Divorcing Mother: When your mother lets you down

What do you do when your mother is a disappointment? It’s not especially something you see covered in blogs or writing. Mothers are supposed to be practically perfect. Hold on, that’s Mary Poppins…

Sadly, I’m at the point where I’ve had to throw my hands up and admit that my mother has been a disappointment. This is not new information. In fact, when I left home for university back in 1995, it was mostly to escape her and the small town mentality that she represented.

When I was a child, she was quite wicked. Nothing I could do was ever good enough. She frequently compared me to a cousin (who ultimately ended up mostly failing at life), and had an endearing habit of beating us with wooden spoons when we got out of line. I distinctly remember wooden spoons actually breaking as the blows rained down on me.

Things changed after I went to university. It wasn’t commonplace in the extended family to go to uni, so it was a matter of pride that I’d got in. But not so much the notion that I’d moved away from home.

And eventually my mother effected an image shift from being bitingly cruel to being this dotty old grandmother figure. If you’d met her after I went to university, you’d have encountered a slightly vacant woman who seemed to thrive on embarrassing her son. And that was fine for many, many years.

The serious bit

Everything changed last year within a couple of months of my father dying. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll be familiar with the story.

Sadly, things quickly turned to crap. In hindsight, if I was able to go back to the graveside and tell myself one thing, it would be “Run. Run like hell.”

I’m not gonna go into the whole mess of a situation that arose. A family member (my sister) began acting out in a big way and caused a whole lot of trouble. I spoke to my mother and other sister about this, and urged them to deal with her behaviour. They didn’t, and she continued to cause problems.

The bottom line is that the person in question was becoming dangerous, and for the protection and safety of my family, we decided that we couldn’t visit my parents’ house in future. I’m not saying this lightly – ‘loose cannon’ doesn’t even begin to describe my sister. I could tell some horror stories, but that’s not the point of this post.

This decision – corroborated by doctors, solicitors and even a bereavement counselor I briefly consulted with – was not taken lightly. But it was met with hostility from my mother, who had slowly reverted to the bitter, sharp tongued woman I knew growing up. She alternated between feeling sorry for herself and being hostile towards me for taking this decision.

I’m painting a very vague picture here, but that’s a deliberate decision on my part. I couldn’t convey in a handful of paragraphs the pain and frustration my mother and sisters caused in the wake of my father’s death. It made an already sad situation needlessly worse.

The letter

So I wrote her a letter. She – and my younger sister – had taken to filling up my answerphone with messages asking us to get in touch. For the last fortnight. But the damage had long since been done.

Tellingly, these were not messages to say “We messed up. Sit down and talk with us and we’ll try and work this out.” They were “Poor us, how did we end up with this awful schism in our family?” And my answer – delivered in glowering mutters to the answering machine – was “Because you did nothing to stop a bad situation becoming worse. You simply pretended it wasn’t happening and then allowed the troublemaker back into your life without dealing with her.

I decided to write a letter. That letter said we can’t be a family anymore. You let us down. You let me down. And somehow you still don’t acknowledge your own part in the events leading up to this. You’ve let someone disrupt your family for 20 years. Someone who actually pushed my wife down stairs when she was pregnant and punched her own sister in front of two toddlers over a remote control.

I won’t expose my children to that ever again. And I can’t forgive my family for allowing those events to unfold and cause the pain that they did. You know what it is? I can’t look my mother in the face again for the betrayal and hurt that she caused. And yet she still perceives herself as a victim of circumstance, which makes me even angrier.

Why I’m writing this post

I’m sorry this post is so frustratingly vague. My reason for writing it is that the vastness of this episode in my life overshadowed everything else.

There have been events in my life that I want to write about, but I needed to get past this. Bloggers out there will understand that I needed to exorcise the demon before I could move on. This was a horrible, stressful, painful time in my life, and it hurt me more than I could ever express in one post. There’s a book’s worth of material in this. One post could never do the last year justice.

So I’m writing this to draw a line under a horrible chapter in my life. It’s over. It might seem harsh and melodramatic to tell your own mother never to call you again, but sadly it’s necessary.

On the plus side, there’s nothing like nastiness and adversity in others to make you realize how much you love your wife and children. They’re really been the most supportive and loving people over the last year, and I’m so glad to have them around me. The next post will be a glowing post about the children, I promise…

Lourdes and home again: The death of my father

My father died at roughly 5:30am on Thursday 25 June 2009. Later that day, Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett would follow him, a fact I’m sure he would not care about.

As you know, he died from lung cancer and the weakening side-effects of chemotherapy which left him vulnerable to pneumonia. This is the story of his final journey, the discovery of his cancer and those short, final two months which led to his end.

Lourdes

It all started back in Lourdes. He woke up on the second morning of a short holiday unable to breathe properly. He was quickly hospitalized and given a scan which revealed the tumors. I flew out the next day to be with him and my mother and provide some support.

We flew back on the Saturday going directly to the airport from Lourdes General hospital. There we met the tour group the pair had travelled out with and spent the next few hours in their stark but modern departure lounge. Well wishers from their tour group came up to say hello, but we downplayed the reason for his being hospitalized.

Back home

When we arrived back in Northern Ireland, we arranged an ambulance directly to the nearest hospital. My father spent the next few days in Antrim Area Hospital, where he was due to undergo tests. However, he was released until the next week because pressures at the hospital meant they couldn’t actually do the tests, and he was more at risk from MRSA staying in hospital. Basically, being sent home was better for his health.

A week later on a Friday, he returned for an endoscopy. I went along to the hospital with them, and the tissue sample was gathered in a short space of time, so my parents came back to my place for lunch.

The very next day, he ran into complications, and his difficulty breathing returned. Later on, he collapsed in the bathroom and wasn’t able to get back up. Cue a quick one-way ambulance ride to hospital in Coleraine.

He never actually returned home after that point. As soon as a bed became available at the Cancer Centre in Belfast City Hospital, he was transferred there from Coleraine.

Belfast

And so the remainder of his illness and treatment was carried out in Belfast: my mother and sister staying with us for the first couple of weeks and then moving in with an aunt a bit closer to the hospital.

The doctors were clear from the beginning: there was no cure. Only a hope of a little extra time through chemotherapy. Sadly, the successive chemotherapy treatments left him feeling weaker and weaker and susceptible to pneumonia. We noticed a thinning in his arms and legs. The presence of this, and the loose skin it left behind was a daily reminder that he was fading.

At the same time, we had some great times in the hospital. I’d visit during the day when the kids were in school and sometimes take Daniel down with me too.

He spent his birthday in the hospital, and we went down as a family. The room was packed out with relatives though, and we couldn’t get a word in edgeways. He made eye contact with me, and without saying a word, I could feel his sadness. Although we went home, I slipped back later that night when everyone else had gone away and chatted with him. And though I’d tried not to do it in from of him, I cried. We sat in silence holding each others’ hands.

Once or twice we walked to the massive panoramic window on his floor and bathed in the evening sun and chatted to each other. And on one of his final nights I stayed in his hospital room, just glad to be close to him and be able to do something during the night to help him.

Last weekend, he started to decline in earnest. A scare on the Sunday night (21 June 2009) meant that we started to arrange vigils. For some reason that I can’t ascertain, people believe it’s important to be at the bedside at the moment of death. Sometimes we don’t get that chance. I stayed in the hospital three nights in a row, and he died on the fourth night. Typical bad timing!

From Sunday onward, the decline was marked by brief moments where it looked like he might regain his strength. Unfortunately it wasn’t to be. At 1:00 on Thursday morning (25 June), his hands apparently started to swell and he received some pain medication. By 5:30am, his pain was gone and so was he.

Ballycastle

Suddenly, funeral arrangements had to be made. My dad’s belongings, my mother and sister hastily packed up and I drove them to the family home in Ballycastle.

I won’t bore you with the details, but the next few days sped by in a blur of distant relatives, neighbors and friends popping in to pay their respects. Saturday morning, we were marching down the street with a coffin on our shoulders, and a short while later lowering it into a narrow grave.

So finally, early Sunday evening, I took my mother down to the graveside. The journey that began in Lourdes and included stays in four different hospitals was finally over. And today, nested in a picturesque corner of a graveyard in Ballycastle, my father rests. We’re glad that he’s no longer suffering from the tumor, but now we have to suffer for a little while from the emptiness that he leaves behind.

We miss him.

Deathbed scenes and false alarms

To say that the last few weeks have been stressful would be pushing the art of the euphemism to its absolute limits.

My father’s condition has deteriorated (he has cancer) since his second round of chemotherapy. Suddenly, I’ve been dealing with some overwhelming emotions – intense grief and a sadness that I’ve never felt before. As the prospect of him dying becomes ever more real, feelings and memories have been jumping out at me, helping to crystallize my father’s role in my life.

My nickname for my father for years has been Chib. In the last week, he’s come close to dying a couple of times. He’s even managed to fool the hospital staff, but would inevitably recover overnight as we all sat close by.

It suddenly became important to me to tell Chib how I felt about him before he died. After the first scare, I thought I’d missed my opportunity, so on the second scare, I wanted to make sure that I had a heart to heart with him. I got a text message during Rachel’s dance show, and rushed to the hospital before I even had a chance to see her perform.

After a frantic dash from Lisburn to Belfast, I arrived at the hospital and ran to the ward, whizzing past uncles and aunts who were clearly assembling as well. The room was packed with relatives, and I glanced at Chib lying on the bed looking failed with his breathing shallow. Before I could stop myself, tears were streaming down my eyes and I thought I’d missed my chance. I might have spoken there in front of everyone, but one of the aunts in the room realized that I wanted some time alone and kindly took everyone else out (except my mother).

The words came tumbling out of my mouth in what was probably a frantic stream: reminiscences of things we’d done together, gratitude for always being there for me, and that above all else, I loved him and would sorely miss him. When you suddenly start to sum up the life of a loved one, you realize how important they’ve been to you. And although we rarely (read: never) shared our feelings openly, it became important to me to share this with him before the end, before he became incapable of understanding the words…

In the end, it turned out to be a false alarm. He lasted out the night, and seemed to be recovering from the low ebb.

Though my father continued for another couple of days, I felt oddly at peace after my deathbed chat. Whether he heard me or not (the nurses say that hearing is the last thing to go), I felt that it was important to thank him before the end. Even if my regular presence at his bedside wasn’t a clue to my feelings, I hope that the words helped.

(Apologies for the change from present tense to past tense – I wrote this before my father died and finished it today).