Man. It feels so good to just say it. I HATE my mother-in-law.
Just last night, I came to home after an amazing day hanging out with my unhoused friends. I was feeling so great. She met me on the porch with a big smile on her face. She said, “I have something for you.”
My stupid, childish hope kicked in as it gullibly often does. I said hopefully, “You do!?”
I thought maybe she found something in her house that she thought I’d like. She’s been getting rid of books recently. She’ll have phases where she doesn’t remember why she has a thing or even what the thing is for. So she’ll just throw it away. Pictures are the one we try to watch.
I eagerly walked into her house and she pointed to the drawer under her stove. She couldn’t close it. Something had gotten stuck in the back and she couldn’t figure out how to get it out.
The thing she had for me was a job that she wanted me to fix before I even had a chance to walk in the door.
Barb has never EVER thought of me in a giving way. The only things she ever offers me is shit she was going to throw away. All I am to her is a mule who gummed up her boring but safe plans for her daughter. She would often call her husband, “her mule.” I hated that so much.
If it was just the dementia and aphasia I could handle that. I’m a natural care taker and I totally understand that issue. My grandmother and my mother both had pretty severe dementia.
But that’s not the root of the issue. I’d say she is a psychopath. She definitely has no recognition of other people’s feelings. But I think it’s deeper than that. I truly believe she feels like she is the only person in the world.
Her lifelong untreated anxiety caused by a totally unloving mother and living with an explosively verbally abusive husband for 40 years consumed her. Shes so freaked out all the time that her constant panic doesn’t let her see anyone or anything in her life. Her house is always on fire.
Aphasia is a condition that causes you to not be able to communicate. It presents in different ways. But in Barb’s case, it was caused by a couple strokes brought on by COVID. One part of her brain is affected. She can write but she can’t read what she wrote immediately after she wrote it. She has lost understanding of pretty much all object words. She can’t tell you the word for table, chair, dog or cat. But she understands their place in the world.
I have this theory that she never gave half of a shit about anyone or anything ever in her life so of course the naming of things was the first part of her brain to go. It was terribly weak to begin with.
My wife and her cousin have this anxiety that riddles their family. But they are doing beautiful work to process it and manage it. Barb is so consumed with it that anxiety has become her entire personality. It defines every waking moment of her life and always has.
It’s not the dementia and aphasia that makes me hate her, but living with her for years with this condition has probably exaggerated my hate for her.
Maybe I am experiencing caretaker fatigue and am displacing it on my entire life with Barb. Maybe I’m just awfulizing the whole thing right now.
I am currently running through several defining moments of my life where she vehemently tried to stop me from living my life because it would make her feel uncomfortable.
The one that is looping in my head right now is the purchase of that building at 15 Broad Street 14 years ago. She sent me an email with 21!!! reasons I should not buy it. She did everything in her power to get me to stop that purchase. It made me so unsure of myself. But my wife and my banker said I should so I trusted them.
I got to do so many fun and interesting things in that building. Not the least of which was run a homeless day center out of it.
The sale of that building paid for my kid’s college. Barb would NEVER have EVER considered to pay for her 2 grandchildren’s college although she has more than enough money to do so.
She’s always been that way with me. She tried to stop Rocky and me from starting a business. She successfully stopped us from traveling around the country after college. (I had been saving for that trip for a couple years.)
She has never once told me or her daughter that she was proud of us. We have always lived wrong in her eyes even though we never moved away from her (which was her most critically important agenda) and now we are caring for her in our duplex so she doesn’t have to live in a memory care unit which she has no idea how much she would hate.
I hate her so much right now.
And that gets me back to my personal journey. I carry so much hate in my heart.
I hate Barb.
I hate Israel.
I hate Trump.
It’s so consuming sometimes it makes me nauseous.
I truly am Darth Vader. At least part of me is. It is so easy for me to understand how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader. That just makes complete and total sense to me. Luke Skywalker‘s journey looks naïve and often whiny.
But I don’t want to be a source of destruction and death. I deeply want to be a source of goodness and construction.
While my hate is always raging, so is my love and understanding. I wonder if they might have to both grow together like a kind of emotional equaling. I wonder if when a person starts really examining what is going on beneath the surface they find all kinds of freaky shit.
Carl Jung wrote,
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
That’s what I’m doing in my blog here right now. I’m trying to make my darkness conscious so that it doesn’t control me without my awareness.
I don’t want to be Darth Vader even though I think part of me is. So I’m dealing with it in hopes of controlling it.
I also am thinking about how conditional our care for other beings on the planet is. Cute animals get more love than ugly animals. And it’s easier to watch ugly people freeze on the street than it is a pretty (white) teenage girl.
I can hate Barb and still care for her. Even though I hate her I also don’t want to see her live the next years of her life in a memory care unit. Just warehousing her in a jail for old demented people feels wrong to me. Freedom is really important to me. I don’t like seeing anyone’s freedom taken away if it can be helped. I don’t have to have a single ounce of love in my heart for her as an individual to take care of her.
All of this is part of my spiritual awakening. I don’t have to like you to care for you. You deserve care not because you did something to get it. You deserve care because you exist. The fact that you are here in the universe is all that is needed. Your existence is your all inclusive free pass to love and care.
I can hate you AND love you.
Sage
P.S. I don’t know if you know this or not but you are my therapist. For some reason it is really cathartic for me to write these things and send them into the world. I was hoping writing this might make me feel a little better about Barb. It did. Thank you for reading it. That makes me feel better too… to know someone sees me, all of me. It just makes me feel more connected to the universe.
Take care.
S.