At It Again
It seems we are always, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Knowing that it will. It always does. And when it happens it is as though we're struck anew each time, with a kind of helpless despair. If I hadn't his presence at my side daily, the bloom of his comforting arms, his gentle, reasoning voice, I don't know what I would do. As it is, when it happens I cannot sleep. I wake at night, either because I'm going through an episode of post-menopausal flashing, or because my beloved has had to get up once again during the night as a result of his miserable prostate urging his bladder on to protest. Once I'm up my mind begins helplessly churning everything over and over and over. Things that seem simple during the day take on urgent meaning during the night. Keeping me from sleeping, from blissful, restful sleep.During those hours when I toss and turn, trying, usually with success, to keep from waking him, I try to fashion reasonable arguments which might be acceptable to her. To try to help her to understand that the manner in which she is proceeding may not succeed; that she might try an alternate route. I play with the idea of telling her that she is slowly but surely squeezing the life out of us. That this simply cannot continue. But knowing that if I do relay this to her, there is too slight a chance she might understand. Rather, what would more likely result from that revelation would be her withdrawal. She has few enough resources to fall back on, and we cannot, simply can not, remove ourselves.
That she has engineered her own plight is beyond dispute, and even she will admit to it. But she sees herself as a victim. As don't we all when everything falls apart. I wonder so often how someone with her intelligence, her ability to think things out as long as they don't refer to her specifically, can be so impaired when it comes to recognizing, realizing the level of her manipulation. She is not a reasonable person, although she is, paradoxically, a reasoning person. She has a bulldozer mentality which insists that she be recognized as being in the right, always. If ever she makes the intolerable concession that she has been wrong, or has been responsible for a wrong, it must always be accompanied by her accuser's own admission of personal culpability.
Is this totally due to her ingrained, inbred personality? I do see much of my mother in her. And most certainly I deplored my mother's personality. Her incendiary, miserable personality. Our daughter is so much more intelligent, she has enjoyed so many more of life's benefits than did my mother, so why in the name of all that's reasonable has she turned out this way? In some respects her dogged belief in herself is a positive thing, her seeming indomitability will carry her through where more fragile personalities might collapse under the strain she is constantly bearing. So that's a positive thing. But we're so tired, so weary of being a partner to her thrashing at windmills. It is personally intolerable.
That she cannot think things out in a sensible, patient manner beforehand. To view beyond the very present to the possible, the very possible pitfalls which invariably lie before her. Will we never be able to? She is, after all, forty-five years old, a functioning adult, with more than her share of excellent attributes. Why is it, how is it that she has been so impaired? Her impulsiveness could be a positive thing if it were intelligently channelled. Her inability to accept responsibility, although she claims she can and does, is a dreadful liability. Her inbred belief that she is always right, and others not, is a miserable and difficult trait to control. She cannot meet a situation halfway, accept compromise.
And how someone who is so bright and intelligent, so creative and perceptive, with so much potential, could permit herself to become a victim of her own failings yet again is just beyond our understanding. So, once again she's put herself into a seemingly impossible situation. Which she, as usual, insists she will work her way out of. And she very well may, we more than hope so. However, on this trip to re-working her future and leaning forward to a brighter one, we're dragged along, helpless bystanders, but there to offer support, both emotional and material. And we're tired, tired, tired of it.
Oh, I know we're not alone in this kind of thing. It's the most common thing in the world for parents to be dragged into the vortex of their children's failed attempts, their despairs, their lifestyles-in-waiting. And what do parents such as we despair most about? That our children will not ask for advice, nor ever, ever accept our unsolicited advice, regardless of the fact that we are able to consider the situation in the round, regardless of our own past experience, either personal or witnessed. Our advice is shunned, although we're still drawn into the situation, and should we be foolish enough to insist that we be heard, we are accused of the bleakest, blackest motives. All coming down to trying to "control" our children's lives. When the truth is, our own lives are being controlled, past endurance, by the needs of our selfish children.
It's a metaphorical bed that we've made. And more's the pity.
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, November 30, 2005
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