things grim's mom has done recently (advice request w a side of liveblogging)

x.X yeah, that sounds about right

 

Witnessed, and also data point: bipolar and ADHD can definitely be co-morbid. For a long while it was thought they were mutually exclusive, but eventually (like in the last 15 years) research determined that they can be co-morbid. (Back in 2000 I knew someone who was diagnosed as having 'one or the other since you can't have both'; in 2006 or 2007ish my mother was diagnosed with both, and then a couple of years later I got the same diagnosis.)

 

that's rly good to know! and it fits her symptoms, bc she absolutely does get manic, she just refuses to believe that it's mania bc it isn't the happy kind and one dr told her that people don't get tired when they're manic, which is just wtf, and she latched on to that bc she refuses to ever accept a bipolar diagnosis for herself

(you know that thing psych people do when they've Decided something about a person, and anything that person does to argue w that becomes proof that the psych person was right? yeah, my mom does that all by herself (she went to grad school for psych when I was little))

 

Ohhh lordy. Yeah, mixed states (which I think is the common term) are a hell of a thing. They're awful enough to be around when the person having them is aware of what they are - it's sheer hell when the person doesn't know or is in denial.

And yeah, wtf at that doctor! Not all manias are the stay-up-for-days kinds. There's variations in degree and intensity! Like, people with bipolar II (which I have) don't really get those full blown manias anyway, we get hypomanias and mixed states.

oh nooooooooo :( It's an endless feedback loop of suck.

 

p much, yeah. deepthroat that tail, ourobouros!

 

*revives thread to remind self to post today's shit when I have more energy*

preemptive tl;dr- my mother is a crazy person and I don't pay attention to my surroundings. also dad probably repeats things that he shouldn't when he's mad (can't confirm what he repeated to mom that I said but now she's trying to use it against me w/o actually telling me what it is)

 

reviving this thread for real bc I've let these screenshots stew for long enough that it was time to get off my ass and edit out the names so I could post them and get a reality check. the context for this is that seven months ago mom's a/c went out again, she needed me to let the repair guy into the house, so I did (iirc) but I didn't bring stuff to stay overnight, bc she didn't explicitly tell me that she wanted me to do that.

Spoiler: big screenshots

is this conversation as nuts as I think it is? bc it seems p nuts but also fairly typical of conversations w my mother

 

yes

 

Holy shit I strated reading that in my mother's voice because replace dogs with cats and I've gotten some of those texts before.

I totally get the whole is this bad or just how my mom is thing but yeah it's not okay and it seems like your standing up to her so good for you. You don't deserve this.

 

ok, so, what exactly are the nutty and red flag-y things that other ppl are seeing here? and how do I deal w them?

 

ty! and ouch bc holy shit this stuff is not ok and you don't deserve it either

 

She basically seems to be backing herself into corners and then blaming everyone but herself/using it to gain sympathy. There's also the "you obviously don't care about me" part and the hanging of animal wellbeing over your head bit.

Maybe I'm projecting my own experiences here but that's what jumps out at me.

 

I said it was sketchy in chat, not in thread, but let me go through this and pick out all the red flags I see message-by-message. This also reminds me of my mother's stuff a lot, so take my analysis with a hefty grain of salt. (not a deliberate joke but I'll take it)

- Ascribing intent to you: 'Clearly you had no intention of helping at all'. This forces you into a position where you have to say you were going to help, or else look like a jerk. (Note in the next message she shames you for not 'being honest', again ascribing intent by saying that you were lying about wanting to help.)
- Asserting that you don't have to do it in a way which paints you as bad for not choosing to help. She's painting herself as helpless and, 'selflessly', saying that you don't need to help her anyway. It's not actually selfless at all.
- Guilt-tripping: 'Just please don't answer me if I call going forward'. These ring as hollow words to me. I'm willing to bet that if you actually didn't answer her, she'd get really mad about it.
- Making herself out to be the good guy for not forcing you to wait in adverse conditions this time. Look at how good she is, she even got you a hotel room! This rings of trying to extend underhanded gifts to get you to roll over.
- Telling you not to worry about it when she clearly does want you to worry about it.
- Redirecting the conversation to her personal pain after you bring up your specific discomfort. She completely ignores your message about not wanting to be at her beck and call to go into detail about how personally hurt she was.
- Guilting you about the health of the dogs. Simultaneously tearing you down by implying that you're her last option and building you up by making you out to be the only one who can save the dogs from their overheated fate. Immediately cutting down all of that by telling you you're not an option any more.
- Treating you as stupid for not getting the implications of her words when, presumably, she knows that you have trouble with implications.
- That weird guilting message out of the blue about buying cookies, what the hell.
- Ascribing intent again! 'You weren't going to do it', asserting she knows more about your motivations than you do. She does this like twice in a row.
- Passive-aggressively telling you to let it go when she's the one who wouldn't know how to let it go even if she listened to Disney's famed how-to song.
- Telling you that she's Never Going To Talk To You Again, which I'd bet is just a way to try and hurt you and not a real resolution she's going to keep.
- And closing with being passive-aggressive about the dogs again.

I'm... not as sure what to do about what to do with them. My own solution when my mother was pulling this shit was to go no-contact, which may or may not fit your situation, though if that's a typical conversation with your mother it seems like lowering contact might be helpful for your stress levels. I wish I had better advice here. :(

 

I was going to argue that she wasn't holding the dogs' wellbeing over my head bc she makes that threat so often I've ceased seeing that threat as actual words w meaning. but if I'm understanding you right then words actually have meaning? even when my mother uses them?

(sry I'm being a sarcastic ass bc wtf self. I'd notice if anyone else in the world made this threat. I'd ask how this one has been so declawed, but I already know the answer is overuse. aaaaaand now I'm going to go check and see how many times she's made this threat since then. will be back w screenshots later)

funny thing is, the year before this she actually did make me wait in the house where it was 90+ degrees two days in a row when her a/c went out. so she is learning, just incredibly slowly and usually the wrong things

also, she got the hotel room for herself and the dogs before contacting me. that's not a bad thing, but bringing it up where it looks like she's saying she did it for me, but also if I called her out on it I'd look like a crazy person grasping at straws was actually fairly clever in a dickish way

iirc she sent me a link to a news article the next day. the longest she's gone w/o getting her attention fix from me was like two weeks, and that only happened bc tax season (she's a tax attorney/cpa)

the funny thing is, I'm the least convenient option. but I'm also her last option bc everyone else either has a job (edit: at least, has a job that they can't leave in the middle of the day bc they haven't been there long enough for the job security that our parents have) (brother and sister) or divorced her and claims that this frees him of any obligation to her (dad) or she knows she's burned that bridge so badly that she'd get no sympathy for the inevitable refusal (brother in law. no one in the family has any sympathy for mom's complaints against him anymore, not even the family members who think he isn't good enough for my sister)

yup. if I don't pick up when she calls, she either panics or calls dad to complain. if the latter, then dad calls five billion times, and he alternates between calling the house and my cell until it gets to the point where I can't call him back bc his line is busy bc he's calling the other phone

it's been like seven months and I'm still so confused about that one

I was actually 90% sure this was what she wanted, but I've been trying out this strange and completely alien strategy of only responding to the things she explicitly states for the last year or so. this was not a new strategy by the time this incident rolled around, and it's cut the number of complaints about me not doing enough to help her in half, bc now she has to list the things she wants me to do, and even she has the good sense to cut herself off before that list takes five minutes just to tell me over the phone

is it weird that I can't remember the last time my mom talked for more than a minute or two about anything that wasn't one of her interests or problems?

I've learned to filter out most of the passive aggression out as the functional equivalent of signal decay from my mom

 

huh. I just checked and mom hasn't done the "I'm sending the dogs to the breed rescue service" thing over txt since then. the only thing that came close was "someone needs to take care of the dogs if I have knee surgery idk if I can have the dogs or the surgery at this point" which is p standard for her. the fact that this is only shrug-worthy is probably kinda terrible, but I understand why she does this particular thing. her reasoning is stupid af and absolutely ridiculous, but since I have to know it and I'm stuck w dealing w it I'm going to explain it so that other ppl can share the wtf w me (I'm a big believer in sharing my misery)

Spoiler: spoiler bc long ramble

ok, so mom's house is a fucking mess. she's definitely a hoarder and the fact that she has two houses worth of furniture bc of moving various places and not getting to get her stuff out of various places rly isn't helping things. thanks to the mix of adhd, bpd and what's either depression or bipolar disorder depending on who you ask, she's also incredibly bad at taking care of herself. (but she's oddly good at taking care of her dogs, which makes a weird sort of sense bc ofc she'd take better care of her animals than herself. she feels like she owes the animals more care than she owes to herself, and that's just as much bc of religious stuff as it is her self-loathing. most of the time my mom is a good person who's rly fucking bad at being a person.)

anyways, mom doesn't want to do surgery just to come back to a messy home that she won't be able to clean bc post-surgery. seeing as she's a reasonably well-paid lawyer, the obvious solution to this would be for her to hire a cleaning service to take care of the house so that she doesn't have to. and this would be a fantastic plan, but for the fact that mom deeply resents any outside housekeeping, be it through a company or an individual. when I was a kid, I remember housekeepers being lucky to last more than two weeks before they got fed up w mom's passive aggression and general bs. and mom has this resentment bc she feels like she should be able to do all of the things- cook, clean and hold down a 9-5 job. many ppl have told her in many ways that this is not humanly possible for even healthy neurotypical ppl, and mom knows it's irrational, but still it continues. she also has terrible eating habits bc she feels like she should be able to cook every night and always be able to have home cooked meals ready, when in reality she gets home exhausted and burnt out from working all day. mom wants to be superwoman, and sees the reality that she's a human being w limits as some sort of personal failing.

I actually talked to her about this not too long ago, and she was in tears after I pointed out that her expectations for herself were a lot even for someone w/o a knee injury and depression. her response was "but I should be able to do everything. none of these things are that hard on their own." and just. dude. cooking is not an easy thing, and she's fairly good at it. tax law, particularly corporate and international/NAFTA tax law, is not an easy thing, and she's v good at it. cleaning is not an easy thing and she sucks at doing it consistently. and any attempt to point out that this is ok is met w tears and defensive redirects that amount to "I'd do just fine if y'all helped more"

the result is that mom is a mess, and it's not just her house. physically, her knee is torn up, her blood sugar bounces like a yo-yo and she gets pneumonia about five minutes after anyone sneezes in her direction. and any attempt to tell her that she needs to take responsibility for her own home and health is taken as a personal attack, so I don't actually know how to find a healthy way of interacting w her anymore

 

"if you want to move clothes over for me tomorrow at your brother's house, afterwards we can go see Beauty and the Beast or smth" -my mother, earlier today, a few hours before getting into a fight w said brother bc she flaked out on plans yet again and is leaving him holding the bag money-wise.

...ok now let's look at the wording of that first part, bc it took all my self-control not to ask why I'd want to move clothes over when I don't even want to do that for my own laundry

 

upd8- mom is now mad at dad bc he didn't say she was a good parent fast enough, so she hung up on him

I dared dad to ask her to define "good" in this context and he refused on the grounds of "[he] knows how that ends and it's never fun"

 

I need to start recording my calls w mom. I need records and things I can show to therapist. on the upside, progress? I think? anyways I'm putting down as much of the conversation as I can remember clearly, as accurately as possible. which is to say, not completely accurately but I'm trying

mom: how do we make our relationship workable? what do I need to do for us to have a relationship?
me: uh... therapy?
mom: I can't do that rn. I'm too busy. it's great that you can do therapy but I can't rn. so what can I do so that you and I can do things together?
me: ok but the way you respond to things is v distressing. like if I disagree or don't agree enough or fast enough you say that everything's terrible and there's no fixing it
mom: I know I need to work on that. let's just try for the next fifteen min and see if we can make it
me: well that is how to start things, one foot in front of the other [internal screaming at the idea of being on the phone w mom for another fifteen min. also stuck thinking about that thing from the second ep of Kimmy Schmidt about "you can handle anything if you just take it ten seconds at a time"]

then mom starts talking about therapy and how she can't do it and part of it is that therapy is selfish. it took a lot of effort to not express my annoyance at being called selfish, but at this point w/e. aaaaand then-
mom: it's good to have that [support from a therapist], but ppl should be getting that support from friends
me: but it's not always fair to my friends to put all of that on them
mom: then what even is the point of having friends? why even bother?
me: there! that! that's the thing! the "why bother" thing! that's the thing that's distressing to me
mom: there it is, I know but also-
me: that's the thing that makes me feel like I'm walking on eggshells and I can't do that
mom: I know but idk how to not do that and just- [she hangs up. her hanging up the phone in the middle of a sentence is actually p normal.]

five min later, she calls back-
mom: do you still want the boxes of your stuff in my garage?
me: yes. I will get them out of your garage as soon as I can

cue panic that's only barely constrained by the knowledge that mom can't throw away the stuff in her garage bc the only person who knows how to navigate her garage semi-safely is me

tl;dr- grim needs booze

 

ACHIEVEMENT GET- BOURBON!

I just spent 22 min on the phone w mom and just

"you and your siblings need to start seeing me more as adults would and less as how kids would." -my mother

but that didn't happen until after I called attention to the statement and asked what she meant, at which point she tried to make it about how ridiculous her own parents are. (which, tbqh, they rly are. one day grandma is going to kill grandpa and this will be v tragic but I have money set aside to bail her out of jail.) and just? obvious redirect is obvious? and then there was like ten minutes about how dare I give her shit bc look at what she has to deal w wrt her parents (they went to the optometrist on monday and grandma drove them both home bc "[she] only had her bad eye dilated while grandpa had both eyes done" and just oh my glob I'm so glad I don't drive). and yes that's valid and yes her parents absolutely need to not be driving but none of that changes the fact that her infantilizing us, esp after not treating any of us like children even when we were, is not ok

I'm p sure mom lost the right to treat me like a child when she left me to live alone back in MD while I was still 17 (I get that she found a job back in Tx and I still had school but fuck there was just so much wrong w that entire situation)

and typing this now I feel like an idiot for not calling her out on the full DARVO thing, bc instead I just tried to shift to neutral topics like joking about grandpa's driving. but fuck that bc I don't have it in me to fight all the time and this one just isn't worth it

after mom hung up I told dad that line, and asked him what his first thought was. his response: "where tf has she been the last ten years?"

so at least dad gets it. mostly. he doesn't know what to do about any of it, but he gets that it's a problem

 

Looking at this from the outside and having read this thread, her statement doesn't make any sense. It looks like she's in distress and just saying words to say words.