Crossing the bridge

The difficulty of coping with an elderly, confused parent - a conversation I've found myself having  quite often  in recent years. 

With Frederica, something about a lack former intimacy between us facilitated my confession about feeling resentment towards my mother; I suspected that Myra then, about two years ago, was far more capable than she allowed herself to be. (Scans and assessments indicated some fall off in cognitive function, but not as much as she complained of). And she certainly didn’t need the two sticks she insisted on. When angry she strode off without support... like when I so annoyingly pointed out that hers was a gilded life by comparison with those of the people I’ve worked with in the Kalahari desert.
 
Frederica raised an elegant eyebrow — And how did that go for you?
 
I laughed and show her my ‘knife’ wounds. 
 
Frederica refers me to a TEDX talk, ‘The Power of Connection’, by clinical psychologist, Hedy Schleifer, who like me, had a hero mother * she felt she was losing to dementia.

It resonated with me so I'll list some learnings:

• I needed to present myself to Myra simply as her daughter, not as the know-it-all, resentful, too busy woman she was slightly afraid of and felt ashamed of being so dependent upon. I needed to try and see the situation from her point of view.

• I had ‘polluted the sacred space’ my mother and I inhabited together – ‘via a look, a judgement, a criticism’, (Schleifer, TEDX, 2011. ) We were so uncomfortable we reacted to ‘the danger in the space’ by ‘exploding our energy’ or ‘withdrawing’.

(See why it resonated?)

• Schleifer recommended ‘crossing the bridge’ into one’s mother’s world. Leave behind prejudices, ego, identity, justifications and story.

 
So, before ringing Myra’s doorbell, I mentally discarded my suspicions, grudges, resentments and agenda, and stepped in just as her daughter. No baggage.

You know what? It worked.

*My father was, at best, a narcissist, but Myra managed to keep my sister and me from his worst abuses. She made the house look nice and our five-acre plot productive: vegetables, fruit and a horse-baiting business. Sometimes she worked three jobs and she ran a thriving equestrian club because her kids were horse-crazy. She supported our tertiary education while getting professional qualifications of her own and for a decade she travelled the world selling cookware very successfully.