Throughout my childhood, each night before I went to sleep, my mother sat by my bed while I said my prayers. In addition to the traditional  “now I lay me down to sleep” part (including the nightmare-inducing if I should die before I wake…) I prayed for every member of my family and extended family, as well as for all of the sick and lonely people in the world. But the part that affected me the most was the end bit:  help me to be a good little girl, amen. 

I grew up in a very traditional 1950s family (though I was a mistake and the only child to be born in the 1960s), with my mother staying home and my dad going to work. As children, we were expected to behave politely in public and around household visitors, seen-but-not-heard unless courteously answering a question. We didn’t talk about problems or difficult emotions, and my mother was the queen of the silent treatment. If she was mad at me for something I did, she wouldn’t talk to me about it and explain what the problem was; she’d just ignore me. I’d slump to my room wondering what I did wrong and how I could fix it and make her happy again. I’d pace the floor with an anxiousness that I couldn’t shake.  But how can you fix something when you don’t know what you did? All I knew was that I must have been bad. I’d failed at being a good little girl and Mom wouldn’t speak to me. 

Because no one ever told me what a good little girl was supposed to act like, I figured I just had to be cautious in pretty much everything I did or I was going to hell. It created a great amount of anxiety in me and turned me into a people-pleaser of the highest caliber. To this day, I am petrified of disappointing my mother (or anyone else for that matter), despite the fact that I am 61 years old and she is 94. Does that feeling ever go away? Will I ever be able to look at things just as they are as opposed to looking at relationships through a lens of am I disappointing you and how do I fix it?

Mom now has age-related dementia and I am her primary caregiver. I live two hours from her home (the house I grew up in) and I drive back and forth from my house to my hometown almost every weekend and sometimes during the week as well, despite the fact that I work full time and cannot afford to quit working, much as I’d like to. I have two older brothers, but they live farther away than I do, and do not come down as often. Mom refuses to go into a care home and refuses to have help come into her home other than me.  She also refuses to move in with me, because I live in a different town and she won’t leave her house. I do have a family friend who checks on her every day when I’m not there, runs errands for her, and helps her pay bills and maintain her property. And my dear daughter and her husband, who now live in my grandparents’ house around the corner, check on her daily as well. Other than that, she lives on her own. The only thing that would make her truly happen is for me to move in with her, which I simply cannot do (and will further explain in another post).

My father died in 2008, and her two sisters moved in with her after his death. One sister died in 2015, the other in 2019, and that’s when I became Mom’s primary caregiver. Since then, she has fallen about six times that I know of, broken her tailbone, her lower spine, her arm in two places, and has cracked many ribs and had several concussions. She went into a care home once, and almost went insane (literally). She refused to participate in any of the activities, staying in bed all day and being quite anti-social. Right before she left there, she was talking out of her head in paranoia and threatening to walk home in the middle of the night. Her roommate fell once and was left on the floor for about two hours because there was no staff available to get her up, as they were all serving lunch. As a result, we figured Mom was better off at home where she was comfortable and had a routine. Once home, her paranoia stopped and she settled back into what was normal for her.

To keep an eye on her while I am home and at work during the week, I installed cameras in every room and at the front and back doors of her house. This has been both a blessing and a curse for me. A blessing because I can now make sure that, if she falls, she doesn’t lie on the floor waiting for hours like she has in the past. I can immediately call 911 or someone nearby to help her. A curse because my phone constantly pings with updates on her movements. I usually turn the notifications off for an hour or so during the day while I am at work, then check on her and turn them off again. At night, though, I leave them on, which means that every single time she wakes up and goes to the bathroom (3-4 times a night) the alert pings and wakes me up. I never sleep through the night any more. But this is all I’ve got right now, the best I can do since she won’t accept help or go into a facility.  The peace of mind I have by being able to watch her at any given moment is worth the exhaustion.

So back to the good little girl thing. I still—still—want to please my mother as much as I did when I was a child. It is so ingrained in my psyche that I’ve spent a great majority of my life afraid to disappoint her in any way. I have stayed close by, as I know that’s what she wants of me. I have taken few risks so as not to hurt myself, playing it safe my whole life so that I won’t stress her.  When I went to England to visit for the first time with my partner Tony, way back in 2006, her first response when I told her I was going was, “But what am I going to do if something happens to you?” I was so afraid to tell her that I was going that I wrote her a letter to tell her instead of just speaking to her. I didn’t want to face her disappointment in me. 

Pathetic, I know. But again, ingrained in my psyche. I have to be a good little girl. 

So how does this fear of disappointing my mother present itself now that I am her caregiver? I should have a bit more power now that our caregiving roles have switched, but I still feel beholden to her every mood. I’ll give you a great example that happened just this week. About two months ago, with the help of my wonderful son-in-law, I programmed her phone not to ring unless it is an approved number (whitelisting, it’s called). The reason for this is that she was getting about 30-40 calls a day from scammers. I’ve watched her on the cameras giving her credit card information, social security number, exact address (including landmarks) to strangers on the phone. Within five minutes of a call, she would get out her credit card without really asking who the person on the other end of the phone was. If they told her she needed a home warranty or she would be in trouble, she listened. If they told her all of the starving kids would die without her money, she listened. We fixed her phone without her knowledge to prevent further scam calls, my son-in-law painstakingly entering every phone number that we could think of that she would need. 

Since then, she has received zero spam calls, and she hasn’t even noticed that no one is calling except friends and family.  We succeeded in protecting her without her knowledge….until this week. Her hairdresser tried to call her to set up an appointment. She couldn’t get through because her number was not on the approved call list. My mother eventually called her, and her hairdresser told Mom that she had been blocked. Mom then called me, asking me why this happened. I told her that we had entered her important numbers in her phone so that she would know who was calling. This was not acceptable to her. Why did we mess with her phone? She guessed she had missed so many calls because of that and she didn’t like it. Though I largely smoothed it over with her, and she’ll probably forget most of our conversation, it doesn’t matter. At that moment I was a little girl again, and a little girl who had messed up, upsetting her mother. 

I got that familiar pit in my stomach, that nauseous lump, and I started getting nervous: I had disappointed my mother, the one thing I was taught not to do. 

I couldn’t let it go. How could I make her happy again? I worried about her reaction for the rest of the day. During breaks in between seeing my clients in my practice, I nervously drummed my fingers on my desk, trying to think of ways to ease her disappointment. I realize my reaction is ridiculous, as I am actually protecting her by fixing her phone to stop the scam calls.  And I can’t explain it to her because she has dementia and is paranoid. She is no longer rational and can no longer see that I did something to help keep her safe, and that my intentions were good. She just thinks I am doing something behind her back to keep her friends from calling her. And I fell into the trap, that sticky, gooey, infinite trap of guilt that I have been plagued with my whole life. 

Help me to be a good little girl, amen.