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So are you gluten free because you think it's a diet trend or do you have Celiac disease?
Not that it is relevant or any of your business, but the answer is neither. I had a headache every day for 1.5 years. An IGg allergy test revealed that I'm allergic to wheat (not gluten) and cows milk. I went into the diet kicking and screaming but my headache is much improved. I can eat small amounts, like Chick-fil-a nuggets :-)
If I overindulge I get sore joints and the headache...just ordinary inflammation.
Not that it is relevant or any of your business, but the answer is neither. I had a headache every day for 1.5 years. An IGg allergy test revealed that I'm allergic to wheat (not gluten) and cows milk. I went into the diet kicking and screaming but my headache is much improved. I can eat small amounts, like Chick-fil-a nuggets :-)
If I overindulge I get sore joints and the headache...just ordinary inflammation.
Wow...well, this has going south in a way I never expected. We had a nice day, just hanging around the house and cooking. Dinner was good, not one backhanded comment. Unfortunately mom drank a bit too much and started ranting on about some changes at her retirement community and she was really defensive. She thought she was responding to something my brother said but it was unrelated so it came off kinda weird.
I realized that my brother is a major part of this dynamic. He is not at all patient, he is a perfectionist and an eye roller and I sometimes get stuck between them which is an uncomfortable spot for me. He and his wife micromanage a beautiful home which makes me feel like quite the unsuccessful slob.
Anyway, mom drags out this tote bag of stuff she wanted to 'share' with us which usually means random crap that made her think of us that no one cares about. What she handed me was a letter she wrote in 1986 (when I was 17 ) to my grandfather but never mailed. Apparently he had visited and given her a hard time about some things and she was put on the defensive. In this letter she basically blames 13 year old me for causing her nervous breakdown. She was not really aware of the contents of the letter and says she was thinking it would explain how she was thinking at the time.
Soooooooooooooooooo now I have to decide which direction to take this. She is a sick, sick person and we can't fix her. She has never accepted any responsibility for her psychiatric problems and now she drops this on me at a time when I am very low.
So I lost my temper and told her a secret I was trying really hard to keep. That I will never forgive her. How did she respond? Lots of excuses.
Soooooooooooooooooo now I have to decide which direction to take this. She is a sick, sick person and we can't fix her. She has never accepted any responsibility for her psychiatric problems and now she drops this on me at a time when I am very low.
Part of mental illness is the inability to process normally and that includes accepting responsibility. She knows she wrote the letter, she gave it to you, and it illuminates your mother is indeed ill. It sounds like it's her way to show you a side of herself that is very deficient, even more deficient than perhaps anyone thought.
Someone in their right mind would not want another, particularly the person referred to in the letter, to actually read that letter because a sane person would realize how bad it makes them look to others.
The direction to take this (with your mother) is pretty much nowhere. You know you can't negotiate with crazy and you can't fix disordered thinking. But, if you decide to seek therapy about any of this, you have a very useful tool to help your therapist: that letter. Think of it as a gift, like a key that opens some of the locked mysterious doors that comprises your mother's psyche. Your mother shows her illness in a way that you wouldn't be able to describe. That letter spells some things out; a therapist would really be able to understand what you dealt with as a child of a mentally ill mother.
None of her behavior is your fault. The 17 yr old you, the 13 yr old you, hold zero responsibility for her mental illness and her inabilities. The relationship you the adult need to nurture is with you the 13 yr old who probably didn't understand what all was going on and felt crappy, and without insight. This is why I say the letter is a gift. It doesn't feel like it now, but it is.
Part of mental illness is the inability to process normally and that includes accepting responsibility. She knows she wrote the letter, she gave it to you, and it illuminates your mother is indeed ill. It sounds like it's her way to show you a side of herself that is very deficient, even more deficient than perhaps anyone thought.
Someone in their right mind would not want another, particularly the person referred to in the letter, to actually read that letter because a sane person would realize how bad it makes them look to others.
The direction to take this (with your mother) is pretty much nowhere. You know you can't negotiate with crazy and you can't fix disordered thinking. But, if you decide to seek therapy about any of this, you have a very useful tool to help your therapist: that letter. Think of it as a gift, like a key that opens some of the locked mysterious doors that comprises your mother's psyche. Your mother shows her illness in a way that you wouldn't be able to describe. That letter spells some things out; a therapist would really be able to understand what you dealt with as a child of a mentally ill mother.
None of her behavior is your fault. The 17 yr old you, the 13 yr old you, hold zero responsibility for her mental illness and her inabilities. The relationship you the adult need to nurture is with you the 13 yr old who probably didn't understand what all was going on and felt crappy, and without insight. This is why I say the letter is a gift. It doesn't feel like it now, but it is.
Thanks, Moxie. You are right, it is indeed a good reminder of all that.
We spent the evening pretending for the sake of the rest.
Wow...well, this has going south in a way I never expected. We had a nice day, just hanging around the house and cooking. Dinner was good, not one backhanded comment. Unfortunately mom drank a bit too much and started ranting on about some changes at her retirement community and she was really defensive. She thought she was responding to something my brother said but it was unrelated so it came off kinda weird.
I realized that my brother is a major part of this dynamic. He is not at all patient, he is a perfectionist and an eye roller and I sometimes get stuck between them which is an uncomfortable spot for me. He and his wife micromanage a beautiful home which makes me feel like quite the unsuccessful slob.
Anyway, mom drags out this tote bag of stuff she wanted to 'share' with us which usually means random crap that made her think of us that no one cares about. What she handed me was a letter she wrote in 1986 (when I was 17 ) to my grandfather but never mailed. Apparently he had visited and given her a hard time about some things and she was put on the defensive. In this letter she basically blames 13 year old me for causing her nervous breakdown. She was not really aware of the contents of the letter and says she was thinking it would explain how she was thinking at the time.
Soooooooooooooooooo now I have to decide which direction to take this. She is a sick, sick person and we can't fix her. She has never accepted any responsibility for her psychiatric problems and now she drops this on me at a time when I am very low.
So I lost my temper and told her a secret I was trying really hard to keep. That I will never forgive her. How did she respond? Lots of excuses.
Well, before anyone decides they aren't going to do Thanksgiving (or maybe any more holidays or even any more anything) ever again with their family, etc., there is that last one where you say, yep, I was right. I ain't doing this no more.
My dad wrote me crazy awful letters. I chose to burn them or just throw them out - and I mean immediately taking it to the outside trash can, because it felt like there was an evil presence in my home. Occasionally, I'd wonder if I should have kept them in case I needed to show them to an authority (he was threatening to kill people and himself), but I always figured I could just tell someone I'd gotten them. It just wasn't worth keeping them around at all.
And, sometimes I think they want it in your drawer. They want it seeping into your consciousness constantly.
My belief nowadays is that once you turn 18, your behavior is on you. If you commit a crime when you're 18, you go to jail. Right? Now, when someone comes from dysfunction, maybe we can give them a few more years to get it together, if they're just a tad neurotic and not committing crimes. But, then no more excuses.
Your Mom is an adult. She has raised kids, apparently can pay her own bills, has relationships at her community, etc., etc. So, I just don't see any excuses. What she needs is a consequence to change her behavior, and if she doesn't change her behavior, then she lives with the results. She's grown up enough to get herself a counselor, and no doubt has insurance to pay for it.
You, on the other hand, have the right to not want her negative garbage in your life.
I'm like OregonWoodSmoke. I had to cut off my crazy family.
Reading the posts about how to train someone made me feel exhausted. And I don't have to do that anymore. That's something that's helpful when you're in a situation where you choose to stay in a situation where it's worth the effort. Maybe a job, for instance, that's worth keeping but you need to train rude co-workers.
Now, if your family just had some minor rudeness, it might be worth the effort. But, in a full out house full of unreasonable people - reason is not going to get you anywhere. Because you can't reason with unreasonable people.
If you want validation and permission - I hereby validate you that your mother is toxic and not your problem and you absolutely don't have to spend any more time with her.
If you don't want to burn that letter, you could send it back to her with a letter telling her you're done with her negative dysfunction. I wrote a letter to my mother after her last Thanksgiving drama-fest telling her that was it.
I hadn't seen her for over 20 years, and she just died in October from dementia. I did go see her before she died - because - she didn't know who I was. People were saying they were so sad she didn't know who I was. I said that was the only way I could sit with her and just love her as a person who had a hard life - because she couldn't be nasty to me, because she didn't know who I was.
No, I don't miss her as a mother. I am grieving the life of a young woman who ended up sad and angry. That's sad and I can feel sorry for that young girl whose life could have gone one way, but went a sad route. Some people don't become mean due to their circumstances and some do. Not my fault. But, I do feel sorry for that young girl, and so that's how I'm grieving her death. But, I didn't have a loving mother to miss.
Anyway, good luck to you. Not having a nice family is a sad thing. But, it's not our fault.
Today, I was invited to two different friends' homes for Thanksgiving. I couldn't afford to go visit them and stayed home and had a lovely day. I read a great book, hung out with my dog, ate good food by myself. My friends called me and I called them, and some young friends texted me to say Happy Thanksgiving, too. It's such a different thing to know you're wanted by people but choose to stay home and relax, than feel lonely. I knew I was wanted. It was so lovely! And it meant I could just enjoy my solitude today, knowing I was loved by good friends.
Everyone has their issues, but my friends are not mean people. I do have other family I got back in touch with because now we're in probate hell because my mother got even with all of us by leaving money and no will - she got the last laugh LOL. But, after dealing with them for about 2 weeks, I quickly cut them all off again. The upside to that is that it erased any question I had about whether or not they had changed. Nope. Unless people remove themselves from the dysfunctional black hole, nothing changes in it.
So, you can cut them off and recreate your own family of your choice, is my point. Dang, this is a long post. Sorry. Guess I needed to vent, too :-)
Last edited by NoMoreSnowForMe; 11-28-2019 at 11:34 PM..
So, you can cut them off and recreate your own family of your choice, is my point. Dang, this is a long post. Sorry. Guess I needed to vent, too :-)
Thank you! I'm glad you had a nice day.
I actually had a nice day also. Crazy that we are good at pretending, I'm going to have a nice day today also. I was thinking how I don't feel listened to (I am the typical youngest child) but then I realize that no one really gets heard in this family because all our conversations are disjointed.
We are in DC so we are going to the Newseum and/or the Botanical Garden and then I"m going to drop mom at the door, maybe fix her computer, and keep driving.
Has anybody here suggested trying to help mom feel better. Perhaps take her to her doctor, who will maybe give her antidepressants?
Mom is obviously having a hard time and it sounds like she had a difficult life. Don’t discount those facts in dealing with her. Does anybody in the family ask her why she is so unhappy and upset so much of the time. She sounds very lonely. Seems to me, when she gave the OP the old letter, that she was reaching out for understanding. Granted the reference to the OP’s 13 year old self was very mean, but is it possible mother did not read the letter again before she gave it to the OP? And didn’t realize that part was in it?
My own mother was extremely unhappy in her last years and very mean to me a number of times during those years. She also had a very hard life in many ways. But after she died, I gradually forgave her because I then began to realize how scared and lonely she was during that time. Sometimes mean people are angry because they are sad about how their lives turned out.
Has anybody here suggested trying to help mom feel better. Perhaps take her to her doctor, who will maybe give her antidepressants?
Mom is obviously having a hard time and it sounds like she had a difficult life. Don’t discount those facts in dealing with her. Does anybody in the family ask her why she is so unhappy and upset so much of the time. She sounds very lonely. Seems to me, when she gave the OP the old letter, that she was reaching out for understanding. Granted the reference to the OP’s 13 year old self was very mean, but is it possible mother did not read the letter again before she gave it to the OP? And didn’t realize that part was in it?
My own mother was extremely unhappy in her last years and very mean to me a number of times during those years. She also had a very hard life in many ways. But after she died, I gradually forgave her because I then began to realize how scared and lonely she was during that time. Sometimes mean people are angry because they are sad about how their lives turned out.
Mom's been under the care of a psychiatrist since the ill fated day when I caused her nervous breakdown. so that would be 38 years. 35 of those years have been with the same quack psychiatrist who sent his kids to ivy league on her misery and has done nothing to help her. She's taken her fair share of antidepressants since then. Yes she's depressed, but no longer lonely. We moved her to continuing care 2 years ago and she has more friends than she knows what to do with. She tells them all a nicely fictionalized version of her life but can't quite explain why her kids don't like her.
Don't think I don't have sympathy for her, I do. We know exactly what caused her mental illness. Her father was an alcoholic and her mother was bipolar. She had a hard upbringing. But she's also had 60 years to overcome that and chooses not to.
I'm more inclined to forgive people who are willing to man up and apologize for what they've done.
My own mother was extremely unhappy in her last years and very mean to me a number of times during those years. She also had a very hard life in many ways. But after she died, I gradually forgave her because I then began to realize how scared and lonely she was during that time. Sometimes mean people are angry because they are sad about how their lives turned out.
You say yourself that you weren't able to forgive your mother, and gradually, at that, until after she had passed. This is because the abuse had stopped and you were able to get enough distance from it to put it in perspective. It wasn't ongoing. You weren't still living with the anxiety of "Is she going to be mean when I visit today?"
It's harder to forgive when the abuse is still happening. I know you mean well and just want to help. But picture yourself in the days when your mother was still around and you were dealing with it. Would it have helped if someone had asked you "Have you tried making your mother happy?"
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Solly says — Be nice!
