When I stood up to my mother a year ago by saying: I can’t look after you any more! Well I remember her first reaction was to beat her fists on the bed and say - You’ve won! You’ve won! You’ve won! And it felt terrifying, really terrifying, a confirmation of my experience, my terror of our relationship being a power battle, that we couldn’t both exist. It either had to be me or her. It has felt like in living my own life some how she has to be sacrificed. And may be that’s why it was so difficult to do that before. It’s that particular those particular parents – but being their only child has just made it so intense and so focused that when I was in my teens or in my twenties and thirties, I couldn’t fully live my own life because it was so different to theirs. Because… then they wouldn’t exist. I mean I do feel since I made that stand a year ago, my mother has been living in a rest home since then. I did feel that we had the possibility for a different relationship. I do now feel very separate from her but I still at times feel guilt. I suppose I think: Does she now feel she has to die? and I think well that’s ok, she is eighty-nine, but I do feel, I also feel guilty. It’s like I’m still taking responsibility by saying - If I’m fully going to live my life then she has to lose hers I’m responsible for that!
I do feel uncomfortable with that. I can’t see it in any other way because it’s almost as if - it feels like I was my parents creation. they owned me, in detaching myself from that they can no longer exist. So in a way parting with that makes me hate being an only child
I feel really angry right now. I don’t feel I should talk to anybody because it hurts, it’s like there was no choice. I think that’s why I’ve never had any children actually. And it’s a relief really at another level I feel well I’ve not even lived half a life.
I feel very, very sad, The half life I’ve had has been a self-defeating one in order to maintain my parent’s illusions.