Family ties

Gosh, my life never provides for much dullness, despite my efforts to avoid my family and friends and even strangers for the most part, at least in the physical sense but even in other ways. Somehow, though, they find a way to reach me – and yes, of course I am also allowing that to still occur, for whatever reasons.

My dad has been showing increasing signs of memory loss and confusion in recent months, quite notably when I was at the hospital with him, but even more starkly through WhatsApp messages… the painful thing about text is that it captures what was said in an unmistakable way, yet he still doesn’t seem to notice that he’s repeating his stories… so I finally pushed myself to read more about different types of dementia in the hopes of understanding what it is that’s happening to him and how best to approach dealing with him and the condition as it worsens.

Sounds like it’s probably related to the Parkinson’s that he’s had for about 6 years, in which there’s an associated condition called dementia with Lewy’s bodies. After days of stressing about just the thought of whether I could handle him properly, yesterday evening I finally meet him for tea and tried to gauge how things are, what meds he’s actually on and so forth.

On the plus side, I think I had psyched myself up (or down, perhaps) so much by worrying about this for days that the reality wasn’t nearly as stressful as many of the vivid scenarios I had anticipated. Or perhaps he was just having a slightly better day. Still, by and large it was like one of our previous coffee sessions, in which he did ramble on a lot about the same old complaints of his marriage and children, but he mostly managed to keep his thoughts in some sort of order. I made him laugh quite a bit as well, which was nice.

But towards the end I could see that his anxiety was building about having to go home and face his insane wife again (she’d called at least 9 times and texted repeatedly just to ask for “urgent groceries” – trust me when I saw the house is literally full of groceries that end up getting tossed out upon expiry… yes, literally.) He’s very easily agitated by her, as I am as well, obviously. Difference is I made the difficult choice to leave and he hasn’t and he’s increasingly aware that with his growing mental frailties, that choice is slipping further away each day. So he became more confused and repetitive, almost as if he was unconsciously hoping I’d let him stay out a little longer… but I had to go, we had spent 7 hours together and I was left quite drained and in urgent need of a quiet smoke (I never smoke around them) and some down time.

The sad thing is that today I got yet another rambly message from him. Disjointed, very emotional, repetitive and even asking to meet again today 😦 Sigh. On Saturday I had talked about this with my friend K who spent 4 years caring for his elderly mom who had dementia while his siblings just ignored the whole thing with a simple, “If you wanna send her to a home, we can split the cost.” She passed away 2 years ago and he’s still only just starting to come to terms with all the pain, hurt, anger and injustice of it all. He’s stopped speaking to his siblings too and we’ve discussed the whole concept of family responsibility, blame-shifting and illusions of love and choice many different times. So of course he cautioned me to think twice before committing myself to my dad’s care, especially as I’m sensitive to the details of what “best care” would look like, among other things. K is right, of course, but as per his situation with his mom, he didn’t care for her so much because he wanted to – not really – but because if he didn’t, then she’d be left with nothing else and that just seemed too wrong to him.

Bear in mind that K comes from a wealthy family in which the nursing home option would’ve been the best goddamn one available. In my case, we can’t afford even mediocre homes (mostly cuz the other siblings won’t pitch in fairly) and anyway my dad is way too stubborn to “give up” on his “own home” for a while more. But the truly heartbreaking thing for me is that this intelligent man is forced to live not just with his increasingly deteriorating mind but in an increasingly inhumane space for which he has paid while someone else insistently destroyed it, piece by piece.

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Jesus. My dad just called with this long rant about how last night when he went back, my mother accused him of “dressing up nicely and going out with some woman”… and then she told him she’d gone to his room to bring down some of his meds (he’s having trouble walking after the surgery) and she found “condoms” in his cupboard. Jesus fucking Christ. The worst thing is that this is just a pathetic re-hash of previous stories she’s cooked up. So of course he loses it, storms upstairs and brings down what is apparently multi-coloured candies of some kind that he bought at his last hospital checkup…. he also tells her that he was out with me, to which she says, oh that’s okay then.

What the fuck is wrong with these people. My idiot brother was there and starts shouting at her to apologise, which she does but my dad is already so worked up that he threatens to hit her, yada yada but ultimately he decides it’s not worth it. This morning she’s back to asking him to do shit for her as if nothing had happened last night.

See, the thing is, I cannot allow myself to emphatise too much, even with him, because he has enabled this sick telenovela to keep going by playing along with her BS instead of leaving. Not hitting her or hitting her isn’t a relevant plot twist, but he keeps fixating on that instead of doing something that would actually be useful for himself. So that is a choice on his part and I know that. He’s partly afraid of being alone, partly afraid of how she’ll spin the story to their mutual friends, relatives, etc and there’s other bits to this that only he would know about, of course. But yeah, the baseline still remains that he doesn’t really dare make a meaningful change to this grotesque and highly unnecessary turmoil.

I know that on some level he wants me to intervene for him but I’ve told him why that won’t work and I am finally able to not pretend to myself that I am able to “make” her do anything. I have tried that too many times to know better. The only person she even pretends to listen to is my eldest idiot brother, and that’s purely based on their Indian mother-eldest son relationship (eldest sons are nicknamed “raja” in Tamil, which literally means king) so there’s nothing worthwhile for me to do in this shit-show than to keep reminding my dad to tell my brother about this.

That my father is reluctant to talk to my brother is also a mark of that male ego BS of “saving face”, but again, this cannot become my problem because I have no role to play in it. So that’s how I left it with my dad just now, despite him pushing me to have dinner again with him tonight… sigh.

So exhausting. I knew it would be, that’s part of why I was trying to avoid it for the longest time. They are such a drain, such a distraction from my own needs, such a polar opposite to anything that is good in this fucked up world.

 

Falling

Where’s the line between procrastinating and letting my Self roam freely? How about the line between caring for someone and needing them to care that I care/to return that care? Then there’s the ultimate – the invisible line between liking my own company and simply being too messed up to let anyone close lest they point out my self-fuckery.

Well, actually there doesn’t seem to be a “line”, of course. We like to pretend that lines can be discerned, but we must know how arbitrarily we make them up and mend them as we see fit. A little voice tells me that, in fact, I’m deliberately blurring some different lines now with this post; finding a way to drag myself through another few minutes before the sleepwalking resumes.

How can I actually know what I really want? Thinking coherently is difficult at the best of times, but on days like this (and the last few as well), it feels downright impossible to clear my head. I’m pretty sure that’s why I chose to focus in on A (or whichever the Guy of the Moment is, essentially) or my shitty friends or my shittier family dramas instead; it’s some kind of twisted attempt at distracting myself while the shitstorm is at its peak of rampage.

But what next? I mean, for tonight I can even tell myself that it’s “pre-PMS” that’s actually to blame here, besides the batshit crazy stuff I had to deal with at my parent’s place on Saturday. Cool, biology provides a ready-made explanation for a few days and in fact there is a truth to that which I don’t need to deny.

But what about after these few days? I haven’t got any desire to apply for schools, let alone jobs and I don’t know what to do about this lack of interest. It’s an insane thing, surely? I mean, I’m sabotaging my own fucking future. All the money I’ve carefully, painfully saved for the last 7 years is being drained over the course of a few months… I could have at least have taken on a part-time job over the last few months, but I simply did not want to. Not even any freelance editorial work… WTF is the logic behind that? None, honestly. I just… Don’t. Want. To.

I know this cannot continue. I also know that the suicidal thoughts are going to intensify if money is yet another problem added to the list. But I’m still feeling numb 😦

 

Salvation is at hand.

A lot has happened in the last week or so and I still can’t find my equilibrium yet, despite the fact that I am at least somewhat gentler with myself these days. Oh well, that is no small feat, so I will continue to remind myself to just allow what must flow, in and out of me, for this moment in life.

After I finally wrote about that man from my past, the initial sense of relief was – of course  – followed by the scary realisation that there was plenty more in the chain of events that followed, even though it was different men and an ever-changing Me as well. But I felt it was too much to deal with, so I stopped writing and tried to distract myself by spending time with a few friends and my aunt. I also ended up having dinner with my ex, after avoiding him for more than six months.

There’s many reasons why I saw him that night but considering all of that, it turned out to be a tame affair, with me just ranting a bit about my housemate and family issues that were rearing their ugly heads (December always brings out the worst in my family). Meanwhile, he just seemed happy to have some company for a change, since he’s been without a car & basically broke for months now.

We survived that awkward hug moment and I left feeling only slightly shaky but mostly I felt a genuine sense of relief that we were able to have this fairly chilled out night. Here’s the thing, though. I was becoming increasingly disturbed by the new guy, who had completely retreated from me during that week. So yeah, I used my ex as a distraction, which of course only works for a short amount of time.

So between the family stuff resurfacing (my mom was being her usual incredibly selfish self and my aunt was once again scandalised by the injustice of that… meanwhile my dad was being hospitalised for a surgery and no one felt a need to tell me, including him. Hah.) and the frustrations with my housemate (she’s borrowed a shit ton of money and stopped being a functional housemate, let alone the friend I used to rely on…) and then this guy retreating from me, of course I make the emotionally flawed choice to focus in on, “Oh, he’s lost interest in me and doesn’t even have the decency to let me know.”

Sigh. Well, at least I didn’t pull a teenage rant of any kind this time… But I did text him with a politely worded and mature-sounding exit, essentially saying that I wasn’t quite sure what had changed his mind, but that I would respect it and that I had learnt a lot from our encounters, brief as they were.

That might have just been that, and I had to deal with the shitty family drama that was unfolding, entirely deja vu BS as always. My mother refused to play any role in helping either my aunt with her situation or even my father with his hospitalisation (though my stubborn father would refuse as well, of course). So I was trying to come to terms with the fact that I would have to go to the hospital and care for my father, which frustrates me on so many levels that have nothing to do with actually helping him but the nature of our relationship and the complications that his ever-worsening dementia, Parkinson’s and bipolar add to the already volatile mix.

Then A decides to reply and he tells me he’s struggling with depression – dysthymia, to be specific – and suddenly so much of his detached attitude, abrupt changes of mood, and frequent disappearances made more sense. Even his passionate beliefs in astrology (his emphasis on Cancerian traits of retreating into their hard shells…) and karmic cycles which I couldn’t quite place; now I can at least see why it holds such weight for him in light of all the darkness that he struggles with.

Sigh. It also broke my heart, of course. I keep meeting fascinating but painfully unhappy people and it’s always right when I am at the cusp of a “recovery” or crossroads of my own. It’s not bad or wrong or whatever, but the problem is that I have to manage my desire to be Batman and attempt silly rescues of this person. The key, as always, is in gaining a better understanding of what this saviour mechanism is really trying to do for Me. What is it that I myself wish to be rescued from? Also, who in the past failed to rescue me, perhaps repeatedly, so that I am now so desperate to spare others from the anguish I experienced as a child, a teen and yes as an adult. The vague hope from my unconscious – which can barely be understood at the moment let alone articulated usefully – is that saving someone else in some way results in my own much overdue salvation.

But I know better than most that it isn’t possible for things to work in this manner. We truly only have a chance at saving ourselves, and even that is a constantly shaky goal that seems to constantly edge just out of touching distance. I must keep this in mind, even as I go to have dinner with this young man who is in so much pain.

I will hold him, though, if he wants me to. That is as much for me as for anyone else.