There are days...Part I
...when the many aspects of my life are so seamlessly intermeshed that there is no discernible difference between my "personal life" and my "caretaking life". There are days when caretaking becomes critical, thus borrowing energy and time from other aspects of my life, and highlights a usually unnoticed separation between those aspects, which, for simplicity I will label "personal" (even though there is little more personal to me, as her caretaker, than my mother's life), and my caretaking life. Then, there are days like today, when the opposite happens. Something from my "personal life" overtakes me and intrudes upon caretaking, siphoning me away from my mother. Today was such a day.
    I awoke overwhelmed with a wave of consuming hatred for someone. I have been actively hating this person for some months. When my hatred began, it was a surprise to me, and not easily handled, but it was necessary for me to learn how to fit it into my life, since it wasn't going away, by accepting it and finding a place and a schedule for it, so this is what I did. Apparently, I haven't been giving it enough attention lately, because, this morning, it attended to me.
    I already knew I had a busy day ahead, and, as well, didn't wake up as early as I usually do, so I panicked when I realized that my hatred was going to demand attention. With barely an hour and a half to awaken and assemble my mother, typically a three to four hour job, for her routine doctor's appointment scheduled for 0900, I hit the decks running, despite my psyche's need to pay some attention to my campaign of hatred, and, within a half hour, ended up in the bathroom stress vomiting, another surprise. I can't remember the last time I stress vomited. I may never before have done this. When I found a moment between bouts of nausea to collect myself, I approached my mother, in her 'waking up' seat at the dining table, and announced that I was going to have to cancel her doctor's appointment. Neither of us were concerned about this. It is a wellness visit, and, although lethargy continues to be a problem, rescheduling her for Monday is not going to affect the efforts we're already taking to combat it. This change was fine with my mother. She was not happy about enduring a fast turn-out and considers doctor's visits an annoyance anyway, even when she's feeling her worst.
    I didn't speak to her about why I was feeling bad. There were so many other things to do that I just allowed her to take note of the fact that her daughter was nauseated and vomiting but determined to attend to as many of the scheduled events of the day as possible. The subject never came up.
    Resolved to gain control of this turmoil of hatred, I discovered within minutes that the most successful way to direct it seemed to be to consciously pray (used with wide semantic latitude) for the social, physical, emotional, sexual and intellectual destruction of the object of my hatred. Since I already have a fair amount of practice at praying for this with this person in mind, I quickly devised a way to do this on one level of, excuse the affectation, my being, while continuing with everything else I had to do. I immediately discovered that, far from biting into my effectiveness with other activities, doing this seemed to add a charge to my day, and I ended up accomplishing a few more tasks than I had planned. I did appear, not only to others including my mother, but myself, as unusually stony and almost off-puttingly focused, but my mother, and probably others, chalked this up to some passing physical illness that was affecting my digestive tract.
    It wasn't until late this evening, as our day settled down, that my mother said, "I'm sorry you've been feeling bad today. Do you think you've got the stomach flu? You haven't eaten much, today."
    I am always as up front with my mother as I can possibly be. She has been forced into a position of having to tolerate my intrusion into a variety of her life intimacies and it is a matter of respect for her position that I offer her the same openness about myself that is enforced upon her. I believe it helps both of us retain our dignity and helps reduce power struggles. As well, I have always operated under the assumption that the more people know, the better, especially when matters of relationship are involved. It is in this spirit that I responded to my mother, "Remember, Mom, a while back, when I told you that there is someone in my life whose actions against me and betrayal of me I cannot forgive, and who I also hate?"
    She remembered.
    "Well," I confessed, "this morning I woke up so overwhelmed with hatred that it made me sick until I figured out what to do with it."
    Continued...
- posted by gail rae @ 23:19   email...this post