This is a very Long post, I want to hear others’ perspectives, since mine is so screwed up so I have written everything on my mind, in order not to drip feed.
My DM is a lifelong victim of domestic violence, first as an observer as a child (her father beat her mother too), then later, her husband. In her mind, it has been normalised as this is how life would be, it is what men do. My F, with whom I am LC, never hit us (my brother and I) when we were kids but he was not above hitting any adult (not just my mother) in front of us, if he feels they have goaded him enough. Usually my mother does this, but not that often. And oh can she goad him and nag him to the core – this is just a honest observation.
I have come to the conclusion that they both have severe high-functioning mental illnesses (this can be said of everyone in my family, my brother, cousins, uncles... they all hit their wives. It’s a mind bending horror, one that I have escaped but have nightmare about) and have learnt to live like parasites, sucking each other’s life blood to live. We are from a culture where their generation had arranged marriages and just did not divorce, and would rather live like snarling dogs who often have long, quiet episodes.
I am not going to hide the fact that my mother also manipulates my father and takes all his abuse because she feels it actually empowers her because he abuses her, he owes her (I will never judge her for this, if she hadn’t adapted in this sick way, she could have never survived in this fucked up family of mine). I tried to offer her a home with me once I moved out (we don’t live in the UK), but she would not even listen, in fact she screamed at me for becoming an all-knowing brat who got educated in their money and dared to break up their marriage, and we briefly fell out over this (I told her all men are not like this, my husband is not like this, but she replied: then you live happily with your husband, but don’t come here trying to separate me from mine, he may beat me but he is mine, he could have left me long time ago but he stayed and did all his duties as a father and a husband, more than what my own father did for his family, and I will not allow anybody to badmouth him.”)
I am struggling to express how to describe this attitude to people not from my culture. My culture literally worships the phallus, we are that ingrained that women should be grateful to men and whatever they do, we should stay together as a family. Even the police here advise women if they dare to complaint about their husband hitting them, to compromise and live with him if he is good in ‘other ways.’ I am a convent-educated, well-travelled and reasonably sane woman (believe me, it took dedicated planning to get out of this situation, years of therapy, many fucked up relationships and a lovely, lovely person, my husband, to help me get to this point) who has understood that my mother would never, never accept my or anybody’s help in her marriage. In her mind, it’s laughable to even think of leaving her husband, she knows she has a bad marriage, but her standard reply is: I have a roof over my head, I have maids, and I have good clothes and cable connection, that’s enough.
My DM is not well educated or exposed to the outer world, she is supremely uninterested or incapable of having a job or a even volunteering for one (she does have a distance education degree in her mother tongue), she is extremely racist and has appalling social etiquette and attitude. I love her, but I cannot lie – if she was someone I saw out of my family, I would not even exchange two words with her (to be fair, this can be said of about 90% people from my extended family, I have horrible uncles and aunts and grandparents who make her look meek). But she is my mother, and after so many years of observation (I am 40, she is 65) I have understood that she is a product of her times and upbringing, and if she has been given a formal education and some financial security (my dad held the purse strings and would make her beg every day for housekeeping money, I grew up watching this) her life would have been so different, but as of now, she has no chance now to change, and I don’t want to judge her or change her, I just want to provide her with some comforts during the last years of her life.
So I whenever it is possible, I take her out, to the spa, to the shops, even for a weekend break, because her daily life is unimaginable drudgery (well, from where I look, because she claims she is completely happy sitting all day and watching TV) and I feel guilty that I travel a lot and have so much more money and freedom that she can ever dream of, so I make it a point to have an outing with her once a month. But lately, it has been extremely hard.
As far as conversations go when I spend time with my mom, Her talk revolves around superstitions and religion and caste and daily soaps and family gossips. But I do love her, she went without a lot of things so that she could afford my school fees, she fought heaven and earth to get me educated after college (my father wanted to marry me off to the first bidder) and get me the money for my graduate degree without which I won’t be where I am now, and supported me when I had a love marriage (still a novelty in my country and culture). I really want to give her some measure of happiness, but it’s become so hard to do so. She is not like before, she has changed, somewhat become nasty. She has been very rude and critical about me.
She has OCD (goes nuts if I cut an apple sideways and will nag and rant for an hour if I do not cut it the way she wants it to be cut – yes, the apple is my snack, not hers) and tells embarrassing stories about me as a child and how stupid I was as a child but somehow thanks to her hard work and upbringing, I am a success story. She tells this not to me, but to strangers she befriends in the hotel or the spa. It’s all done under a proud voice, but it really annoys me, and she totally ignores my pleas not to say all these things.
She can spend hours complaining about her DIL (my B’s wife – I am NC with my B, another saga, he persuaded my mother to gift him the parcel of land I saved for and bought as a gift for my mom as her 60th birthday, for her security because she has never had anything in her name all her life, and he sold it, and proceeded to drink and gamble the money away) and how badly she treats my DM (it’s not a complete lie, they have epic arguments, they live together as a joint family, SIL is an abused wife too, younger than me, but coping in her own way) and how she stole him from her and on and one until I literally feel like pulling my hair out. I have told my DM several times not to speak of all these things on our day/weekend out because it really depresses me, and have even walked out of the room because she just does not stop, but she says she will talk what she wants, she has no one to talk to.
Anyway, thanks for reading such a long post, I will try to wrap it up, there have been serious issues in my parental family currently which means they are going to face some legal interventions and they are going to lose a lot of money – let’s call it as natural progression of long term foolishness – and my mother has only complaints and horror stories for me that it has started to affect my own mental health. She relies heavily on my emotional support and dumps all her worries on me. Every day she calls me and cries on the phone. This has affected me so badly that I have gone back to therapy, I have night terrors, I have been yelling at everyone, and generally feeling like crap.
My therapist has now said that I need go low contact with my mother because she is destabilising my mental equilibrium that I have worked so hard for many years to obtain and maintain. She says to just talk to my DM for once or twice a month, and do not go out with her at all, or even visit her. But how can I abandon her like that? Everyone else has done that. My F and B hardly speak to her. She literally does not leave the house for days, and she is dealing with some big problems with her family right now. Will I be not like the rat that left the sinking ship if I went LC now?
And if I do that, I’d literally not have any contact with any of my parental family, it would just be me and my husband (we are child free). But the truth is I just do not want to even take her out anymore because I have to come to dread these outings. Just yesterday was one of our mom-daughter outings and as I heard my mother’s voice go on and on about some tissue paper crisis in her home and how my F refuses to buy the ones she like, suddenly I felt like, no I cannot do this any longer and then I felt so guilty because without me to take her out, my DM would never really go anywhere. I am torn.
My heart says I cannot abandon my mom but my therapist says I have to do this or risk undoing years of hard work. In this difficult situation where I am my DM's only solace in life (her words), AIBU to go LC with my DM?