My son came to my town yesterday. Despite a tortured history together the past 13 or so years he assumed he would stay with me, contrary to everything in our past experience. He sent a text from the train (paraphrased) that said, I'll be home, like good old times, me sitting and reading a book in the living room and you in your room at the computer.
This may be literally true. But even still it's a fantasy.
Well. i don't remember it like that. I remember hiding out in my room. I remember being sick to my stomach. Writhing in pain. Calling the cops to get him out. Raiding the fridge and leaving food and filth all over. And on and on.
I told him. You can't come here. I get sick. It will be the same old thing. You didn't even ask.
So, he hears it instrumentally. Saying, if I'd only asked. He misses the point, of being responsible for his choices, his conduct. Having to take into account the effects on another person, namely me.
I am pushed into a person I don't want to be, in order to save my own life. I can understand my son needing, wanting refuge, with the fantasy that everything will be comfortable and loving and blissful at home. But I can't give him that. Not at the expense of my own life. This is the situation we are all of us in. And it is a terrible one.
In the late afternoon I spoke to a friend from Chicago on the phone, I was so tired. I couldn't help falling asleep it must have been 530. And I woke up at 10 pm thinking it was morning. Now I am worried I have sundowner syndrome with Alzheimers. But it's just as likely or more that I am wiped out emotionally.
When we got home from taking me to the dentist this afternoon, apparently we didn't see my son in the street near the hospital. He called, to ask M if we were ignoring him. What a life. My son has something missing in his brain, that he is accountable for his own conduct, and that reciprocity exists. That we are not cardboard cutout figures. That to be a mother, or a son, both requires something but also costs something, and they are not ever-renewal resources, that exist no matter what. I am depleted. I just am. And I feel very sad.