It has been nearly ten years, since my mother’s stroke, a month before my father died. I have reached the end of my productive adult life as a female, in terms of having a career or having a child before it is too late (not physically, I am unlikely to trust anyone enough to procreate before the time is up, given my slow burn mentality.)
I frequently cry about this, I pretty much started crying as soon as I saw Wolfe. Not for the obvious reasons, just the polar opposite, confident male version of me. These are not all good qualities, given the errors in plain sight etc. He makes me feel very battered.
I did wonder, for a long time, whether there was envy involved in my interest in him. I also wondered why, as someone considered very knowledgeable by even my drinking buddies, I would seek what would be considered to the untrained eye a ‘himbo.’ These people would not understand as I do, the amount of time and commitment Wolfe has had to put in to make his extensive knowledge of natural health look superficial and effortless to the jaded European passing interest eye.
I have been horribly bullied since childhood. I wondered, as a child, why I got on better with my teachers than I did with my own family. I remember at ten or so, having to leave the room because my sisters were shrill, inane, and extremely nasty.
Last week I tried to notify one of them of my mother’s impending operation. Her response was that this was not good enough for her. She only really sees things in terms affecting her. The fact that she had already had a letter explaining the operation had escaped her, because apparently my ability to write frightens her. Were I to describe a summer’s day, she would find it weird and patronising.
So, as you can tell, I am not dealing with brains of Britain. My mother used to tell me I would have to look after them after she was gone. I thought this was very odd, given that I was a small child, and they were ten and sixteen years older, and consistently nasty. Now I am less surprised. My mother, herself pretty unpleasant until her stroke, was identifying the stronger party.
Being strong sucks, however. You get dumped on, everyone expects you to cope on your own, and they think it is quite alright to attack you over and over again. I am a bit fed up, to say the least. I have had to say to her, in all seriousness, that either I have to now demonstrate some form of parental discipline, or she will have to go into care as I am not safe from my own siblings, who have proved themselves to be greedy, dishonest, extremely nasty and extremely ruthless in their pursuit of role playing power points and financial entitlement.
I did not take care of their parents for reasons of power-mongering, but this is what they have always been so scared of, and which is now a horribly self-fulfilling prophecy, and the only way out of it, it seems, is for my mother to live elsewhere in case they want to visit. (in my brother’s case, the visits are now every five months, so this seems like an expensive waste) I am not sure that I see a way out, other than our moving so far away that they cannot visit at all, and this would be complicated by my mother’s progressing illness, leaving us open to further legal attacks from her own children.
So there we have it, the opposite of a go-getting, driven, confident and rather slutty male, is a shy, harried, equally loquacious but somewhat different female that gave her life away for a family who neither deserved nor appreciated it. I have distracted myself from misery, by investing myself in amusing my opposite, who remains unamused.
I do realise that part of the reason that Wolfe hates everything is to let me know he has seen it so that I can take it down, and I also realise that I am insufficiently worthy of note to really affect him at all, but it still pisses me off that I could not even manage to get a sensible conversation out of him in the first place. He spotted me, and then apparently made several incorrect assumptions, based on erroneous ideas about worth, purpose and interest.
I just wanted one thing to go right. I wanted one thing to be appreciated and used appropriately, and I wanted to make something of a life that had already been taken away.
You could say that something else was created, but whether it is worthwhile beyond comforting a few thousand other emotionally scarred people, I don’t know. At least it got me writing in the first place, I guess.
It is unlikely that my family will notice that they have messed up until they have lost everything. It makes me very sad that other people cannot even let my mother die the ways she wants to, and that I am becoming less committed to fighting them. Being strong sucks, and being kind sucks even more.