Turning 40
I turned 40 recently. My mom, who has dementia, was crying because she forgot to say happy birthday or get me a card. Then she found a card in a drawer and wrote what I consider to be a very morbid birthday message in it, and gave it to me while crying. (I won't share what she wrote, but it was the way it was written with such finality, as if she were about to drop dead - or as if she's afraid that in a year's time she won't know who I am anymore - that upset me.)
I went out for a break but ended up crying in a parking lot. On top of dementia and age, I know that the reason she had an off-day yesterday is because she had a disrupted night's sleep - she was fine and in good spirits the previous day, but yesterday was confused and downbeat due to having slept badly. I hadn't slept well either.
But I also think she worries about me being single and not having a family, and about what my life will be like after she dies. I don't think anything would be any better for me if I were in a relationship. Her own marriage wasn't good. It's not a panacea. We have a family friend who is a straight guy who lived with and cared for his mother until she passed away when he was 50, then he found a girlfriend and moved to Ireland. Sometimes when my mom speaks to him on the phone, she makes comments about how wonderful it is that he found someone and how sad and lonely he would have been otherwise. I say to her "Don't say that!" I wonder if she sees my being gay as something akin to a disability. I can remember her making comments 20 years ago to the effect that being gay is a "lonely life". The thing is, she isn't wrong.
But this is also part of a general behavioral pattern around holidays and birthdays. For years, long before any signs of dementia, my mom would become upset at Christmas/NYE and tearfully apologise to me for various imagined transgressions. For being a "burden". For being a "terrible mother" - when in reality she raised me near-single-handedly while my dad did almost nothing. Saying that I "deserve better", as she said again yesterday. Then I end up having to spend what's supposed to be a holiday managing her feelings, comforting her, just as I had to yesterday. It is not alcohol-related; she never drinks.
There's a phenomenon called Jocasta complex where a mother develops an essentially spousal relationship with her child - one definition describes it as "the domineering and intense, but non-incestuous love that an affect-hungry mother has for an intelligent son, which may be coupled to an absent or weak father figure." That accurately describes my childhood. It's something I've always been intuitively aware of, and fully aware of for a decade or so, when I did a lot of reading about parentification and Jocasta complex circa 2013. I had a good childhood, but the reason I moved so far away when I left home at 18 - first to university in Scotland for three years, then living and working in Germany for the next eleven - is I knew I needed to make a clean break from my parents, to build my own life and develop myself, to redefine the relationship on my own terms.
Now as her dementia progresses, she feels acutely vulnerable and is more aware than ever of how dependent she is on me. For some years, I have been the parent, she the child. And I actually prefer it like this. Being responsible comes easily; I didn't like the powerlessness of childhood even when I was a kid. Even with my friends, I often slip into the parent role - the reliable one, the designated driver, the listener, because it's what feels right and comes most naturally to me. My friend Rick and I know a gay gay who is essentially the opposite of me, whose mother did his laundry for him and cleaned his apartment for him well into his 40s. When she died, he completely fell apart and slid into addiction, because he'd never been independent from her, he'd always been in the child role. As someone who's had to be responsible and independent for a very long time, I struggle to understand or sympathise with that. Growing up as a parentified child has its downsides for sure, but I also see a great number of benefits, especially when I look around at my peers - people in their twenties, thirties, forties, even fifties who can't look after themselves, assiduously avoid any responsibility, don't stop to think about others, and act in spoilt, immature and profoundly selfish ways that have become increasingly normalized on a societal level. I hate every one I see, from manchild A to fuckboy Z.
I am 40 and one day. Things are going to get better and worse. Gay men my age scour sex apps for "fun". A culture in which one of the most intimate things you can do with another person is downgraded to "fun" is profoundly unhealthy. I will age, I will live with integrity and dignity, I will learn, study, read, watch, tend, protect, venture. I will cultivate my relationships. I will feed the birds. I will leave the UK again, but not for ever. And I will become as Mr Eszter, from Laszlo Krasznahorkai's "The Melancholy Of Resistance": "He had to retreat to a point of inner security if only because the world outside had become a place of agonising decay; he had to ignore the itch, the desire to intervene, for the purpose and significance of action were being corroded away by its thoroughgoing lack of significance; he had to distance himself because the only valid response of a sound mind to this process was to protest against it, or indeed to withdraw; to cut all contact with it and retain one's distance [...] while at the same time continuing to pay attention to the increasingly meaningless state of things, to look long and hard at it, for to avert one's eyes would be nothing short of cowardice, like substituting submissiveness for misapprehension, like running away from the truth that however he may have spoken up against 'a world that was losing its grip on the law' not for one moment had he ever lost touch with it. He had spoken up against it and had never ceased interrogating it, wanting to know why it was irrational; like a fly he kept buzzing in its ear and would not be waved away, but now the buzz was out of him, he had no desire left to keep buzzing because he understood that his tireless questioning and rebelling against the nature of things resulted not so much in the world becoming an adjunct to his intellect as in him becoming an adjunct to the world, the world's prisoner if you like. [...] He knew the moment he lay down in his bed that night 'the great burden of human decline into madness, imbecility, dullness, thick-headedness, gracelessness, tastelessness, crudity, infantilism, ignorance and general stupidity' was not something that could be slept off even in fifty more years."