What keeps my parents together

Time since New Year’s Eve has been quite crappy. My mother thinks to be deadly ill because she has 37,5°C temperature, which is an ideal temperature, as a dear friend of mine, a medical doctor, told me. My father has been sulky as usual, always complaining about everything. 

Yesterday, after dinner, I was doing the dishes with my father as he started one of his long speeches about the topic "Oh I am so old and tired". He loves self-commiseration not less than my mother. He was complaining about his being an old man who is surely not going to live to be a hundred. He added that he feels tired and he has troubles catching breath. Yes, he suffers from a little breathlessness sometimes, but if this is the only problem he has, with 91, he can be happy, isn’t it true? New Year’s Eve has been awful, but this is not just my mother’s fault. My father got aggressive and furious at her as she was accusing him of having the intention of leaving her penniless, while, knowing his wife’s character, he should have been more diplomatic. So, at some point, I decided to stop my father’s litany about all his "terrible troubles" and his "being the victim of the family" and tried to explain to him that we can and should be happy. My dear friend Marvin’s brother, for example, is dying of cancer, painfully fading away, and he is in his 60’s. The father of a very dear friend of mine passed away last year due to lung cancer, and he was still a young man. Most of my father’s peers are either dead or in such a bad state that they can barely walk, go to town, read, let alone use a tablet and actively take part in family life. I think that my father, with his self-pity, was giving life a slap in the face. I let him notice that but, of course, he got offended and replied that I am insensitive to his problems. Which problems, dad? You have everything. He has a family, he is in good health and in good shape, so if he sometimes has little troubles catching breath, he will survive. 

I asked myself what keeps my parents together. Habit? Convenience? Love? A daughter (me)? Well, habit is a point for sure. My parents have been married for more than 50 years by now. They have their rituals, their habits, and they are quite set in their ways. They do the same things, at the same time, in line with the same schedule, every single day of the week, 52 weeks a year. There is no place for flexibility, and I am involved in this routine despite the fact that I don’t really want so. I have my rituals, which I developed during years of struggling with my illness and therapy, which help me to cope, for example, with self-harm urges or with violent impulses. I don’t need their rituals too, which are mostly useless – like cleaning a room which is already clean -. Convenience is also a reason: my father needs clean clothes, three meals a day, a clean house, and as long as he has all this, everything is ok. Sometimes I even think that he does not care about my mother anymore, but uses her just for this purpose. He accepts insults and humiliations, lacking any pride, because he knows that my mother will serve him anyway. And my mother married my father because he was a successful medical doctor, a rich man, who could offer her money and a quiet life. Do my parents love each other? Maybe, maybe not. As far as I can see, they are inseparable, but this does not mean that they love each other. My mother has a strong tendency to tie up her dear ones to her, isolating them from the rest of the world, and making them dependent on her. She fears abandonment more than anything else. So, she managed to separate my father from all his friends, because "they were not good enough", or "they were not nice to her", whatever. My father ended up being a very lonely person, having just my mother as a constant company. The same happened with me: at the time I still had friends, my mother would criticize them and show me how they negatively affected me. As a consequence, I started seeing them with suspect, since I was still a little child and did not have my own opinion about the people around me. Long story short, I grew up in solitude. With the only, overwhelming affection of my mother. Later on, I isolated myself on my own just because I had an inner world which was very populous and made every interaction with reality almost superfluous. Almost nasty. Let’s say, I had no other choice anyway, since I was considered a geek and a mommy’s daughter and was excluded from the "group", especially at High School. And the last possible reason, a daughter… I know from my brother Richard that before my birth, my parents pondered the idea to divorce. But then, maybe, I saved the situation. I sometimes think that my father decided to have a child at almost 60 just because he wanted someone to take care of him when he would be old. I know, that is quite a strong accusation, but there are not limits to my father’s selfishness. He sometimes even call me "his only daughter", in spite of having a son, Richard, as well. My mother has always been very possessive towards me, and never liked to share my love with her husband. That was never a problem, though, since I have always madly loved my mother, while my father has always been pretty insignificant. Not that I do not love him; it is just that he always spoiled me, without taking care of my upbringing, thinking that with gifts and compliments he could buy my love. Even nowadays, I have the impression that he thinks I am on sale. I was raised by my mother alone. 

Well, enough thinking about such a topic. I feel blessed because I have a family, even if we are a dysfunctional trio and we are a bunch of neurotics, we are a family. Not everybody has the privilege to say something like this. I sometimes come to this site to vent my frustration or complain, but I have a happy life, on the whole. Nobody is entitled to everlasting and constant happiness. I am on the opinion, though, that all the times my family wastes time arguing about trifles, it insults life, because we could be far happier than we are. 

Take gentle care everyone, and may the Fire of Enthusiasm be with you.