The Other One

again again

When I moved in with my mother on December 28, 2022, I did not know that I was moving in with her.

I thought I was postponing my day's activities and work in order to check on her when she didn't answer the phone, because she lives alone and I was worried.

And then when I found her on the floor of the upstairs bathroom, I thought I was cleaning her, feeling along her bones for breaks, dressing her in a clean nightgown, fixing her dinner, and getting her into bed.

And then when I drove home to get a change of clothing, I thought I was going to stay at her home overnight to make sure she was okay.

And then when she wasn't okay, I didn't know what to think. I guess I thought she was going to die, and I tried to prepare myself for that.

But she didn't die and she still needs round the clock care and here I still am, my life hijacked while the stress rolls downhill gathering sadness, anger, resentment, helplessness, powerlessness, loss of all control, surrender of everything I have wanted to do and everywhere I have wanted to go.

This could go on for months. Years. I try to remain in a place of acceptance. I am here to keep her out of a nursing home. I am here to respect her wishes- no doctor, no nurse, no respite for me aside from the random day out here and there.

In July I was gone twice for work, one night each time, back before noon the next day. I had help the day before with getting her dinner, and help the following morning getting her breakfast, but my mother won't let anyone dump her commode let alone change her briefs, so that means even if I do get out for the night I am coming home as quickly as possible and almost certainly to a big disgusting mess of pee and shit and laundry and cleaning.

And so I am stuck I am stuck I am stuck.

My father still isn't speaking to me, even though I called and left a message crying and asking him to please call me.

Why was I crying?

Well, thanks (I assume) to my mother's dementia, I thought he was sick.

I was downstairs working when my aunt called for my mother, to tell her my uncle was sick. When I came upstairs to ask my mom about the call, she said "Treesha told me your father is sick."

I was in a bad headspace at the time and I immediately picked up the phone to call my father. He did not answer and I left a message during which I broke down. "Treesha told me you were sick," I said. "I love you and I am worried about you. Please call me."

It wasn't until I spoke to my aunt later that I found out it was my uncle who was sick, not my father.

It doesn't matter though. My father never called me back.

When you are an adoptee, abandonment issues are part of the package. After all, both biological mother and father abandoned me to fate. And in my case, my bio mother literally abandoned me at the hospital, having made no adoption plan. She called my siblings on the day of my birth to tell them "it's a girl and her name is Christine." Then she came home 2 days later with no baby and no explanation. "No, Christine didn't die," she told them. "I just couldn't keep her." Who knows how long I was in the hospital, or under what kind of circumstances, or how I landed in foster care for 6 months.

My mother and father made a deliberate decision to adopt me into a shitty marriage and that pisses me off. My mother tells me she never loved my father, that she married him to please her father and her family. So by the time they adopted me she knew her husband, who she didn't love, was emotionally abusive (and more, but that's another entry), yet she somehow thought bringing a baby into this mess was a good fucking idea.

It's 53 years later and I still struggle with abandonment. And now my father has thrown me away like a piece of garbage. I could go through a list of how I have stayed in a relationship with him against my better judgement, dropped everything to be there for him when he estranged himself from his brother (and his whole family), and when he divorced his two subsequent wives - with details about all those times, how I listened, comforted, listened, advised, listened, listened, listened.

I am quite literally the only woman who has never left him.

And now he
has left
me.

And it hurts. It hurts bad and I feel abandoned, worth nothing to my own father, and I have been proven right about his love being conditional and I don't want to be right. I am hurt. I am hurting.

I find I can't write about it because then I have to feel it and I'm so tired and every day runs into the next with no solace and I have a place to live but I am not home, I am not home, I am not ever home.

I distract myself - a movie I've watched a million times until it is just pictures and sounds and the comfort of familiarity, a hit off a joint, a piece of klonopin, a meditation on gratitude, my bed that calls me in earlier and earlier until I am setting my mom up for the evening at 6:30pm and then lying myself down on my mattress on the floor in her back room and playing the word games on my phone and listening to a book I've heard a million times before until it becomes just words and phrases and the sound of the narrator's voice and the comfort of familiarity.

I ignore the winter the spring and now the summer, carving out time for myself where I can, escaping to bed, into sleep, the sweetest relief of all, the sleep that leads to morning where I cringe and feel the waves of fear and start it all over again.

And again. And again. And again.

Funny how again = a gain. A gain.

I gain ground on uncertainty itself.