One of those things I probably shouldn't be sharing
So my serious blogs never really do too well on here (though arguably nobody's do), but I'm compelled to keep writing them. Not sure why. I guess just to ease some of the pressure on my buckling mental sluices, or maybe I secretly hope one of you buttholes will say something profound that rights all my wrongs. Either way, here it is.
My mom is miserable. Every day is a struggle for her and she frequently tells me that she does not want to live anymore.
These days the world is full of retards that kvetch and gripe about their white people problems and drop weighty phrases like "kill myself" with all the care of a drunken baboon. She really means it though, because her life has been genuinely awful, and shows no signs of getting any better.
Without going into excruciating detail about her personal life, my mother has been the victim of rape, parental abuse, a messy divorce from my dad, a slew of deadbeat boyfriends (not the slap-her-around kind, more like the passive aggressive, selfish kind), medical malpractice, a career she despises and resents, and good ol' fashioned poverty. As icing on the cake, she also has hereditary clinical depression, chronic migraines, and chronic pain syndrome.
I live with her at the moment. Before you accuse me of being a basement-dwelling sponge; I pay rent, and the utilities are in my name. I see her every day, coming apart at the seams, and it's cuttin' me real deep.
Her last boyfriend, who stuck around for a good three years, has been a mammoth-sized financial drain. Because of him, she moved house three times and wound up selling a good chunk of her assets and personal possessions because they were supposed to get hitched and merge all their shit into one big stability sandwich. Of course, he turned out to be a useless, selfish, neurotic dickbag who pretty much said flat-out that he didn't love her anymore and was sleeping around*. Despite this, he continued to live with us for a few extremely awkward subsequent months until the lease ran out and we could switch names on the contract.
*To demonstrate just how fucked up this dude was, he actually had his new girlfriend and her mother over to help him move out.
Due to the incompetence of some jackeroo surgeon, Mom has permanent nerve damage in her dominant hand and shoulder. She sued the fuck out of the medical company, but they wouldn't abate, and she was forced to settle out of court for a lump sum of peanuts because the stack of unpaid bills had reached critical mass.
This disability prevents her from getting the jobs she not only needs, but deserves. The only ones she can get are woefully underpaid in-home care gigs wiping the asses of dying children who live in the ghetto.
We live paycheck to paycheck. Moving to a more lucrative location would be ideal, but simply isn't in the cards right now. She's tired of uprooting herself, and I think another move would break her completely.
So now that you know the situation, here's the dilemma.
You know when you have a really old pet who is in constant pain, and you have to make that painful decision to put them down? Well... as fucked up as it is, that's how it feels with mom right now.
She's mentioned on several occasions how we'd both be better off if she took out a life insurance policy and just killed herself. The very idea fills me with disgust and horror, but with every passing day I see her viability dwindling, and more and more do I understand what she's going through.
She's in her throes, fighting every day to get a better job, find some new friends, basically anything to give her an excuse to live. Instead, she's met with more problems to add to the mountainous shit pile. She wakes up every morning already hating her life, only to be handed reasons to hate it even more. Whether it's the car, the water heater, our empty refrigerator, the inability to pay for the medicine she needs... it's always something. Unless we win the lottery, there's only more dark skies ahead.
She's so unhappy. So worn out. She reached the end of her tether long ago, and is listlessly coasting through her life. She often says I'm the only reason she stays alive, but with a "just let me die already" kind of resonance that makes me hate myself.
So I ask myself...
Am I wrong for making her go continue on with a life she hates? Is my presence a burden or am I saving her? I don't know who the selfish one is... It's so fucked. I know that once I'm gone, if she isn't a better way, she'll put herself down. I'm expecting it.
And make no mistake, she's not trying to manipulate me into sticking around. She wants me to go out into the world on my own and shine, like any good mother should. She talks about death with a kind of solemn dignity that makes me want to sob quietly
For those of you who read this, I'm sure the first thing that springs to mind is "she needs therapy". Well, she got therapy. For years. It didn't help that much. Now we can't afford it at all, and there aren't any good therapists who work for free. She's also on anti-depressants, or she would be... if she could afford them.
I don't know if I could live with myself if I agreed to let her go, but I'm also barely living with myself as it is. There's no way to come out of this unscathed, unless I stop caring about her completely, which is simply not possible.
I wonder what Kavorkian would have to say about all this.