“I promised to take care of my sick grandmother, but I can’t live like this anymore”

“I thought: everything that didn’t work out for my mother, I will succeed”

Yana, 23 years old

My grandmother and I have always been very close. I could tell her things that I would never have told my mother. My grandmother respected my desires, taught me to think independently. When I began to have relationships with young people, I shared it with her. Mom divorced early, failed to build a personal life and despised all men. Grandmother, before she was widowed, was happily married, I trust her opinion more.

Mom and grandmother often quarreled, as it seemed to me, because of my mother’s difficult character. It was also not easy for me and my mother to find a common language – my grandmother understood me better. When I started working part-time, we had a tradition – every weekend I invited her to a cafe, treated her to cakes. I felt that she was proud of me, it was very important to me.

Everything ended unexpectedly. Grandmother had a stroke, she was partially paralyzed. Her mother took her from the hospital to us. However, after a week, relations that had not been particularly warm between them before became even more tense.

Then I decided that I would move with my grandmother to her apartment and take care of her myself. Because of the quarantine, I didn’t have to go to college, and I thought that I could devote enough time to her.

The decision came easily, I even felt something like joyful intoxication. This exit did not seem to me a victim, on the contrary: I perceived it almost as an adventure. After all, we understand and love each other so well. My grandmother is the most tactful person I know, and I will finally have the opportunity to thank her for all the warmth and love that I have received all my life.

I thought: the main thing is to properly organize the process and maintain good relations. And all that did not work out for the eternally dissatisfied mother, everything, will work out for me.

The first week everything was almost exactly as I pictured in my imagination. I didn’t meet with friends, but I attributed it to quarantine. There was a feeling of euphoria when you know for sure: you are doing a big and important thing.

Everyone else abandons their loved ones or takes care of them, gritting their teeth, but my grandmother and I will live a wonderful, friendly life. This stupid feeling of maximalism killed me faster than I expected.

A week later, I realized that I was wildly tired. The ritual of washing and changing clothes twice a day was physically demanding. At first, my grandmother and I understood each other perfectly, she thanked me, kissed me.

But one day she admitted – it would be better if she left and did not doom both of us to all that we go through. Of course, I forbade her to say so, but that evening I retired to the bathroom, turned on the water tap so that I could not be heard, and gave vent to my feelings.

Another two weeks passed, and for the first time I raised my voice to my grandmother when she remarked to me that the soup was not cooked so well. We didn’t talk for half an evening. I was ashamed. I cried and asked for forgiveness.

A month later, I finally realized that I could no longer live like this. I called my mother and admitted that I could not cope. “Don’t think you’re the best,” she told me. And she was right.

We decided that we would all live together with our mother and share the cares of our grandmother. However, even now, whenever possible, I try to spend time outside the home. My grandmother has turned into a different person – she constantly breaks down not only at her mother, but also at me. She cries and says she doesn’t want to live like this. Mom is crying too.

Often I go to my grandmother’s empty apartment, stay there overnight and don’t want to come back. I understand that I am acting cowardly, but I feel that such a life is eating me up, and there is no spiritual strength left for anything else.

“Growing up is the ability to face conflicting feelings within yourself”

Julia Kazakevich, Jungian analyst

In Yana’s story, mother and grandmother are presented in polar opposite ways: the mother is “bad”, frustrating, the grandmother is “good”, taking care of the needs of the child. Mom could not arrange a personal life, my grandmother was a worthy widow.

In real life, of course, this does not happen, and the heroine splits her maternal image: the positive part goes to her grandmother, the negative part goes to her mother. This is understandable: from infancy, a child experiences ambivalent feelings for his mother: she is either nearby, then disappears, then feeds, then does not feed.

At some point, in order to cope with these swings, the psyche finds a way out: to divide external objects into good and bad. To the “good” he will feel sympathy and trust, to the “bad” – hostility and a desire to run away.

Apparently, both mother and grandmother in childhood did not try to smooth out this split. And if earlier the girl tried to keep her distance from her mother and be closer to her grandmother, now they just switched places: she enlarges her with her grandmother and approaches her mother a little. However, there is no internal balance again.

Yana is faced with the withering of a close elderly person and the collapse of the usual picture of the world. This path is well illustrated by folk tales about the initiation of a girl who needs to meet Baba Yaga, the representative of the world of the dead, in order to grow up and prepare for the birth of her child.

The heroine of the story faces a similar choice, and she has to decide: is she ready to make contact with death or is it better for her to leave her grandmother with her mother, and herself go to a free apartment and remain in the position of a child.

So far, she has not made this choice and is only angry at her grandmother that, like Baba Yaga, she no longer feeds her, but gives impossible tasks and confronts the need to grow up. And this, above all, is the ability to meet with conflicting feelings within oneself.

Perhaps Yana’s mother did not survive the crisis of growing up either. And so now it is her task – to go through such a stage, taking care of her grandmother. And the daughter only met the shadow side of life for the first time, but decided not to deal with it, to postpone the process of growing up for another time.

The good thing is that Yana is well aware of her feelings, and this attentive and honest attitude towards herself can become her support.