Chaos to Cosmos
The path from chaos to cosmos was discovered by telling one's life story

Wednesday 30 March 2011

Duvet days are necessary rest not laziness

Duvet days are often necessary rest

"Today I'm in so much pain I just want to cry because nothing will mitigate it. The pain is so bad I feel sick. My head hurts. I feel like I have a fever. It hurts to rest my hands on the laptop to type this and it's taking me ages as I type just one or two phrases at a time, then it's too painful to continue or my mind loses the plot and I forget what I wanted to say. My arms feel heavy and weak, my neck and shoulders feel pulled, my back feels broken, the pain in my hip is more than I can bear, my knees feel swollen and it hurts to walk on them, the muscles down my back and legs feel pulled, making it hard to get up off the bed - but my wrists and arms can’t push me either - and it’s painful even to sit on the loo. My feet feel raw as if they’re blistered and have no skin on them and it's painful even to rest them on the surface of the bed. Every time I get up, my joints click and bang painfully, I feel more nauseous and hot and thirsty; I shake from the “exertion” of just getting to the kitchen and back and I feel totally exhausted." 

Just taking some light packages round to the post office caused this. This happens at least once a week and the effects can last for days, when the only thing I can do is lie down and rest and wait and save up my energies for the next outing.

My mother calls this “lying around” and even told the neighbours that, because that’s what they accused me of doing, when they accosted me and verbally abused me in the street. (And later threatened me with violence.) 

My mother thinks that I “lay around” deliberately for no genuine reason, because she is a narcissist [1] who has spent her entire life wheedling, manipulating and exploiting people and situations so she could get away with putting in the least amount of effort possible - in other words, by being lazy. It became obvious that she's judging me on her standards and projecting her own faults onto me.

She refused to read the information I gave her about fibromyalgia and ME/CFS, but then tried to excuse her ignorance, by saying that she did not understand what these illnesses were. When I said that the only thing I’d ever done wrong was to not complain enough so that she would understand, she jumped, eagerly, on my words and declared that this was it: it was all my fault.

Funnily enough, I don’t blame her for not “seeing” my disability, because in that sense she's only the same as the majority. Most people, if they don’t see a wheelchair and permanent paralysis or a missing limb, fail to see any disability. But we’re not talking about people who are only unaware when they pass an invisibly disabled person in the street, we’re talking about her own daughter. 

The evidence was there under her nose, she just chose not to see it.

Even if she didn't understand my illness, she could have asked. But she didn’t, she rushed to make wrong assumptions and then told people a bunch of untruths based on those false assumptions and when those people heard those things, that they assumed were true - which says they’re no better than her for accepting a one-sided view, without checking for themselves – but then they advised her against me, attacked and bullied me, based on that false information. She succeeded in creating conflict that made her the centre of attention. 

She also decided that I must be lying. It was an accusation she screamed and shouted at me, whenever she had either forgotten or chosen to forget something dreadful that I reminded her she’d said and she then tried to deny. 

It took me over 50 years to realise that she lied, constantly, pathologically.

When she finally seemed to accept that I've felt ill for years, the best response she could come up with when I've mentioned a particular symptom is to say that she has the same (or worse, naturally). No she doesn't. If she did, she’d be constantly whining about it. She certainly wouldn't be able to work two mornings a week, go shopping several times a week, do her own gardening and housework, all of which she does, only slightly slowed by the fact that she's 87. She simply won't allow me to be ill. She is ill, of course, and believes herself entitled to the best treatment and sympathy, just no-one else is … It would detract from her.

And to make her point even more pointedly, whenever we're in the same room – when she remembers – she huffs and puffs and makes moaning noises and grabs hold of the furniture and pretends not to be able to walk terribly well unaided. Strangely, when she thinks I'm asleep or can't see or hear her from my room, she does none of this. When she's outside or in other parts of the house, I hear her perfectly normal footsteps and the total lack of moaning or heavy breathing. 

She walks just fine out in the street. Hilarious how she seems oblivious to the fact that I’ve seen her there. All I can see and hear is an attention seeking child. 

At other times, when I mention how ill I feel, she will say nothing and walk away, offer no sympathy and no help. Won't even bring me water when I’m thirsty.

She once told me that, had she had the choice, she would not have had children. But, of course, she later denied having ever said that, like she denies saying anything that she KNOWS is horrible. It was no doubt deliberate and she probably thought that saying that she didn’t want kids would be hurtful to me, though curiously, it wasn’t. Some people are not cut out to have kids and shouldn’t be allowed to hurt and abuse them and she is one of those people.

Most galling, but also the most pathetic aspect, is her total abdication of responsibility: her false and ridiculous assertion that she did not have a choice. Of course she had a choice, even if that choice meant not having a marriage as she seemed to infer would have been the result of this so-called non-choice. (I’m sure it wasn’t as I’m sure she had my father well and truly manipulated.) But even it that were true, if not having a kid was so important to her, she’d have chosen that. But no, she chose insure her meal ticket, by dutifully producing a sprog, despite not wanting to do so and then trying to fool everyone, including herself, into believing that it’s somebody else’s fault that she became a “victim.” 

The victim card is one she continues to play. No one thinks the sweet older woman can be vindictive, menacing, and ruthless. Nor do people expect mothers to be so self-centred that they are willing to abuse their own children.

[1] I'm not bandying the term narcissist about, as seems fashionable. This is a professional opinion that has been discussed in a clinical setting. I also have evidence from conversation with my mother to believe that either she has been diagnosed, or at the very least, accused of it to her face by another person.