I'm not willing now. She has 1 fully capable son and 1 semi-capable daughter to help her. Between the two, they could work it out. She also has plenty of money to pay someone.
I don't know for sure that I'm right, but it feels right.
If she was genuinely trying to pick up the pieces of her broken family, she would be reaching out to UAW as well. She has always excluded him in some way or another. I just can't tolerate that.
You are right in every way. The position you have taken is one of integrity.
This is what happened in my family of origin after my father's death too, Quicksand. For me too, it was the issue of exclusion that I would neither tolerate nor buy into. At that time, I had not done my work here yet. I could know things felt wrong in the way my family of origin was functioning, but they were only a little more obviously wrong than they had always been. So like you, I wasn't sure how to handle it or what to think. I did the next right thing.
Throughout this time, my brother too was being more and more obviously excluded. No phone calls for him at all, expectations for his service to my mother very, very high. (He remodeled her bathroom, fixed her roof, took care of plumbing, had his son rewire her house while she was with my sister ~ or, initially, with D H and me ~ during the Winter months. For free, of course. And then, she told him she did not want his children or grands at her house when she was not there! Though they were doing work, shoveling snow ~ you name it. Unbelievable, isn't it.)
But, unless my mother was here with us, she would not call him. Even here, she did not want to talk to him, so I called him. My D H refused to have my mother here again after the second time. (I made my D H leave after my mother's last visit because he had behaved so badly while she was here. He did leave, but he came back. Somehow, we managed not to be divorced. Probably, that was D H. After the work we've done here on FOO Chronicles, I can see what my D H was telling me was true. At the time Quicksand, and for such a long time afterwords, I could not see the wrong in the things my mother (or my sister) were doing.
Denial is the strangest thing.
Where was I going with this.
:O)
Okay. About the UAW brother's exclusion. So, after that last visit from my mother, she stayed with my sister all through the Winter months. My brother's wife developed cancer.
Neither my mother nor my sister sent so much a a card. Neither called. Both knew, because I was still talking to them then and I told them.
It was unbelievable. My brother and his wife have been together something like thirty years. My mother supposedly loves her and etc.
But nothing. Not so much as a card.
Isn't that something.
Fast forward. The wife had many surgeries. She is in good, strong recovery now. Or she was, the last time I spoke to them.
They are also shunning me.
But, before they did, the way it worked was that my sister took care of my mother during the Winter months, and my brother and I did for her in the Summer and Fall. Now comes the part about exclusion: So, I told my mother: You need to call so and so. She did not. I told my sister: Mother refuses to call so and so. You need to call him once a month to let him know how his mother is. (Sister claims, as does your Mr. Important Doctor brother, to be too busy. Oh, so busy.)
And my sister exploded. Over my insistence that she call my brother if my mother would not.
Or even, email him or FB him monthly.
And so, things were whatever they were, with me saying what I said and no one listening to me.
And then, two years ago now, my mother called, was undeniably rude to D H. When I called her on it, she hung up on me. So, when she came home that summer, I did not go there to meet the car and see her in and bring her food and call her every night and etc and all the things I usually do.
So my brother, whom I was protecting and demanding that this exclusionary baloney stop, dropped me, too!
Huh.
You are ten thousand times correct in standing your ground on this one. I agree that the mother
expects that you will submit and come to serve her. If she is anything like my mother, she is playing a primo game that you want nothing to do with. If she is anything like my mother, she will subvert the UAW brother.
We have a thread somewhere here in the Chronicles about the narcissistic mother's intent to foment alliances and petty arguments and jealousy between the sibs that persists after the mother's death.
They do this intentionally.
Huh.
It is so unbelievable a situation that even when we are in these kinds of situations, we cannot believe we see what we see or hear what we hear. Or that what is happening could possibly be what it looks like.
It is just what it looks and feels like, and it's the rottenest feeling and I am so sorry this is happening to you, too.
I am happy you camped in the desert with your brother.
I wish for you both that you are able to maintain your good sibling relationship. I wish that for you with my whole heart.
I am very sad about the way everything is for me, and for my family ~ but knowing what I know now, I would do everything I did again in a heartbeat. I wish I'd done it sooner.
But still, it is a hard thing, to be without your real mother and your real sibs in the world.
You are here with us, though. As we work through the way things really were for us, it is good to have the company of those who understand what it feels like. That helps us not to feel that somehow, we are behaving ourselves inappropriately or are secretly jealous or any of the ten thousand other things we think about, when our families of origin are dysfunctional messes.
I did not know the UAW brother was being excluded.
Now that we know that, we know who the mother is, and who the sibs are.
Wicked.
We have another thread Quicksand on the banality of evil. The gist of it, really, is that evil events occur as the result of a series of moral slippages. With amoral choice after choice after choice. It isn't that these people don't know what they are doing. It isn't that these people who are our blood do not know better. They are not stupid, anymore than we are.
We are naive, maybe. But stupid, we are not.
I am glad you have your brother, and that he has you, too.
Our siblings are our witnesses, and always matter.
But the choice becomes to embrace the toxicity, or to take a stand. It could be that in taking a stand, you will bring your family back together. Or, it could be that you will be actively shunned, like me.
Which is a hurtful thing.
But the more I understand the underlying dynamic, and the more I come out of denial, I think there was no other choice for me to make. Even if I had known it was going to lead to this, I would have made the same decisions. It didn't feel like a decision really. I just did the next right thing.
Cedar