Tales of Caregiving
Molly Finnegan
As of this writing, I have been separated from my ex-husband for 22½ years and happily divorced for 14½ years. There was certainly one bright light after the wedding – my child… an amazing daughter to whom I refer as the best baby ever born. She is everything to me, and I don’t believe that I would have weathered this storm without her support, encouragement, and a smile that would melt the deepest and tallest glacier.
“I am not going to be the one to ruin that relationship.” That was not only my mantra, but it also became my commitment to my daughter with regard to her father. Prior to separating, I communicated with my entire family that I did not want anyone to bad-mouth my ex in front of my child; by and large, they acceded to my wishes – but outside of my child’s earshot, one family member particularly insulted, demeaned, and criticized both me and my ex. To this day, this person (to whom I am indentured) is blind to the fact that he/she is exactly like my ex in character and temperament – and they absolutely can’t stand each other (never have; never will). Even though they have not been officially diagnosed by any mental health professionals, I can honestly say that both check off several boxes of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
While I am including this TAR Tale under “Parental Alienation”, I want to tell you it is possible to minimize the effects of this terrible form of […]
Soffia
So, a little about my grandmother. In short, she is very toxic. Old, of course, and sick. And I was her caregiver. There are six of us, including her, living in our home – my mom, dad, and two sisters. I’m the middle child.
My grandmother is always trying to start drama with the rest of the family. A few months ago, she accused me of stealing $5 from her. Before that, she had made my younger sister’s friends miserable. My younger sister wanted to play with a friend – who was black – so in response to this, my grandmother went into her car and followed my younger sister around the neighborhood telling her to go home and not play with black people.
My grandmother has also bothered our neighbors about things, got into an argument with my neighbor’s mother, and if she doesn’t get what she wants, she will lay on the couch near the front door and scream.
She screams that she is dying! And she does this on and on for at least two hours straight. One incident happened roughly two weeks ago when my older sister refused to buy her chicken.
Consequently, my mother actually took my grandmother to the hospital where she was checked out for 60 minutes and given some prescription medicine.
This wasn’t the first time my grandmother pulled a stunt like this, crying and screaming and pretending to die on the couch. She had done this before, I can’t remember for what reason, but I remember […]
Jo_shua
A young child is born. Nature has seen fit to equip this child with an incredibly adaptive & effective system for recalling every experience they have ever had, summarizing all of this information, and delivering it to their consciousness in microseconds: this system is called emotion. However, like every system in the human body, it is prone to dysfunction & failure when subjected to more negative input than it can withstand.
From an early age, the child endures neglect, abuse, & random, unpredictable behavior from its caregivers: moments of tenderness & kind words interspersed with violence, vicious insults, & withdrawal of affection, with no apparent correlation between the child’s actions and the resultant treatment.
The child’s emotional system cannot integrate with the rational conscious mind; the developing intellect cannot make sense of the conflicting input. At times, the child feels affection, comfort, & love from one caregiver or the other; but other times, the child feels hatred, abandonment, & pain from that same caregiver. Yet evolution has programmed one thing into the child: being abandoned by their caregivers means death. Regardless of how poorly one or both caregivers treat the child, the child feels an imperative need to maintain a positive relationship with them; this need will diminish as the child matures, but so profoundly is it written into the core that it will never truly fade completely.
If one or more of the caregivers are primarily physically available, but emotionally distant or neglectful, with only occasional episodes […]