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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
LW, I feel for you as my late schizophrenic aunt did the same kind of damage to her family, and my best friend's brother keeps doing it to his. They may not be able to control themselves in doing the damage, but as with anyone who's a danger to themselves and others, the safety of family and community must be protected.
My uncle hung in there with his marriage vows; he never had quiet affairs or a mistress, though he did take a week away every year just to escape the sheer overwhelming 'always there-ness' of his hideous situation. And though much younger than his wife, he died first.
The caregiver always dies first.
Look around, you'll see it's true.
Your father made a life-saving decision, and so have you by choosing to distance yourself. I have recently had to make this same decision regarding a manic friend: there is nothing I can do to change anything, nothing I can do to help. Distancing yourself doesn't hurt these people because they don't have the emotional capacity for visits or contact very often: 1 year or 20 can pass unnoticed by them, and very often as in your case, family members are regarded as the enemy plotters.
The cruel selfish truth that can apply to this kind of situation (and to divorce because of it) is that 'the kids' are frightened: if one parent leaves, they'll be left with the care and responsibility. It may be this fear that's driving your sister. I don't know how she can come to terms with it, except perhaps through the same suggestions Cary has made re learning about schizophrenia, and through supportive counseling.
It can be loss upon loss in families of the mentally ill when siblings also distance each other and/or distance themselves geographically.
I don't know if this will help any of you, but it's a suggestion a counselor once made to me about my own abusive parents: Write down all the things you wanted your mother to be to you. Write that mother you've imagined a poem or a eulogy. It may help at this point also to buy an adult female doll with which you 'invest' these qualities, and for which you hold some form of funeral in which you literally bury the doll, perhaps including the papers on which you wrote your wish list about your mother and/or your poem or eulogy. Or perhaps reading the poem aloud - and crying if you want to. Then bury the doll and/or the poems and wishlist. Give up as lost the mother you want or remember; grieve her; and then you can get on with living with the mother you've actually got, in whatever way you choose to do that.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
