C’mon C’mon C’mon
Yesterday, I had to take my mother to Urgent Care for another UTI. She has had so many recently and blown through so many antibiotics that they sent us to the ER. We left at 2:00pm and got back to the house just before 8:00pm. I should be gracious and patient and forgiving that she LOVED the attention, but her behavior, as always: sweet, docile, self-effacing with the doctors and nurses — and an impatient, petulant child with me.
I saw how she cannot wait, delay, amuse herself with her own thoughts or ideas or memories or images. She lay in the ER bed chanting “c’mon, c’mon, c’mon” under her breath. And none of this is new. I felt it past her Alzheimer’s, deeper, into her psyche. This is how she has lived her life. Impatient, irritable, entitled to the attention she wants. Maybe it was her irritability I felt so inexplicably the day before. Or maybe I have simply absorbed some terrible habits.
I introduced myself to staff as Bo, adding, “She’s my mother. My sister and I both have medical power of attorney to make decisions easier.” So they called me Bo. So she called me Bo. Which she does not ever do.
And then, when I would step out of the room for her to have scans or procedures or bathroom breaks that involved her getting half-naked — after each break, she would say something like “there she is” or “there’s my girl” or “my daughter says….” It was fascinating, how she reasserted her view that I was HERS, and FEMALE. I would roll my eyes as staff grinned. Or simply ignore her.
This is my mother. IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM, she wanted to engage in verbal combat with me about being who I am. She asked if I preferred to be called Bo, and I said (for the 20th, 200th time), “Yes, I do. Bo.” Told her that it was a nickname, that Dad had tried to figure out a nickname for me for years, and I finally found it. But I’ve told her all of this before, of course.
She said, “He did?”
I nodded.
“He didn’t think ‘Barb’ suited you?”
“I guess not.”
“My friend Barbara was a good person,” she huffed.
“Well, I’m a different person.”
“Not a ‘Barbara.'”
“No, not really.”
“You were my little girl….” She loves to say this with theatrical wistfulness.
“Was I?” I responded. “What about this” I gestured to my overall appearance “says ‘GIRL’ to you?”
“Well, today you look like a boy, you’re dressed like a boy.” A boy in his late 50s.
“I like looking like a boy.”
“OH!”
I changed the subject. INSANE Emergency Room banter. Aren’t you sick? What are we doing?
Whenever we are one-on-one, she wants to question who I am, my way of being in the world. She wants to reaffirm her definition of my role. This has been my entire life with this person. She criticized me “just sitting there in that chair — how can you stand it?” With irritation at my nonplussed attitude. She told me I was suffering, being there with her for so long.
I laughed and said, “The only one suffering here is you. Why don’t you try taking a rest until the nurse comes back?”
I think she wants me to react the same way she does — in all situations.
Which is psychologically impossible.
The next morning, I listened to these online tarot readers I like on YouTube. They told me that my questions are the barrier to moving through the next doorway, crossing the next threshold, finding my next stepping stones on the unmarked trail. The questions keep me behind a wall in my mind — having to understand, having to know. I need to stay in the space between knowing and not knowing. This is where my intuition lives.
11:11am: driving from Reservoir Ridge to Old Town to get coffee and do this writing, I went through the North Highway 287 roundabout — which was swirling with huge, dark birds. Dozens of them. A tornado of ravens and vultures. I pulled over by the river rafting buses and got out of the car, shielding my eyes from the midday glare to look up at them. It was as if all the vultures on the Camino and Cumberland Island and Lake Superior had lifted into the sky, all at the same time, and circled together. I was speechless.
In the afternoon, I listened to Jerry Wise talk about specific behaviors of Scapegoats who had Narcisistic Parents:
- Peace was temporary, chaos was inevitable. This turmoil was the family’s “emotional wifi” that keeps you tuned in, attached to the family’s dysfunction. You learned to expect instability.
- You replay arguments in your head, perfectly. Blamed for everything, constantly defending yourself, you were never able to express your true feelings or your true self.
- You apologize for existing – or are expected to. Your worth is tied to other’s emotional states.
- You get tongue-tied when speaking your truth, because your voice was silenced or dismissed. Maybe this is why I’m still struggling with word-finding since the Vulture?
- You feel like a ghost at family events. Because your true self is not seen.
- You fantasize about proving them wrong, because you were taught that you were the problem. But that desire to prove them wrong keeps you emotionally entangled with their view/role of you.
- You can instantly sense who is the Golden Child in any room — and who is left out.
- You attract wounded animals and toxic, emotional vampires, because you were trained to be a selfless caretaker without boundaries.
- You dive in and share too deeply, too quickly. The flipside of lack of boundaries.
Hate binds you to the hated object. And anyway, these feelings are not yours only — they are emotional strings connecting you to the relationship system. Which is emotional fusion.
So yes, she does want me to follow her into dark places and share all of her negative reactions.
Not be the self I am. Still. After a lifetime together on this earth. Even as her brain is slowly disintegrating.
Is mine? How much longer will I stay here? Are my medical appointments about done?
Am I as impatient as she is?
My questions are the barriers to crossing over. An unmarked trail is not a journey of entitlement: it is a revelation. It reveals itself as you take each step.