My mother was more effusively loving----Announcing constantly, "I love you.". & "Hold my hand!" & "I'm scared." Most emphatically. It was like the conscious filter on emotional overwhelmed was a much thinner psychic membrane.
She'd had over several years several unnoticed micro strokes that built in affecting severity. But because she chose to not exercise, was reclusive and obese and a hypochondriac from diabetes and heart disease it was difficult to ascertain. She and my stepfather wanted a magic pill to make the pain, illnesses go away, not lifestyle changes prescribed by doctors or a 30 day diabetic rehab I offered to pay for, much as they had been as substance abusers before sobriety.
She was just as manipulative, maybe more because she became bedridden. I confronted her with this as a halo of sanctity falls around the ill. In fact I was ironically the one she wanted present the most at the hospital because I was the most unabashedly direct with her and others. I once threw the nurse out of the room to curse my mother out for her ill treatment of the hospital staff.
Her subtle, intellectual manipulation became more infantile and direct and self serving.
But when she accepted there was greater value in being forthright, honest, admitting fears, I was able to do a form of counseling with her. I'd done a lot of teaching and educational counseling and was shocked at how adeptly it transferred to communication between us.
I estimate she lost motor skills about 25% and cognitive skills about 15%. Her memory loss was within a handful of years, presumably micro stroke periods but her cognitive processing, language and long term memories were reasonably intact. By that I mean each deficit affected each area so she could speak but rapid, multi person conversation was occasionally overwhelming. Frustrated she would breakdown into a childish ugly crying jag that was part real, part performance. Deeply ironic she became like my child and we had conflict on her having to accept she could be consultative but no longer my controlling parent.
Oh and my stepfather was a low IQ asshole she literally bought years ago so that she could have a man servant or servant man. She was a psychology major who chose him over a very attractive, ambitious slightly younger employed man because he was homeless, ten days out of jail and his mother had died at 13 so she intentionally did the psychological transference work on him so he'd never leave her. And he wouldn't. Eventually she left him because he was making a mess of her terminal time and cheating.
She had often admitted to me that she tried to play the two of us against each other but it only worked on him. She lovingly said she should've built more trapdoors into my psyche.
Pat, full cylinders, I'm one of few people who could get a shot at her. Think Olivia Popes' mother, Maya. Yes, my mother was briefly in radical political groups and yes, my father is so much like Eli Pope its like watching an alternate universe of my biological parents.
Which is why the effusive loving and hugging was so startling .
But she was still in there.....
I wheeled her out to a church grounds and park one Sunday to break to her that my stepfather had jumped the shark and I was going to have to deal with him in order to maintain the financial and resource stability to take care of her.
Without missing a beat, she said:"You're going to kill him?"
I replied, "No, Old Woman! Why do you always go there?! Why can't people just deal with problem people legally in your world?"
"Takes too long," she laughed. "Hold my hand."
I called her Old Woman since I was 15.
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