My parents' childhoods were made of book series material: both lost their dads when they were couple years old and the life that followed was even harder than it was already before.
Grandma (dad's mom) raised three little kids on her own from their early years when they couldn't even remember what their dad was like. Being a nurse, always at work and living in her late husband's village, life didn't spare her. The kids were looked after by aunts and grandparents. Later, dad's granpa moved in with them because they couldn't stand his drinking at his house. He was a good man and all, my dad's role model no.1.
Mom was the oldest of three kids who lost their parents when she wasn't even 10. After dad's death my mom's mother was left with the kids and a whole load of debts not being able to finish the projects of dad's company, she soon left north to be able to earn more money. The kids were divided between three families of relatives, which were good to them but they were separated and often felt like intruders in other families. Mom's second family lost their father rather early as well.
Following this, my childhood was rather special as well, having parents who leart parenting on their own. I haven't forgotten the pain they caused us so many times but I don't blame them anymore. We have good relationship now, especially with mom, with whom we're actually great friends who can talk about everything. Well, recently I kind of started getting on her nerves and I don't really know where we're at anymore. I've been working on understanding dad, his past, his present, his feelings and fears ... I hated the feeling of blaming him for the whole situation even though I rationally realized it's not his fault, at least not entirely. Talking to him, even though we're both rather slow and quiet when it comes to talking about feelings, talking to mom and grandma about life before us kids, seeing his real effort and him being now more aware of his actions related to alcohol, all that helped me a lot.
It helped me stop blaming him and being hurt by nearly everything he did. And it helped me transfer my negative feelings towards mom.
I faced her couple times lately, I put pressure on her because she only complains and mumbles everytime she doesn't like dad's actions and because of the way she radiates negativity if dad's by any chance happy or making jokes, her thinking he must be drunk to do that. Yet, all she does is give him her Look (if you knew my mom, or me in fact, you'd knew that look that could kill, if it were possible) and mumbles so that everyone else but him actually hear her comments. We talked about it and she confirmed what I was afraid of - she gave up. She has no more energy to fight once more with alcoholism, all she seems to be able to do is hope everytime dad tries to stay sober.
I can't stand this, I can't stand the fact that I've done the next step, invited her several times to come with me in search for help, and she doesn't want to do a thing. I respect her not pretending and giving me hopes anymore that she might go with me next time, yet I can't respect her for what she said the other day:
"I tried, I did everything I could and it was useless. Only you, his kids, can help him now."
No comments:
Post a Comment