Two days before the devastating elementary school shooting in Connecticut last week I received two emails from my mother wherein she essentially told me and two other relatives that we are not doing enough for her and she can only recover with more from us and then proceeded to outline the numerous ways we should help. The "numerous" ways all involve giving money.
I get it. People in her position don't have a lot of money, if any. I do get it. I'm sure it would help today to have money, and if I could make a big enough contribution, it may even help for a week or a month or two.
I have not replied.
And I vacillate between saying to myself "my non-reply IS my reply" to "I don't know what to say yet". And when my heart and mind wander back onto this subject I feel a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach. This sickening feeling is largely connected to the calendar.
She informed us that the halfway house, which from what I could determine was a relatively good place for her, was kicking her out on Thursday (tomorrow) and she will again be homeless. So as I get closer to Thursday, it is on my mind. I can pretty much guarantee that come Christmas day it will be on my mind as well, just as it was on her birthday, and on Thanksgiving. I feel like these days are held hostage, which I resent, and I am having a hard time working my way around it.
No matter how long I live with a mother who in no way resembles a "normal" mother, the normative scripts around how I should be responding to my mother remain there for me. I continue to dismiss them, counter them, argue with them, but this is a process that takes energy and a lot of it.
After the shooting last week I was left thinking about the time several years ago when I saw her driving while under the influence and didn't call the police. I regret that so much. It was early in this process of distancing and boundary work and we were leaving family therapy. We knew in therapy that she was under the influence of something and then when I saw her swerve I thought, my god, she could kill someone. But this struggle internally with calling the police on my own mother with whom I was actively trying to mend fences was too much for me to bear and by the time I thought this all through, I didn't know where she was and she could have been home and off the road. While it felt like too much to bear to call the police, I realized later that what really would have been too much to bear is if she ran into innocent people on her way home and I had not called the police.
It was like she had a weapon and when it got impounded and sold at auction, I was very relieved.
And what I have been thinking about since the shooting is this: I have struggled with protecting my mother from herself, protecting my family from her, protecting myself from her, and protecting the rest of the world from her. These things do not always line up neatly and I think more conversation about these issues could help it to be more transparent.
I am so heartened by the folks I know who live with mental illness and work with it. To be open, to be frank and honest and brave about dealing with a mental illness, while having a mental illness no less, is nothing short of inspiring.
However, I am so sad for my mother, that her illness is too much for her to handle, or that the line between her and her illness is sufficiently blurred at this point that there is no handling to be done. I am profoundly sad that it has cost her relationships with people who do love her very much. But to my mother, loving her means feeding into her illness, and to me loving her means not engaging with her illness. This is one of those emails. I think it is from her illness. But she will undoubtedly be hurt in the process no matter how or if I respond.
I have been so happy that I have some readership here from folks who have similar experiences and for whom I can remind you that you are not alone in dealing with your friend or family member who might be struggling too. I will leave you with something I remembered the other day: in therapy a couple of years ago, my therapist talked about how she would give me a diagnosis of anxiety or depression or some such thing so that insurance would cover my sessions. She told me there wasn't an insurable option for "help processing while a family member slowly unravels". This to me crystalized how I, too, felt about my mother's illness. I didn't validate it as something real to me either. It was always in reference to how it was affecting my mother, not me. It was hers. Even though it clearly directly affected me, I didn't feel like I had a right to talk about it openly. It was her illness, not mine after all. It was shortly after that discussion that I started this blog. I think it is unhealthy to keep these things inside and I think we all need each other's support.
I wish I had called the police back then on my mother, for the community-at-large's sake, for my sake, and for her sake. Hiding from it or pretending it was not happening would not keep it from happening, and drawing attention to it and seeking intervention actually might have helped her at a point in the road early on when she could have potentially righted this ship.
