Yesterday was a very strange day for many reasons and I felt the aftermath of posting an extremely personal saga. But in a way it brought some internal piece, I kept running into the Emperor in the halls of this castle. This encounter took place in an elevator.
Me: I keep seeing you everywhere today. Are you following me or am I following you?
Emperor: I am following you. I see where you are on the security cameras then come and find you.
Me: I suspected that all along.
So here is the end of the Success Story, Be prepared for some big surprises tomorrow.
Secret of My Success Part II
I am able to reflect on my life because I have had so many years of therapy. Of course, that is where mother dearest and i differ again. She did have a ‘counselor’ after my father left her. She was in her sixties at the time and the man was not very well trained. Mother was never reflective and probably was a narcissist. Again a vast difference between us. For complicated reasons I had psychological testing in 2015. Narcissists have egocentricity scores of 100. An other directed person, like Mother Theresa has a score of 0. Normal is between 33 and 44. Where was I? Much to my amazement I weighed in at 14. That is not at all good and I have to practice being a narcissist to get my scores up. It is hard. One way is to always look at a relationship and say:”What is in it for me?” I do not do this often enough.
All of the former paragraph is true. That is the other difference between my mother and myself. I am, at this point in time scrupulously honest. One male acquaintance of short duration actually said I am the most honest person he has ever met. My mother did not know the difference between a truth and a lie and lived in a state of constant denial. I do not think I realized that until I wrote that just now.
But a recent event changed my perspective. In the midst of a disagreement with a man that was a love object I threw my shoe at him, perhaps two shoes. He brought the incident up
later and then I remembered an earlier incident. The only other time in my whole life that I threw a shoe was in the presence of my mother. I was tactful, it was not at her, she was after all in a hospital bed in the University Hospital In Edmonton. But I did throw it out of sheer frustration and absolute dismay.
She had been hospitalized after a ‘faint’ – perhaps a stroke but there were no incapacities relating to the incident. But she ‘decided’ that was going to stop taking care of herself. She was incontenant but out of laziness more than anything. She refused to get out of bed to eat. Therefore she had to be moved away from the independent living place she had lived for years and put in a total care facility. We were powerless to act on her behalf unless she took some initiative. All of the crises with her is always mine to deal with, brothers are useless. So I sat on the bed, looked her in the eye and did the big conversation. “Do you want to die or go on living? If you want to go on living you have got to get out of bed. You have to try.” She said she wanted to live and promised me she would get out of bed and eat her dinner, that very night. I left to do one of the countless chores necessary to move her possessions. I returned to find her – in bed – eating her dinner. I was devastated: “What are you doing? You promised you would get out of bed to eat your dinner?” She said something stupid, non responsively, taking no responsibly for her actions. I slumped in the chair but took off my shoe and threw it across the room exclaiming: “You always do this to me!” I sobbed uncontrollably and fled the room meeting my older brother in the hallway. “I am done! I cannot do this anymore!” I ran down the hospital corridor.
\ I saw her once again. I went to say goodbye because I was returning to California. She said: “When are you coming back? “ Not thank you for coming, for moving my possessions into storage and visiting me every day. I looked at her and said one of two things, I cannot remember which at this moment in time. I think I said: “Whatever I do it is never enough for you and you want more.” Or I said: “You always ask too much of me.” I left, never to see her again. She died about three weeks later in a total care facility. I think she essentially starved herself to death. She died alone.
She left a total mess. She left everything to her favorite son not me, not my other brother. My younger brother took it out on me and he and his family shunned me at the funeral that I had planned singlehandedly. I wrote on the plane on the way home to California that I was glad she is dead because when asked if I had a mother, I would have to say yes. “ Now I can say no. It is so good to be able to tell the truth. ‘
But the recent shoe throwing incident has brought something quite horrible to light. My ‘love objects’ – the men in my romantic life are eerily always like my mother. And I keep trying to win their love, like I did with my mother for all of those years. And they, to a man, are like her. They do not have the capacity, for some reason, to love. I try and try and finally realize what is going on. So I have my strengths and I have had my successes but I am deeply and horribly scarred. I have my women friends, my gay friends and close male friends that I have never slept with. But I am unable to form an intimate relationship with a heterosexual man with whom I am sexually involved. I am 73, it is not going to happen. I guess that is life. Something in me keeps saying to the blind and the cold: : See me! Love me! Of course they cannot.
