Why I Hate Mothers Day: To All the Daughters of Unloving Mothers

Here we go again.

Psychology calls it the "Unloving Mother." Others call it the "Not Good Enough Mother." If you're like me, either term will do. We have the experience: The label tells us that we are not alone.

Mother's Day is coming up.

And another instance when my mother figured out how to obtain money she didn't have for the drug addicted unnamed family member just passed.

For somebody who has to ask what day it is, she has an extraordinary ability to find out which rock to hit to get cash from it. I discovered this latest ruse late last night, when I looked onto her statement.

"I don't recall doing anything with $2000.," I thought to myself. That's because I had not. She had telephoned the bank and had had the maximum funds transferred from her Overdraft Line of Credit into her checking account, and written UFM a check for that amount, which he promptly went to the bank and cashed, and there it was, in "pending" although the check had already been cashed. It was too late to stop payment but I filled out the online stop payment form and clicked, as reason for stopping check, "coercion." I had to wait until the morning to get through to the bank service reps for more information.

Morning. Service rep:

"I'm going to connect you to the fraud line," she says. "You said it was coercion."

"I'm not interested in the fraud line," I tell her. "Are you going to arrest my XX year old mother?"

"No, but it will go into collections, and she'll get telephone calls," Ms. Friendly Banker Representative Supervisor told me.

"Well, she's not making payments on it."

"Then when she dies the executor of her estate will deal with it."

I can't bear the sadness around this relationship. There's a continual yearning to have closeness with ones mother. That never goes away, a fact that I wrestle with. It will take me many many years to heal from this. God give me the strength.

Mother's Day is a few weeks away. I'll be mourning the relationship I never had, and the way I was lied to, over and over again, even as I attempted to take care of her in her old age, in her withering days. But I"ll be trying to have a good day, a day that I can have some control over.

When your mom is mentally ill, or elderly, there's always a question of how much to hold onto that relationship and how much to let go.

Days like Mother's Day have created huge conflicts in the past. This year it will not. Maybe I'll hire her an aid to make sure she's up and alive, but I will not call and I will not be conflicted about it. There's so much reality around this now, - it's impossible to ignore. It's impossible to feel, to know, each time I phone her, that I am not being authentic with her. That when she says, "Why are you tired?" that I'm not painfully aware that the real answer is "Because I"m tired of dealing with you and your lies and your depression and your mismanagement of all your money and that UMF gets literally your last dollar while I try to keep you alive, and still you persist; that you are always thinking about how to get money to UFM, even though you never let on.  That I am being crushed under its weight. That I simply cringe every time you say 'I love you.'"

Maybe the next day she'll say something about my not calling. Maybe I'll say, "Oh it was Mother's Day? I didn't realize!"

This Mother's Day is to all the suffering daughters of mothers who are not good enough, to all the daughters of mothers that Psych Today calls "unloving" mothers, to the daughters of mothers who do NOT put in that call, and do not send that card or buy that box of chocolates, who try to remain authentic to themselves and hold onto reality because our hearts don't just break once... They break again and again and again.

The Saddest Moment of Accepting Your Parent's Mental Illness

We get to act normal for a while and then every now and then the disease manifests itself. 

I've had a lot of time to think about this. I've had a lot of time to accept that things are going to seem normal for a while - and then they're not.

I've had a lot of time to accept that there's nothing that I can do to avert this, or to avert that sooner or later I'm going to be the bad guy. The one who always rescues my mother, the one who made sure she was out of her home and safely in a new apartment before she was financially destitute, the one who made her divorce happen because she couldn't function enough to do anything let alone appear in court to face her (soon to be ex-) husband... eventually I would be the bad guy.

I've had a lot of time to accept that it's an emotional state that she enters, and that there is nothing that I can say that will release her from that, or cause her to see anything, rationally, any differently.

So when this afternoon, I said "So what about the credit card and the taxi ride?" I knew that sooner or later warm air and and cool air were going to meet and produce the thunder and lightening. I was at a shopping center, in a big soft easy chair that they had for patrons to relax.

"He said that the card was turned off."

"Yes, Mom. I closed the card."

"YOU CAN'T DO THAT."

But of course I could, and I did. And a person who is being abused, or who is part of an abusive relationship, or a co-dependent relationship, will never, or rarely, acknowledge it.

"I had to, Mom. You're going to be destitute again and I can't allow that to happen."

What was different about this time is that I saw her illness roll in like a dark cloud. The issue was her and her Unidentified Male Relative. There would be no talking to her.

"But I'll have bad credit."

"Mom, you'll have bad credit if I don't do that. There's too much money going out to UMR"

She screamed "YOU CAN'T DO THAT." and screamed "YOU DON'T HAVE THE POWER TO DO THAT.", she was going to "get a lawyer and that will cost even more money" while I waited quietly. The voice in my head said, "There's nothing you can say." I felt like the center of the hurricane. All was quiet. Maybe it was one of the saddest moments of my life. But I had reality on my side, and that's nothing to sneer at. There was one thing I could say:

"Mom, I'm going to get off the phone now. I'll talk to you later."

It's Not So Easy. Social Security, Power of Attorney, and Representative Payee

Everybody says "You have power of attorney...just (this) just (that)." 

Not so easy. For every hole I try to stop up, she can make the same telephone call and do the opposite.

Believe me. I know they mean to be helpful but it takes too much of my time trying to explain why it's not so easy.

But I think I have an idea.

I did a test and so far it has worked with small amounts of money. Will it work fully, when I try it next week, for real?

Do you have power of attorney for an elderly parent? Great. But unless you have guardianship, your elderly parents can, if he or she is clever enough, pick up the phone and undo what you've done to protect him or her. Even if you have PoA, you can't have the social security check auto deposits deposited in a safe bank unless your elderly parent makes the call and that defeats the entire purpose. The SSA doesn't accept PoA: You have to literally have your parent declared incompetent by a physician, file that with Social Security and get a designation which will give you total control... And what if you don't want total control? Or what if you don't want your parent legally declared incompetent? Like I don't. Then you have to figure out how to get the social security money into an account so that your elderly parents won't, under pressure, be able to write out checks and give the money away to some young and healthy person who would rather get fresh green money from his/her grandmother.

And my mother will do anything to do what this person wants, to do what she thinks she needs to do to earn his love, to keep him close to her. Even if it bankrupts her.

Reminds me of a drug addiction. You'll do anything for that drug. Anything.

When Your Elderly Mom Is Part of a Chronically Co-dependent Relationship

It was bad enough the $150.

The next day I got a bad feeling. Usually when I have a bad feeling there's something to back it up. Is this because I'm so smart? Or because God sends me little messages? Is this because I'm learning from experience?

My bad feeling led me to look online at her credit card charges. THERE IT WAS. $850 cash advance on one of the charges. Plus a $55 service fee, Not to mention the high interest rate on cash withdrawals.

Can you guess who this money went to? 

It was difficult to remain calm on what was supposed to be my Sunday afternoon and evening, my return to sanity, my return to looking after my own health, keeping my stress to a minimum, getting regular exercise and lowering my blood pressure and blood sugar level. I'd been warned, after all. I could feel my heart racing.

with the bank on the telephone, we conference in my mother. She immediately said she couldn't talk because she was tired. We kept her on the phone. She admitted it, the thousand dollars. I told her what I needed to do. She was argumentative and feisty.

After a few moments, I asked her to hang up. She refused. "You can't tell me what to do." Eventually she hung up.

Sadly, of all the credit cards she had, this is the only one for whom I had not yet sent in my PoA forms. But one thing I learned: If the next payment was made, then the credit card company would automatically block the card.   Good news, but two weeks away until the next payment due date.

That night I wrote a letter to an attorney asking how to initiate a Guardianship. I didn't want to do it. But as long as she had legal access to credit cards and her checking account, she would find a way to undue all the good things I had done to put her life in financial shape and all the good things I had done to rescue her from bankruptcy and homelessness herself.

How can you feel when you're doing this? I knew it would destroy my relationship with my mother forever, maybe even destroy her. And maybe not. It was, after all, her own behavior that was destroying her and undoing her life.

And she was 87 and doing it once again.