It is so hard for me to understand why my mother, a college-educated person, can believe the things that she does. Recently she sent me an email linking to an obviously fake article about a work-at-home opportunity that would pay you up to $10,000 a month. She tried to sign up for it, but luckily the website wasn’t working. How can she believe that someone would really pay her $10,000 a month for very little work?
It is like how she believes that there is a miracle cure for my brother. If only she would use the time she spends looking for this “miracle cure” in a more constructive manner.
The other day I was talking to a friend about my worries about Gege regarding his developmental delays, and how difficult it is dealing with the school district. She asked, “Why don’t you ask your mother? She has an autistic son and has had to deal with this stuff. She’d be the best person to tell you what to do.”
So why don’t I? Because when I tell her things about Gege and my worries and fears for him, she sighs and says mournfully, “If only you were a believer, you could pray for him.”
Yeah, that’s why I don’t ask my mother for advice. And it is no use turning things around on her. Like, “so why isn’t Christopher normal now, if you’re such a believer?” I used to do this in my teens and 20s. Her answer, every time: “Because your/your father’s disbelief ruined the cure.”
Sometimes when talking to my mother, she completely misunderstands what we say. AJ says it is because she is a “lazy listener.” For example, let’s just say she and I were talking about the weather, and I said something like, “It’s so nice when it’s sunny.” She’d go, “Yeah, I like fruit, too.” Or something equally random. This past weekend it happened again. When we called her out on it, she started to blame her bad English, but I said, “It’s not your English, Mom, because you understood every word when we said it again.” So then she started to blame her schooling in Taiwan, and how it caused her brain functions to be faulty. I said, “It can’t be the school system in Taiwan either, because then every single person in Taiwan would have this problem and I don’t think that is the case.” Without acting as if she heard me, she continued to blame the school system in Taiwan for all her failures in life. At least it was better than when she blames my grandmother for everything.
This is basically my mom’s biggest shortcoming in a nutshell: Everything happens to her. She blames everyone and everything outside of herself for her problems, and she wants someone or something outside of herself to fix it. It is not something I can change in her but it is something I try to recognize and prevent in myself.
Don’t get me wrong, my mother is great in a lot of ways: she is super kind, she can be really funny, and she is incredibly supportive. This is the one thing that really bothers me because I feel it prevents her from enjoying life. I feel like I spend a lot of brain power thinking about my mom and her happiness. I wish that alone would make her happy.
I think your mother and my mother in law are the same person. My MIL asked for magic ionic clothing for xmas this year. She blames everyone else for her misery (despite a lifetime of surveying all options and always choosing the worst one). She thinks the world owes her. It is hard to understand why she is like this, but she is. We have tried and tried to figure out what her deal is. My current thinking is she either has Asperger’s syndrome or a personality disorder. She is much more unhappy and difficult to deal with than Mr. A’s father who has a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder.
Haha, AmFam. I don’t know whether to be happy that I have something in common with you, or appalled that my mother has something in common with your MIL. If I think deeper about the whys, I believe it was her father. He had the same views in life and my mother worshiped him. My dad, who I don’t write about much, is much more difficult to deal with, but I am not as obsessed about his happiness, because I believe he IS happy.
“I feel like I spend a lot of brain power thinking about my mom and her happiness. I wish that alone would make her happy.”
Haha! I can so relate to this.