An End

Last night I dreamt our house was sinking. Every time I looked out the window I saw the earth around our house swallow up more and more of our home and everything in it.

Peter and I were scrambling trying to get our two kids and four animals out of the house before it was swallowed completely. It seemed impossible to get all of our family together and no one would leave without the others (which was kind of sweet but also infuriating and troubling).

I woke just before the house was swallowed completely.

Here is the completely unsurprising dream interpretation of a house is sinking into the earth:

To dream that you or something is sinking suggests that you are feeling overwhelmed. Someone or something is pulling your down. Alternatively, the dream means that some important and significant stage in your life may be coming to an end. 

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For those who have followed my journey, you know the story. For those who have not, my mother was a bright, funny, spirited, woman with so so many dreams. She achieved several of those dreams. And she did so while not getting support and help for her pretty significant mental illness.

However, she found a way to numb the pain and began self medicating with drugs and alcohol about 20 years ago. We have not seen each other in 8 years. She died at 65 of complications resulting from alcoholism.

These past 2 weeks I have felt flooded much of the time--so many thoughts and feelings that I can't tease them apart or think them through. Flitting in and out or sinking deep into my bones, these thoughts and feelings are pulling at me as if being tossed by a wave....wave after wave after wave...

And, the rest of life doesn't stop. There are still children and pets, with their own crises and needs and lives. And there is still a pandemic and we still are living in this altered state. There is much to wade through in the turbulent flood and I am chest high.

I am processing this significant stage of my life coming to an end and will be for as long as it takes. This week we are preparing for my mother's virtual memorial. Watching old videos and looking through her writings and pictures have been both painful and healing. I hope the memorial we are planning brings others who have loved her some catharsis. Creating it certainly has.

To begin

I tried to start this blog a few months ago. I was beginning to see the deep need to share and open up about my situation with my mother. But then I stopped short of posting anything for fear that my mother would find it. I was paralyzed.

What I have realized is that if I predicate my actions and freedoms based around my mother I will go crazy, or stay crazy, as the case may be.

I believe with all my heart that my mother has a borderline personality disorder. It took me many years to figure out what to call it. It looks like different things at different points in her life, but all tallied, this is my best fit for what I see and experience.

The problem is (and to be honest, there are many problems) that my mother is a psychologist. A clinical psychologist, no less, who has worked at borderline clinics. But that is not all. She also writes books on parenting. Try bringing this one in for family therapy.

However, in her last iteration of instability, we did just that, or at least we tried, until our therapist told us she could not continue until my mother was off of substances.

In the past year she went from a well paid job, an apartment in the same town we live in and occasional dinners with my family, to being homeless for four months, crashing with friends, ruining marriages, and drinking and drugging so much she has to be regularly hospitalized.

Fantastic. So how do I respond to this? 15 years ago I would have been with her in the moment, enabling and defending her and upholding her deluded reality. 10 years ago I would have stepped in to help with the crisis (for my little sister's sake more than for my mother's at that point, as she was only 13). 5 years go I was starting to take a stand, but would still put a next day ticket on an almost maxxed out credit card to fly to be with my mother who "had a stroke" (with many empty pill bottles around). Now, I distance.

A wise woman once told me what happens to people who empathize with crazy people: they go crazy. And that was where I was, trying to connect my mother's "reality" to reality. I was trained well and it has taken years of consistent work to free myself and I'm not quite there, but I'm pretty damned far along.

I will not get into the back story right now. But I did want to finally commit to putting something out there in this shared space, bravely as a testimony to my experience.

A friend reminded me the other day that it will not always feel this raw. And I think that is true. Her roller coaster is never ending, yes, but I am finally getting off of her ride.