damn the gods thus:

Mother has “nerves” (also "nerve": her mother told her in no uncertain terms what she thought of her wearing a lime-green suit in the late 1940s and one could postulate that, even then, Mother had no regard for how others saw her). At the age of 13, about 1940, she was put in an institution for some nervous condition for six weeks, at the time not knowing if she would ever come out. Never mind that this was frightening – all types of "not-normal" people have been institutionalised for the rest of their lives -- there was no diagnosis, no follow up, no healing.

Thus, Mother developed coping strategies that have made her really quite dysfunctional. She has emigrated at least three times in her life and regularly wants to make big moves again. She is constantly dissatisfied with people and events, belligerent and obsessively aggressive to the point of upsetting whoever is her target. She defends herself to the hilt by pleading reactions she can't control and by attacking with emotion and little empathy for how others may feel. She complains that she “has to do it all” herself yet trusts no one to be her advocate.

Thus, we have one more person who is difficult to care for in their old age. We have two children, my brother and me, who are still learning how not-normal their mother is and their childhood was (such that my brother was distressed enough to seek counselling). We have a person who has not been able to fulfill their potential in this world.

Mother will return to her house and her frequent visits to the doctor. And here may be the silver lining to this Disaster.

Evidence for better funding for mental health services?

Surely yes! Although Mother may reject seeing a psychiatrist, a treatment already being suggested by her doctor, because she thinks she is doing alright, there are people who want to receive counselling because of a behavioural disorder or mental illness yet cannot because services don't have enough money. Here is a parallel, the non-availability of mental health service provision in the 1940s, which has turned out to be a false economy in Mother's case.

Indeed, I will thank the gods when the English government finally comes up with a holistic and evidence-based Mental Health Act. The Act of 2007 introduced Community Treatment Orders, an extreme treatment that is at risk of being over used.

The next Act must describe a full range of counselling treatments for a broader spectrum of patients and could-be patients, and make it accessible to anyone who wants it.

Scotland is already taking up this challenge, as well as looking at what contributes to good mental health.

Thus I live in hope rather than damnation.

Decisions with Mother

Only one link in this post, but here you will get up to speed on a personal situation that I am sure is close to many of our hearts: looking after our ageing parents. This is the start of a series examining other facets of adult childhoodship.

I am entering into a phase where Mother needs my support.

This statement alone will seem strange to those from cultures that keep close to their family. And I agonise over the fact that it is not part of my family culture -- my nuclear family culture at least. Talking with my Mother's sister, who stayed in her home town along with her brother and who was around more for her mother in her working life and old age, I know that the distance between my Mother and I till now is not generational behaviour. But my Mother being who she is, I have had to keep my distance. Indeed, she has often (always? still?) had an emotional wall that I've had to avoid bumping against. Yet this seems to have yielded with recent events, contracting and developing large holes through which my love and attention can reach.

This is fortunate and I thank serendipity for it: Mother needs support now and I have dedicated the last month to engender this emotional movement. It is awesome how she has grasped this nettle (oh yes, it is a nettle indeed when it involves a physical movement of 450 miles from a place after 35 years).

Until 4 weeks ago, I had a very laissez faire attitude with my mum: after all, she is/was physically and mentally active, making (or trying to make) decisions, being independent. Even after the whole of this year of telephone calls, when she has told me what she has done, how she has been thwarted, or ignored, or unsupported, or put down, or her letters blandly noted or actioned to no beneficial effect to her (and hardly pausing to even contemplate that I might have news, being so involved in her own life), and desperately wanting to move away from her new neighbours, I was planning to simply help her to sort things out rather than to engineer her relocation.

She had to wait for me to get to her: I had contact time with my children and then a conference to attend, all booked and waiting to happen. I could not get to her before the middle of September without exhausting myself; she waited for me for 2 months.

In the week before I reached her, it became clear that her moving away from her neighbours had to be a positive move (no bygone arguments or stress rumbling on) and a committed move (no lingering to desires to move away from the area completely, which has also been rumbling on for years with no lasting decision). This was the point of my Decision 1, made rather selfishly. The fact is that my Mother's daughter's worklife suddenly needed a massive commitment; either that or she needed to put her career on hold. Indeed, I had even made a decision this summer to curtail my business activities because Mother had become more needy. So, in the week before my long-awaited arrival, I phoned her and was candid. I explained to Mother my position, that her daughter had a choice, that I wanted to not have to feel that I had to drop whatever I was doing when she phoned, that I could know that I would not have to cancel work commitments because of new situations arising -- and she responded, praise the skies! "You should be able to live your life, I've had mine [not as negatively said as it reads]". And there we created a common goal, to organise her house sale, accommodation and other matters and to limit future disruption to my life.

Decision 2 was still to come. Even on my arrival, I thought it was a case of helping her to move asap within her locality (though I really wished she would move closer to me). But her incapabilities became clear very quickly. She was struggling to cope with the intricacies of everyday life, unable to have tenacity in whatever she needed to organise, unable to communicate effectively with the world at large, unable to do little, save shop for food and clothes: in the week before I arrived, she was too busy shopping for winter boots to make appointments for me to attend with her. I find her inability to cope very sad: sad because she has not understood the world for a long time, because she has a nervous condition for years that has not been recognised, and it is this that has disabled her. Physical incapabilities too: her managing the stairs with arthritis is exactly that, a deliberate management of the actions required to move up and down 9 feet of height lots of times a day. I was now concerned and decided that I had to keep her close to me.

So the scene was set for this 40-year-old woman to spring into action with tempered determination. We spent 10 days at her place looking into finances, local housing (private and Council/housing association options), house maintenance before sale, with daily meetings on what we had found out, what we thought, what needed to be done next (I can still hear her exclaim "Do we have to have another meeting? Now?") and oh so carefully broaching the option of changing location. Then I brought her to my place, so she wouldn't be left alone with "them next door", so I could use the tickets I'd booked for a night with Dylan Moran, so she could have a holiday and to see what it is like here, get balls rolling with the Council/housing associations and removal firms, before making a decision.

Tomorrow, after 2 weeks here, we head back to her place, to finish the house and move her out within the next 2 weeks (my partner is now involved on the project, which is an understatement). And we have Decision 3, which is Mother's.

Mother has decided to move closer to me. A long-awaited and fantastic result. Mother--daughter partnerships, huh? In the end, the decision was forced by having to book the date with the removal firm and I am expecting other instances of uncertainty. But here's hoping this one is on a roll from here on in. Even if the first part of this moving closer involves her sleeping in my living room. TBC.

(Note 08/11/08: To continue this as a series is now impossible as mother reversed her decision. See my second and last entry on this story to read the conclusion.)