Family Trouble

I had a bad time with my Mom yesterday.

I think it started with playing too much video games on my lap top. I've sapped my spiritual energy on staring at a computer screen for hours all week. My bad.

Mom called me Saturday night around ten thirty pm. She is living in a hotel paid for by Social Security but is used to the Oakland/Alameda bus systems which runs all night. She ended up stranded in Union City Walmart with her electric wheel chair running our of battery power. She had been caught up in shopping at low low prices and didn't realize how late it was. What she wanted was not a ride but for me to meet her in Newark and drive beside her as she trekked the last mile to the Hotel 6. Now I am happy to help because I realize that the video games aren't at all important but there is no way I am going to do that. It makes me mad because it is so like my Mom. She never wants help she wants to be pampered. It makes me mad because the only reason she needs help in this instance is because she spent the last x hours pampering herself. Granted I was at this point pampering myself but if she had pampered herself x-1 hours she wouldn't have needed any help from anyone.

I say it would be a lot easier if we just lock the chair up at BART and then I drive her to the hotel until the next day when she can take the bus. (The chair weighs about three hundred pounds) She doesn't feel comfortable doing that, afraid that someone is going to steal her chair... even if it locked up and has no power. This makes me mad because when I need to ask for help I do everything I can to make it as easy for the person helping me. But then it seems like what she wants is not so much a ride home (simple help with a problem) but to be pampered (to see herself as a princess being served by willing inferiors). After some painful planning (intermingled with her harassing BART employee with requests for favors he/she doesn't want to do) we arrange for her to take the only late bus which luckily stops near my house. I will meet her there, we walk to my place, then lock up her chair, I drive her to the hotel and then the next day I can take her back.

My mom is a pretty cheerful person and most of the walk she is chatting about the neat little hat and slippers she got at Walmart and about the possibly imaginary lice and worms that she has but several hospitals can not find or identify.

When we get to my place I pull the car around for her to get in so I can put her chair away. I open the door for her and she says in a tone that only her own children would understand "Did you turn the heater on for me." the tone says "if you didn't it is because you are not a gentleman" and this is really what makes me mad. Up to this point it is just me helping my mom who needed help. But this colors everything that has happened and will happen, I feel that my Mom is not needing help but wanting to be spoiled. It is not as if she couldn't turn it on for herself. But I guess she would have to be your mom to understand.

On the way back she mentions how she doesn't have nay food at her room and wants to stop at a fast food place for lunch and dinner. There is a long line at this point because the Jack in the Box is the only place open so late. I am getting so frustrated by how I feel that she doesn't appreciate my help but expects my service. It makes me feel bad about all the times I have ever helped her because it seems like I have just been feeding her mental illness. I try to talk about how the situation is making me very angry but it doesn't go over very well. She is instantly defensive and starts talking about how when she was a girl people always took care of each other and if my Dad were around and how my biological father and how I am bi-polar.

Now about the whole bi-polar thing. I know bi-polar people and I'm pretty sure that is not my problem, but I think what she was saying is that she didn't understand why I was mad and thought it must be because of some kind of brain malfunction. Up to this point I have been the dutiful servant/son. It seems very natural to her that since she is still Shirley Temple that men ought to dote and spoil her like they did when she was six. That I would be mad seemed out of nowhere.

I drop her off at her room as she yells at me for being sick and disturbed.

The next day I get into an argument with Coral about similar subject: about how she accepts and receives help and care from me but does not find ways to return help or care to me. Her defense is that she doesn't make money so she has nothing to give. But that is another whole post. At the time I was also mad at Amber for the same thing but later I realized that Amber and I had had these conflicts a year or two earlier and managed a better understanding and give and take relationship based up mutual friendship, loyalty and respect.

I make plans to pick up Mom then next day. She schmoozes me into promising to pick her up early for the excellent Motel 6 complimentary coffee. It occurs to me later that I was schmoozed but that doesn't bother me. If a good sales person charms me I respect their ability to make giving feel like receiving. BUT because I was up to 1 am driving mom around and wake up at 7 on Sundays and have long trying Sundays (this one even more trying)I accidentally oversleep Monday morning. Yeah, my bad, but very much out of character.

But let's not be too quick to excuse me. I can understand Mom's frustration and anger after expecting coffee in the morning to have sit around and wait and have my phone be off. I can understand how that would feel. But because of my lack of spiritual strength I am in no mood to make up for it. She asks if we can stop somewhere to get coffee and I say no.

At this point I am just being an asshole. And then we pick up Amber.

Mom is all hostility. She is so mad about the coffee I become the personification of every man who has failed to treat her the way she deserves to be treated. Amber overlooks my stubbornness and gets into yelling matches with Mom defending me.

By the time we get to my place she is so mad she starts calling me the worst names.

...
Why I didn't get the coffee.

Once years ago I had a similarly themed argument with Mom. This was when she wasn't in a wheel chair. after an hour of her insisting that good decent people always got coffee and donuts for her and me insisting she didn't appreciate or respect what I did give we stopped arguing. Then she comes up and asks me to give her five cents.

My mom is not helpless or stupid or crazy. I wouldn't deny anyone else the coffee, especially if I was two hours late! But I won't be my mom's donkey (to borrow one of her terms). In retrospect...
no retrospect yet.