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• Thursday, November 2, 2006 01:10 PM

  One way of looking at it

  My mom has no short-term memory (she's exactly like the guy in the film Memento, minus the body writing), as a result of a brain aneurysm when I was 17. She also was diagnosed in recent years as having been paranoid schizophrenic for longer than anyone knows, but likely since before me or my brother were born. Because of the short-term memory loss, she's unable to take care of herself (she can't remember if she showered or ate already) she lives in an assisted living facility where they administer her meds for the schizophrenia, which keep her from having delusions...

  All the same, she's a mean lady. Hate to say it, since she's my mom, but she's mean--she was extremely emotionally abusive to my older brother from the time he was born, and kept me in some sort of fear-induced numbness and depression that I'm still trying to figure out in therapy. The paranoia has always made her feel justified in her meanness, and with no intellectual or social structure to rein her in (one can't have much of a life with no short-term memory), over the years she's grown to be the emotional equivalent of Jack the Ripper--but she can't remember what she said 5 minutes ago, so it doesn't help at all to confront her about it.

  All of this makes her a nightmare to deal with on any level. We both oversee her care from afar (we live in New York, she's in Philadelphia where we're from), but my brother has long kept his distance to a large extent--and now due to a recent over-the-top comment from her, he's not planning to see her at all anymore. I've always felt I should visit her every few months or so, since I'm one of only two visitors she ever gets, so I do, but the older she gets, the worse she gets... Every visit is an endless litany of insults against and indictments of various people I care about, and now she's even started to turn on me. So there's a very good chance that i won't be seeing her much anymore, either.

  Some of our relatives think we should see her more often, the we can't "hang her out to dry" at the assisted living place, so to speak. And believe me, I do feel the guilt. But every time I see her, I feel one piece of my heart break, and another piece of it turn to steel. And it takes me a week to recover. So my take on it is this, and it's echoed in some of the other letters:

  It's YOUR time now. Do whatever you have to do to be okay, to be more than okay. Your mom had her youth and her chance to make her way in the world. That's over now, and would be even if she weren't ill. And I believe it's our parents' deep-down wish to have their kids to go out into the world and be happy, even if these wishes might be obscured by mental illness. And clearly, you cannot do this by keeping your mother close.

  I have always thought that if my mother were in her right mind and somehow could see my dilemma with her from a distance, she'd tell me to save myself. To keep my distance, even from her, if that's what I needed to stay sane. Maybe this is an idea worth running past your sister... But whether she can see it this way or not, maybe there's some comfort in it for you.

  And hang in there--as you may have found already, these situations tend to play themselves out in waves. A time of family crisis like yours that feels like it might never be over does, in time, subside.

  —holly nyc Read holly nyc's other letters
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