My Parents Are Old

Tags

changing relationships, swapping places

My parents are both over 80. They are old. They are physically fragile. They have just moved house and country, which is one of the most stressful things they can do. They are having to learn completely new ways of living. Small details such as in which bin do you put your rubbish take time to learn and all these changes are happening at once. Going round the supermarket my mother has to read all the labels as she doesn’t recognise the contents from the colourful packing or the visible branding that is not what she’s used to. They now have smartphones, having never used a touch screen device and barely having used a mobile phone. They have to learn their new house, which windows open, which keys do what, how does the alarm work, the oven. They have to learn to use more than one remote for the TV and the cable TV, how to use a new land line phone.

On top of all that, they have to discover their local area, find out where they want to go for pleasure, what they are going to do, what their new routines will be.

It’s a lot to learn. It’s even more to learn when you’ve spent the last fifteen odd years living in your own little bubble and having things exactly as you like them without having to change anything without months of thought and discussion.

Into this mix I come, now half an hour’s drive away instead of several hours. We’ve been used to quarterly day visits from my father and an annual visit from my mother. In the last month I’ve talked to each of them more than in the last year combined. It’s all changed.

The relationship is altered. What it is to become is yet to discover. At the moment I am the educator, the facilitator, the practical person. I am helping, explaining, supporting, teaching. The roles have changed; I won’t say reversed. I feel sorry for them. I see their fragility, both physical and mental. I want to help them and look after them.

But at the same time I feel annoyed that I’m being compassionate and giving up my time and it’s all about them because they don’t have the space to consider anything else. I mentioned my small housing benefit disaster and got nothing. I mentioned what my sons were up to and got nothing. It’s all about them. Nothing has changed on their side other than the passage of time. I can feel annoyance turning into anger deep down and that conflicts with the fact that these are old fragile people who are never going to change.They are never going to be there for me.

That is easier to accept from a distance.

My mother’s already reverted to talking to me about my father. His little quirks and his health because he won’t talk about them or acknowledge them. She’s not allowed to go up a ladder more than two steps in case she falls because he won’t be able to catch her. His cancerous nodules are growing which could mean anything but it reminds me time may be short.

And yet, what am I to do? No doubt conversations and help will tailor off shortly as they become more settled. Grandchildren will be less enthused about visiting once school comes back and it eats into their time. Their behaviour has been immaculate and helpful on visits so far. I’m not going to be taking my mother round the supermarket once a week or even once a month. I’m becoming the helper and the grown up, but they are not children and they are not helpless.

What do I want out of what time we have left?

The Day I Went Off My Mother

Tags

1sis, mother, parenting, suicide

It was a couple of years ago. I’d already had a falling out with her when I said I didn’t want to hear her moan about my father any more. Either deal with him or accept him (I mentioned this briefly in Shush Don’t Tell). She didn’t like that but I just felt sorry for her weakness.

However I remember the moment I just lost any faith and trust in her altogether. It was when she still visited me occasionally and we had gone out to lunch in a local Italian restaurant. I faced towards the river. I can point out the table if you like.

We were talking about the teenage suicides in Bridgend, so it was probably 2009. If you remember a teenager committed suicide and several other followed suit, as if it was contagious.

My mother said something like “I don’t know why I’m surprised, after all two of my daughters tried suicide” clearly thinking there was no logic to it and certainly not thinking that it was anything more than coincidence.

I did once, when I was 15, swallow a bottle of pills. It wasn’t serious and I just had a very good night’s sleep. I was hurt when I later found out that my mother knew about it but had never mentioned it but I just simply put it to one side. I didn’t know of a second attempt though.

“What do you mean, two of us?” said I.

“Oh, didn’t you know”, titter. I can hear that titter now.

My big  sister was in London when we were abroad. She took an overdose. Her friend took her to hospital where it was serious enough to have her stomach pumped. He looked after her and took her home with him. My mother rang her up.

“What’s this nonsense I hear?” she said. So 1sis told me, because if my mother had told me while I was still shocked that she’d said something so unbearably insensitive I would have hit the roof.

But note, she said this over the phone. She didn’t go to my sister’s bedside to be there for her. “Why not”, I asked. “Because she didn’t need me.” Right, of course not. Your daughter tries and commits suicide and doesn’t need her parents, either of them.

I had worked out several years ago that my mother doesn’t do big emotions. Cuddles yes, commiserations yes. But deal with big things, no. She can’t.

I asked my sister about it and she told me her side of it.

I tried putting it all to one side but it comes back to haunt me. Firstly what an absolutely stupid thing to say. But secondly,

HER DAUGHTER ATTEMPTS SUICIDE AND SHE DIDN’T GO TO HER BEDSIDE

(I abhor shouting, but that deserves it, don’t you think?)

I mean, if all you can do is kiss someone better or send them a card then you do it don’t you? The more you love them the more intimately you show your support but you show you care. Even if you can’t do anything. Especially if you can’t do anything.

The idea that my mother was incapable of doing that made me start to wonder what sort of mother ignores a child’s pain so much?

I understand that a lot of my own feelings of inadequacies, both as an individual and as a parent, stem from so many mixed messages from my parents. I doubt every decision I make as a parent and wonder on the long term impact of all of them.

But the idea that I could ignore their pain, whether physical or emotional, is just unthinkable.

Much as I know that my mother has her own stuff which she’s never dealt with, I have to say something I find difficult.

The mother who ignores her child’s extreme pain, is a shit mother.

 

Half Way Through

Tags

exercise, food, good habits, HAES, me, pressure, priorities, smoking, thinking, time

We’re half way through the holidays and I’m only just beginning to take the time to think about me.

I’ve made a good effort at writing this blog more regularly; I’ve gone back to thinking about HAES. I touched the Wii yesterday for the first time in months. I’ve started thinking about what I’m cooking in advance and I’ve started trying to add more fibre back into my food and balancing my diet more.

But it all takes time and thought and energy. I’m not going to have time to get set into new good habits before we go back to school and other pressures will take priority. I need to find a way of addressing this or I will never give myself the time.

When I stopped smoking over 5 years ago, I spent a good year thinking about it beforehand. I read Alan Carr’s book which helped a little, and was further helped by someone who said they’d read it 6 times before stopping. This made me realise the amount of thinking I had to do. But I did. I renounced my desire for smoking mentally, before I put that last cigarette out and as a result I quit without patches and without all  that feeling of deprivation that had gone along previous efforts. I wanted to not be a smoker so I was.

I need to perform the same sort of mindswitch here. The biggest and slowest switch is to throw out much of my ingrained habits formed one way or another by my parents and childhood. That’s a work in progress but I’m finally beginning to really understand how pervasive my childhood is and how much it affects everything. There’s a lot to unlearn, but I’m getting better at recognising the thoughts and feelings I need to throw out. I do need to think about what, if anything, I say to my parents about all this but that’s almost a separate issue.

Writing the previous few posts have made me realise other mindswitches I need to make.

In Fat Is My Prison I realise for the very first time how much my parents’ attitude towards sport and exercise has worked against me. They only value walking as exercise, nothing else. I taught myself to swim and did quite a bit of that when young, mainly because we had a marvellous and cheap swimming pool. That fell off when we returned to England and it wasn’t such a pleasure any more. I also learned to ride a bike with the help of 2sis and used that to go off cycling round the streets although I never got into going on big days out on it. Riding a bike is also something that stopped when I returned to London. Having learned on safe streets with good cycle paths I cycled to Weybridge once and was absolutely terrified and never got on a bike again. I do occasionally think about starting again, with all the riverside paths we have but this is something I feel I ought to rather than I want to.

Writing We’re Eternally Hungry has forced me to re-evaluate my diet. I always used to think my diet wasn’t that bad because I didn’t eat a lot of cakes, creams and puddings. Again this goes back to my parents. Nice sponge cakes with a bit of jam or icing in were all right but for the most part puddings were not deemed ‘proper food’ although we did indulge in the occasional patisserie. Just about the last time my mother made me cry was when she ridiculed me for wanting an ice-cream after a meal. The children could have one but it’s a childish thing to eat so why on earth was I bothering. I know that sounds petty and ridiculous but it hurt. Why was I not allowed to enjoy the simple pleasure of having an ice-cream along with my sons and nephews just because she didn’t want one. So I grew up with savoury=good; sweet=bad mentality. Chocolate is an indulgence we permit ourselves. So I need to throw out all that as well as all the diet indoctrination that goes on in my head.

I don’t really know how I’m going to keep up this level of thinking when term starts again. To write this blog, I need a good hour’s peace which I find in the morning if we’re not going to school or elsewhere or in the evening once they’ve settled down. I feel too much pressure on the hours while they’re at school to use that time to write which is something I need to try and address but that goes back to prioritising me over work which I find difficult. So I need to think more about that.

I also need to make the time to play on the Wii, something I don’t need peace and quiet for and don’t have to do in a solid chunk. Again I hear the thoughts that you don’t start burning fat until you’ve done at least half an hour so anything less is wasted. I need to throw out that thought and think that actually 20 minutes can make my muscles ache and that strengthening my muscles and making me stronger and healthier is actually what it’s about rather than as a source of weight loss (which according to research is a fallacy anyway). So if I can break it into 20 minute chunks that makes it a lot easier to squeeze it in during the day in a way that doesn’t make me feel that it’s pushing other higher priorities out of the way.

When I stopped smoking, I wasn’t working. But I didn’t have all my children at school yet either. So pressure was still there, just in a different way. I managed to find the time then to do what I needed to do. I need to find the time again.

I also need to continue to think about the implications of my reluctance to take the time to think about me, to not see this as a luxury but as a necessity. I still need to learn to value myself more, to prioritise looking after myself as essential and to take the time I need to do what I need to do. For me.

Out of the Blue

Tags

2sis, anger, child, mother, sister

There I was, minding my own business, sweeping the kitchen floor, when all this anger suddenly came spewing out of me. Well, in my head it did.

I could hear my mother asking, as she did a few years ago, whether I blamed her. At the time I said No, it wasn’t about blame but about understanding which was sort of true then.

What I wanted to say to her this afternoon was “Yes, I am angry at you. I’m angry at you for making a mess of your own life. You made one mistake, albeit a big one and you never got over it. That bitterness and anger that led you to feel trapped in a marriage you wouldn’t have chosen if you weren’t pregnant spilled over into my childhood. You expressed it to me every day ever since I can remember.

“I knew, even before I had the remotest understanding of why, that you weren’t happy, but that you didn’t seem able to do anything about it. You felt that my father was cold, heartless, rational, and that I needed protecting from him if I wasn’t going to be hurt. I didn’t need to be any more confused about my father than I already was. He could be warm and affectionate but he also drove me to tears too many times for me to count. He scared me with his anger and his lack of understanding.

“I loved 1sis, as I still do, but her moods went up and down; sometimes she lived at home and sometimes she didn’t. When she was there for me, she was all the way there, but much of the time she wasn’t, either absent or bound up in her own problems.

“2sis makes me angry. Although we tried to be friends at some point, she went off to university and escaped. Sometime after that it all went bad between us. She resented 1sis being alive and she resented my father’s perceived favouritism towards me. She felt she didn’t have her rightful place within the family and she took it out on me. She belittled me, mocked me, said hurtful things. She did them in front of you and you never told her off. She did it in front of my father and he never even noticed. You used to acknowledge that she caused me pain, but when I started to find my voice, you backtracked and said you had no idea what I was talking about. Us both becoming mothers drove us further apart and we certainly never swapped parenting tips. The fact that I was pregnant as she was getting over a miscarriage didn’t help. We now have no contact with each other and I don’t know what to say when my children ask when they are going to see their cousins.

“As to my father, I feel more frustrated than angry towards him. He genuinely does not understand where his life has gone wrong. He said to me the other day that there was a youth club attached to his school but he’d never gone as he didn’t see the point of having fun and making friends. He still doesn’t. For that reason I find it difficult to feel angry towards him.

“But to you, who was aware that things were wrong in your life but refused to do anything about it, I feel anger. When you told me about the one time you thought about leaving him, when he was gloating about having cheated and beaten me at Scrabble aged 6 you talked about how we children would feel in the morning if you had gone. You did not contemplate taking us with you. And when 2sis had her stomach pumped, you weren’t there for her then either. When you were told that I’d swallowed a bottle of pills, you never mentioned it to me.

“Was your life really that hard? Has keeping quiet for all those years got you what you wanted?”

 

IE: Diets Don’t Work

Tags

Allen Carr, diet, emotion, food, HAES, IE, Intuitive Eating, mother, smoking

“Dieting is a form of short-term starvation“.

The forward to this book includes the following: “Through Intuitive Eating, they [clients] have learned to trust the wisdom that has always been within, but had been blunted by years of self-doubt”. That last phrase, “years of self-doubt” echoes strongly with me.

As a child I never had an eating problem. You ate what was provided, like it or not, and children’s menus didn’t exist. I remember my mother stating that we had potatoes at every meal until I was 7 because she couldn’t afford to feed us all otherwise. I don’t remember feeling unhappy about my weight until after I’d had my first child. Subsequent to that other confidence issues began to take over my life.

Even then I didn’t really recognise a problem. As a child I had enjoyed cooking and was perfectly competent. My ex-husband enjoyed cooking and gradually took charge in the kitchen having decided that I couldn’t cook. I didn’t really mind this slur as I was quite happy not to cook. I have since completely lost my joy in cooking and really struggle with the simple act of providing food for my family.

Although I hadn’t a problem with food as a child, my mother did, as I touched upon briefly before. I watched her from the age of 7 onwards fight a battle with food. Living abroad didn’t help with all the cheeses she loves and other wonderful food. She struggled with different diets when we got back to England and her weight swung up and down. I think she’s fairly stable now, but quite overweight. I tried to provide emotional support for her as no-one else was going to and I think I had years of her self-doubt reflect on and influence me so that I was burdened with her weight issues before I gained my own.

Furthermore I now begin to realise how much emotion is attached to food. My parents would spend hours discussing food: what to cook, where to buy from, how to alter the recipe,did it need another ten minutes, was it good, should they do it differently next time… It seemed endless. I was once asked how Christmas could be improved and my answer was simply ‘stop spending the whole day talking about the meal’. Celebrations are about having a big meal. Not about having the family round the table for a long chat in each other’s company accompanied by food, but by a meal which is the focus of the gathering and after which we all leave. This makes me angry now, thinking of all the time wasted and conversations (or fights) not had because of the focus on food. My parents somehow saw food as the glue that helped us stick together – ‘the family that eats together, stays together’ was often quoted by my father even though he didn’t really understand what was meant by that. He took it literally.

Going back to the book, diets don’t work. People fail to adhere to them, fall off the wagon and put the weight back on coupled with guilt. One of the symptoms of “diet backlash” is “having little trust in self with food”. I feel a lack of confidence with my ability to eat well anymore. I don’t think I eat badly but too much. Diets help break the direct feedback you have with your body over food by trying to impose the dietary rules on you (you can’t be hungry: you had a limp lettuce leaf an hour ago). Your metabolism becomes sluggish if you diet too much; I don’t know if I suffer from this as I don’t know what having a normal metabolism feels like, but it’s worth remembering.

One interesting fact is that according to studies the growth in commercials for dietary products has a parallel trend in eating disorders. Obviously there are lots of other similar pressures: women’s magazines (which I don’t read) but also newspapers and other media always identify and equate the body beautiful with a slender one even if they’re discussing whether it’s a valid comparison. My father kept telling me to lose weight until I finally said that I had confidence issues and please could he shut up. Listening to friends talk about their diets is also pressurising. Just the fact that clothes shops have larger quanties in the smaller sizes adds to the pressure.

I think of the parallels between this approach and that of quitting smoking. When I stopped smoking almost six years ago I read Allen Carr’s book on how to quit smoking and while I didn’t put out my last cigarette whilst reading it did show me the degree to which I had to change the way I thought about smoking before I could stop without masses of will-power. It took me over a year to turn it all around in my head, but then I stopped with very few cravings and have rarely thought pleasurably about smoking since. Dieting seems to be me to be that equivalent of quitting eating (well, mostly) without changing the way you think about food. The fact that you’re not stopping entirely but are trying to find a balanced way forward makes it much more challenging than quitting smoking. And I’ve done that.

Quotes are taken from “Intuitive Eating” by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch

Detaching Myself From my Children

Tags

children, detach, emotions, independent, parent

Let me start off my saying that I love my children. Absolutely. No doubt about it.

I knew I wanted children by the age of 10 or 11. Or so I thought. Now I wonder whether I really wanted children, or whether it was the idea of having my own family where I could make the rules and get away from my parents that was so appealing, and that later on I saw marriage as an escape rather than a positive commitment in itself.

I also felt that my mother’s happiness depended on my support so maybe I did fall into that trap of thinking that children would make me happy. That’s a tough one.

But, I love them most sincerely and consider it my responsibility to do the best by them I can. I still can’t accept just ‘good enough’ as a parent and I do very much struggle with guilt over all the things I don’t do for them and the opportunities I cannot provide. The fact that I may do better than my other parents, single or not, as my headteacher regularly reminds me, doesn’t actually cheer me up.

For many years my life has been dominated by my children. As, I think, it should be when you make that commitment. I breast fed all four, up to 21 months which I think combined to a total of 6 years. I never used a dummy (believe the Americans call it a pacifier) or fed them out of a bottle. I didn’t leave them to cry and would often lie down with them to get them asleep and start dozing myself. I have to say that although that meant a lot of disturbed nights for the first two years of their lives I quickly got to the point where they were good at sleeping and they never wake up now and never try climbing into bed with me unlike some of their peers. So I feel the sacrifice of sleep in those early years was worth it. They even let me have a good lie in on a Sunday morning which I treasure.

For maybe ten years, with interruption,s happiness depended on getting enough sleep. I also got divorced and moved several times and did lots of other things. But my life was and still is centred around the children. I worry that they have no other adults who are close to them, let alone to provide them with a male role model. On the other hand they no longer hear arguments, shouting, and stressed silences and we are a stable family unit. I also worry about what happens if I die, and who I could ask to take them on. I usually reach the conclusion that I should just be careful not to fall under a bus.

In many ways I define myself by my children. I follow academic years rather than starting a new year in January. I’m having a good holiday if they are. I’m enjoying peace and quiet if they are happy being involved in something. If they get enthused about something, so do I.

Last year my mood has been incredibly volatile since 2son stopped going to school. If I had put effort into him and got nowhere I would be frustrated and miserable. If he had got up or said something positive I would feel good. If I’d heard good news from one of the support services I would feel buoyant, if bad news I would slump. My mood did not depend on what I was doing or feeling, but what he was.

I need to detach my emotions from being so intertwined with that of my children, especially 2son. Hiding behind him last year has stopped me doing things and making progress in my own life; but it’s also stopped me feeling the emotions that I want to and need to as my emotions get subsumed by his.

I have to make progress with my life. I have to learn to do things that make me feel good and positive irrespective of what mood my children are in. I have to relearn being an independent individual who can be happy if she wants to. Otherwise I haven’t learnt anything from my mother’s example.