My Mother...

...is the latest on my hit list of idiots. Well she has always been but it's as far as it can go now. She is on the verge of a mental breakdown which is obvious when you see how her brain works. Worst of all she won't listen but instead uses her many years to talk infinitely (not allowing anything in). I don't know much myself but I can see she has made some massive errors in her mind. Not wishing to detail much of the insanity but for future reference here is an example very like the bike situation. She spends many hours a day turning off electric lights and berrating people in the house for leaving them on or having more than 1 swtitched on at a time. She is not wrong here in terms of enviornment - I try to use as much solar as I can. The problem tho is her argument is to do with money and I have suggested better ways of saving money. A 100W bulb uses 1kW every 10 hours which cost 10p - that is 24p a day and £88 to leave on all year. We have energy saving so that is £18 to power all day, every day for a year. Now she simply isn't interested in doing the maths she just wants to wander around the house being busy and lecturing. Maybe this is one origin of my campaign against busi(y)ness? Altho really I know it lies in the environment and Nature.

However at the same time as she wants money for the upkeep of the house she refused last weekend to let me take a tree down preferring to hire a tree feller at £200+. For a morning's work I consider that a lot of money but in my mother's head that is worth less than a 100W equivalent light bulb on every day for 11 years! What can one do? And I remember now the real problem is that no matter how much I go along happily with her idiotic requests she considers me unhelpful because I don't do what she wants when she wants it. It seems that executing her orders, giving her the sense of control is the point here: nothing practical at all. Arguing this now I see the problem :-) My bosses had the same attitude: regardless how idiotic, they simply want the sense of control. Famous example was my lab boss being ordered by the MD to clean out the bins a few hours before they were due to be emptied anyway and right at the critical point of the week where orders had to be completed. My bosses failure to agree with this was mentioned at every appraisal for quite a few years! I feel that the problem at the temple might have been the same. The Abbess said I was egotistical. This I interpreted after a lot of thought was not what it seemed but rather meant I was not respectful of her ego. So my mother, bosses and temple at least seem to have one root: the desire for control of people. Unfortunatly I'm not the sort of person who can be controlled - it feels like death to me, a prison, a dark hole where the sun doesn't shine. Who wants to be emprisoned by someone for no reason? So its not a part of any contract I sign "being controlled". That is always for the other person to negotiate with themselves - I hold the mirror up instinctively.

Maybe this explains the bike situation too. She did say that I would never buy the bike myself - so she spent the money she owed me on what she wanted me to buy. Basically she was controlling me.

Wow hallelulah. All this makes a bit more sense now. The "idiots" are people who are trying to control me. I'm not that fussed if my mother has a nervous break-down. She had it coming from day 1 the way she has been brought up and the things she believes. It is quite natural. The problem arises when she suddenly feels that she needs me. Then as she grasps for control in her world it follows that she grasps for control of me... or the sense at least that I am controllable... "reliable" I remember she called it. So my mistake is to think that she needs things being done - of which, I pointed out to her, I have never failed her. What she sees however is not that I execute her "orders" and always get the job done well, but that I do not execute "her" orders. Which is true. I always make a job my own. As argued before here if I can't make a job my own I don't do it. It was failure to think about what they were doing and take responsibility for it that led to the Nazi atrocities - you can't take orders and make it your own at the same time. This is where friction then occurs with bosses - I do what I am paid to do, but i don't do what I am told: they are different. I've always considered the latter unprofessional - but maybe this is the subtext most of the time.

OK so I understand now, and unfortunately realise that this is just the way it is. I don't take orders. Anyone who wants their orders followed needs to find someone else, or do it themselves as I have always maintained. Which is kind of where the argument ended with my mother anyway. I simply can't be the son she wants or even needs. Where do you go after that! Sadly her way of thinking looks like its heading for a brick wall which is going to he hard on everyone my sister most. Ironic since she is the one who can't accept my way of thinking and always says it will end in my ruin. What I see now is that my way of thinking doesn't give her the security and control that her way of thinking needs, my way of thinking will end in her ruin! No wonder human relationships gets so self destructive. I will have to think about how we can both survive when she is demanding of me my opposite and my way of simply living my life is actual perceived as a treat to hers! For now I'm on holiday and I said to her I wasn't coming back and she was no mother of mine anymore. That should gain her infinite distance from the troubles that she sees in me. What might have been a mis-calculation in retrospect was that this was all kicked off because she was off to the funeral of a friend of hers (about the 10th who has died of cancer). I've pointed out to her that at her age death is something she has to face - yet she persists in her quaint worldly thinking and just seems to dig herself deeper and deeper into depression. Why she is so beligerent and determined to keep up a show for the Jones (whoever they are) and not face the realities of life is beyond me. It is a lesson never to follow the crowd, the Jones or the hegemony because when you need them they aren't there for you - because they never existed! People like me who are there for my mother are considered demons because we don't follow the Jones and so can't offer the "support". While this is unpacked the critical issue is jobs - my mother considers it an embarrassment and a liability that I don't work while all my friends have top careers. There is certainly no talking to her about this when she won't even listen to simple things. Really at this point the road splits she must run with what she has got and me with what I have got. True she nurtured me as a child, but trying to keep the umbilical attached so that she can suck it all back out is not the way it works. Parents ultimately do die and she must face this.

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Update on the above. It is highly ironic that I should be turning my back on her when she needs me most! How I get caught in these mirrors and reflections is as much a mystery as the irony itself. After cooling off I realised that I have no choice but to support her. There will be a pantomime of me feigning obsequiousness even where I know it will achieve nothing but her security. Why I can't graciously accept my position is that it makes a mockery of the belief that there is a "true" way. Obey my mother and accept her way of doing things when not only does it violate my own way, but I think her way is counter productive. By accepting her way I become an instrument to the very problem I am being asked to give assistance in. It is just something to avoid; yet I am her son and this binds me to the world in a way that I can't escape.

One thing I am learning through all this is that, particularly in human relationships: you never get a clear shot at the target. Like eons of folding, weathering and deposition, and intrusions the geology of human relationships is never the right way up (if you forgive the analogy). Sometimes layers of rock are turning upside down, folded and twisted so they point in almost any direction, and then faults cut through the mass and it is folded and twisted again... and again. It creates a Rubic cube of rock where without other clued it is impossible to find out where we started. So too with the affairs of people and the world, unweaving the mess is virtually impossible. Just look at how in just two centuries of involvement in the Middle-East and Afghanistan, of twisting allegiances and reversing political alignment, the West is so embedded that they can no longer even remember how it all started let alone how it is going to end.

So it is Peace with my mum in her frailty. Peace may not it turns out be based on Truth or hope of Resolution at all, but maybe just Peace itself and acceptance that the absurdity and counter-production of the ever-twisting-topsy-turvy-through-a-looking-glass world is just the way it will always be until death do us all part.

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That said it occurred to me that this is already what I do in every situation. Faced with the "idiot" you cannot reason with them, they will not listen so you have no choice but to just accept things the way they are for the sake of peace. But this does not rest easy in my mind. If we are to just accept inaccuracy, idiocy, falsity without concern then how do we at the same time treat these things within ourself with concern? Once we are trained to just accept idiocy then what i find happening is that our mind has no choice but to become idiotic itself. Thus I find that the tolerance phase is short lived and very soon I have to exit the situation - that being temple, my muse, work, relationships, my mum? It is the problem that the computer HAL9000 had in the story of "2001" (odd now I think about it that my dad would have seen that film for decades and never known that it was to be the year he would die - I wonder how many times I've considered the year that will tun out to be my last). The machine has two competing rules: 1) not to harm people, and (2) not to jeopardise the mission. The conflict between these leads the "rational" machine into quite irrational behavior... a non-logical emergent property arising out of logic - maybe a suggestion of how emotions might occur in machines... which after Sartre makes sense as emotions are "magical" events which shift our mind from one state to another without any justification. Anyway the real world I'm discovering does seem to be multifaceted and people seem to revel in playing the many sides; not to harmonise and "mend" the whole but rather to lever the world apart so they can set the bits against one another for their own purposes. Trying to operate in such a fractured environment creates either apathy or mental illness... or if you are me you just walk away. This does seem my only strategy which works. Thing is I can't really walk away from my mother tho I can probably distance myself from her.

Mum will be sent mad by exactly the analysis above. She is programmed with love for me, but also programmed by her upbringing to be unable to handle my indifference to the social norms - in particular having a job. She will blow herself apart trying to marry two opposing instructions. Just writing here is it possible that she finds me an idiot then for sending two of her directives into contradiction? Shall have to consider this more.

The problem then is not as simple as I have tried to make it over the past decade or so. Faced with a contradiction we do have a serious problem then which threatens to blow us apart unless we walk away... at least that is the only solution I have found yet. Run away, live to fight another day! It is certainly not good enough to naively ignore it and try to remain peaceful and undisturbed!

== Update in 2019

My mother got a dementia diagnosis a few years ago. Having learned about dementia I discovered that she was not deliberately being hostile to me, but that she was struggling with personality changes, anxieties and confusion. It was typical of myself then to (1) assume everything was directed to myself - that is my ego (2) to assume that everything was a matter of thinking correctly - this is also ego in fact. So both my mother and myself have been on a long journey since this post and now as she declines and slowly shuts down and goes to sleep we have a good relationship of support and mutual love, and it is a chance for me to return all her care and nurture that she gave to me over all those years when I was young. The cycle of life continues forever.