Chapter Four – Mother Doesn’t Love Him Best
I remember that when my brother and I were fighting over who would do what with my mother, my husband stated, “This is about a lot more than taking care of your mother. This is about who your mother loves best.” Our caregiving will always be colored by our roles and our expectations within our families. Throughout our adulthood, the child in us is very near the surface, and this child has something that he or she needs to prove or has been assigned a role she’s been conditioned to accept.
In the book Dutiful Daughters, edited by Jean Gould, one of the accounts tells of a daughter who always was the “wild child” in her family. She had given her parents nothing but grief as she was being brought up by two strict farmers in North Dakota. Later, she had left home for college and had been a part of the hippie culture of the 1960s. She had given birth to a daughter out of wedlock. Her parents had disapproved of her lifestyle completely, and whenever they spoke of her to friends, they always shook their heads in sadness and disbelief at her lifestyle choices.
This family also had a son who stayed at home in North Dakota, took over the family farm, married a girl in the area, and settled down to farm and raise his family. This son was the pride of both his parents. However, the daughter stayed in college, went to a prestigious graduate school, graduated from that school, and after college taught at a large university in the Midwest. She became a tenured professor, bought a house, took care of her finances and her child equally well, and in the end was a well-respected member of her large academic community.
She made regular trips home and even took her parents on a trip to visit their relatives in Montana once a year (however, they made her use their car; they didn’t trust her foreign-made car). It was during one of these trips that they hit a deer. The daughter was on top of the situation. She had a cell phone. She had AAA. She could afford to rent them a nice motel room while they waited for her insurance company to bring them a rental car.
Her parents would have none of it. They would call their “good child” to fix the situation. It must have been something in her poor lifestyle choices that caused her to run into the deer. So, instead of letting her take care of it, they had the “good son” drive from North Dakota, rent a truck to tow the car, and take care of things much less effectively. She could not convince her parents that she was trustworthy. She would always be the hippie.
In the same way, I could not understand why my brother and his wife thought it was their role to take over my mother’s care. I had always been Mom’s best friend. She and I had spent much more time together. In fact, in my mind, my brother didn’t even like my mother. When he was an adolescent, he had huge trouble concentrating in school and subsequently got poor grades. My brother’s relationship with my mother had been very emotionally charged. She was always trying to get him to “live up to his potential” (or her idea of what his potential was) through seemingly never-ending screaming matches.
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