I am not saying I sympathise with his mother.. She is doing a lot of harm to a lot of people's lives and using tears to extort peoples' tolerance of the destructive illness..
i've been trying very hard to digest your last two posts about making amends with my mil and making a list of things that i would accomodate and what i wouldn't.
to be honest, i'm not sure if i have it in me to work with her. there are trust issues that i have to overcome. i don't know what she talks to her son about when he calls her on his way home from work. i could be doing everything right and still be taken for a fool.
i agree that she's doing more harm than good - but isn't that the more reason to get her help? she will never reach rock bottom because in her mind, she's just trying to help and doing only what's best for the family.
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But I am saying that there are ways you can learn to work with the person with the illness...
i tried. but her help became more of a hinderance than help. even my own mother tried to help me learn how to work with my mil's quirks but it became harder and harder.
at one point, things got better. and i actually got along with my mil. and the truth is, i never fought with my mil or my fil .. yes, i used the word "never". i never raised my voice with her. i saw the good side in them and it made up for their quirks. i cared about them almost as much as my h did.
i have taken my mil out alone when she was visiting. we grocery shopped together and i took her out to dinner once. we didn't have the big dramatic fights that most ILs have with their DILs. when i saw how she was getting on my h's nerves with her constant need to help, i would convince her to go shopping with me and relieve my h of her nagging.
one of the things i'm really good at is making sure they don't get ripped off by anyone - be it a car salesman, the phone company, etc. and i would look out for them. they live in the mid west and my h and i live on the east coast. so we are unable to be with them all the time. if they have computer trouble, my h gets frustrated trying to debug stuff over the phone. so what did *i* do? i put a remote access program on their computers and now we debug their machines without my h ripping his hair out. my ILs are elderly so they are not computer literate and are slow typers. so you can imagine how frustrated my h can be. so i help them figure things out and make life easier.
my h walked away from this m with so many things that he learned from me. he didn't value what i brought to the table. he only valued material things we had.
most of the time, i felt like the 'h' in the relationship. i took care of things he didn't want to bother with while h just worked.
it's funny when you said him calling me a gold digger is probably a projection of how he feels himself .. and all this time, i kept wondering how he could have thought of me that way. when he ended our m, he basically wanted to take everything and run away.
eight months later and the hurt is still very raw. and i wonder whether i will ever be respected for the way i handled things. i valued the people involved - that's why i helped them. i show that i care by helping them and doing things for them. when will he ever learn that material things are not replacements for tenderness, friendship, and love?
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The biggest problem is your H hasn't grown up, partly a result of this disorder I'm sure...
sigh. the more reason not to accomodate it. it only continues to grow and expand. at some point, you have to stop it .. accomodating the disorder often tends to blur the boundaries. and from there, it leaks and thrives.
