Mum Harks Back To The Past

Mum Harks Back To The Past

Once again, the hours and the days have whizzed; we've had the same ups and downs, with Mum sometimes sleepy, when it's really hard to get her to eat a drink, and other times when she has been bright-eyed and bushy tailed for 72 hours.....

It is so much easier when she has had a good sleep and is rested - she is able to concentrate; follow requests to do things; she's chatty, and it's a real pleasure to sit with her at mealtimes and have a talk about the cats, or watch t.v.

However, it can be very disconcerting when her mood changes, or when she goes into a different time zone in her head. We've all had folks we know, telling us the same thing over and over again, not remembering we've already heard the story so many times before, but it's even more difficult when Mum gets on to a subject that I know is painful for her, and certainly not a comfortable topic for me to deal with either.

A couple of evenings ago, she was going on and on about my father, and how, years after the divorce, he had asked her to re-marry him.  I took it as though it was the first time I had ever heard this:

"Good heavens, Ma, I hope you didn't accept!"

"Oh, no," she said, "I told him, if you could treat me like that once, you could treat me like that again."

"That was a very wise decision," I said.

Then I tried to distract her with another subject, but Mum was having none of it, and a few minutes later, that conversation was repeated, until I lost track of the times we'd covered the same ground.

I really have no idea if my father ever tried to stage a "come back," but nothing would surprise me. If he was "between affairs," Wendy tells me that people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder will often try to return to the first partner they had, going back to their primary source of "narcissistic supply," in order to re-affirm their control of that person.

If it is true, thank goodness at that time Mum was savvy enough to say "No!"

Having done some research a few years ago into what my father did after he finally got divorced from Mum in 1964, I discovered he had remarried two years later - and two years after that, had got divorced again.

He came back to England when Wendy was about 11 years old, and we drove to see him at his brother's house. He certainly had a woman in tow then, whom I assumed was his second wife - I didn't know then, he had divorced a second time, in 1968.

So, who was she? Was she the woman he had married in 1966, and divorced in 1968? Had they remarried after Mum turned down his proposition they get together again? Or was she someone else altogether?

Like so much of my father's life, it remains a mystery!