Reading over my last post I saw these two sentences: [Eleanor] “told Dana that she didn’t see how I could ask her to leave when her therapist was going to be away unless I was deliberately trying to be mean. Dana said he saw that as an example of how Eleanor saw the world as revolving around herself, she couldn’t conceive of a reason that I might have that had nothing to do with her.”
This reminded me of Mother. Once, when I didn’t go to a family reunion in Washington DC because I was very sick, my mother told my cousin Susan that I didn’t come because I knew she would be there, and I wanted to hurt her. Susan told me what Mother said, also saying that she didn’t believe it. Later, when we all went home one by one to help Mother return to the house after a time in the hospital, Mother prevented me from having a last goodbye with Mama Greene. She was old enough that I knew it might be my last time to see her, and in fact the next time I went home, Mama Greene was in a nursing home and didn’t recognize me. She had come to take care of us when I was three years old and was still taking care of mother some 50 years later. She was a divorced mother of three who needed a job, and her name was Mrs. Greene. The story my parents told was that I couldn’t say Missus so I said Mama instead, but I think I knew a Mama when I saw one. So when I was about to leave, Mother told me to call Mama Greene and tell her not to come the next day, my last one. The whole story is here. I called her and told her I would drive over to say goodbye, but Mother would be hurt and I couldn’t do that. She said “No, you were never like that.”
But when the difficulty happened with Eleanor, I still half believed that I was a person who would do things deliberately to hurt someone else. Mother had done her best to convince me that was true. Thinking of all this, I see why the situation was so confusing and painful, one reason why I was so vulnerable to the neediness of someone I truly cared about, and would go beyond my actual resources to help.