Mutual dependence can bring mother and daughter closer together. But caring for elderly relatives is expensive and difficult, so aging is often a challenge. Psychoanalyst Claude Almos talks about shame, anxiety, guilt and how we can remain human.
Magda Szabo has a novel “Pilate” about a woman doctor who, after her father’s funeral, brings her mother, who has lived in the country all her life, to her city. Of course, she does this so that she does not remain alone and lives in a comfortable environment. She does not even know that, tearing her mother away from her world, she is stealing the end of her life from her.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions… The same ones that we always hide behind when we want to help someone, but forget to ask what this person considers good for himself. We arrogantly arrogate to ourselves the right to decide for him.
How can we protect and support a loved one, while continuing to recognize in him a person who is able to express his own desire worthy of respect? This is the main issue both in raising children and in caring for elderly parents. Children must respond to it at a time when they themselves become more vulnerable. This often happens when we face the specter of our own old age and the fear of being rejected by a society where old age is tantamount to inferiority.
When parents grow old, both sons and daughters have a relationship with them that is burdened by fear.
First of all, this applies to women, because society still attaches unreasonably great importance to their appearance. Therefore, the mother, aging, becomes for her daughter a frightening mirror of her own future. Especially if the life history of the daughter did not allow her (unconsciously) to separate her body and her being from her mother. In this case, she will consider herself doomed to exactly such a life. But the difficulties are not only in this.
On the horizon of parental old age, the thought of their inevitable departure looms all the time. This causes pain and anxiety: the descendants find themselves “on the front line”, face to face with death, from which no one separates them anymore.
Therefore, when parents grow old, the relationship with them, both in sons and daughters, is burdened with fear. And children should take care of their parents, feeling this fear. Every day, in all daily activities, if the parents can no longer serve themselves.
In order for professionals to take care of old parents, and for children to only show tenderness, money is needed. Therefore, often daughters and sons are forced to provide care on their own.
The most they can (when the situation allows) is to find a nurse who will sometimes replace them. Each time they experience anxiety: “How will everything go?” And if it turns out that “everything went badly,” a feeling of guilt arises: “I had to myself (myself).” This feeling they rarely dare to admit: society does not want to know about the psychological suffering caused by the failure of its institutions.
Some women notice how the rivalry intensifies with age, in which mothers have forced them to live before.
Although men are not spared from it, usually the main burden of caring for parents falls on women, and this can be not only terrible for them, but also inexpressible. How can I express how difficult it becomes to wash the mother’s body and even her genitals – because there is no professional around who could do it? That part of the body that was the forbidden zone of maternal sexuality and that gave rise to conjectures and questions in childhood?
How to cross the taboo? How to make these movements? And do it without getting angry at the mother for this ordeal, generated by her condition? How to hide from her your anxiety, and sometimes even disgust? And how to help her endure without shame this attempt on her modesty, this helplessness? And how then to return, without feeling guilty, to your life, to your own – healthy – body, to your sexuality.
Many daughters today are experiencing this torment. But for some, other sufferings are added to these sufferings, connected with the peculiarities of their relationship with their mother. Some women notice how the rivalry intensifies with age, in which their mothers have forced them to live before.
These mothers, due to their personal history, ignore the natural change of generations, cannot bear the thought that their daughters will outlive them. They take advantage of the situation to ruin their lives as much as possible. And then the daughters again, as in childhood, are manipulated. And again, those around them test their patience, denying what is happening: “She doesn’t understand, she’s an elderly person.”
The worst thing for an unloved child is when parents refuse the love he would like to give them.
But perhaps the most difficult thing for a daughter or son is to take care of a mother who is completely dependent on them when she did not love them or, even worse, mistreated them.
In this case, two dangers lie in wait for the child. The first is the temptation, according to the “eye for an eye” law, not to take care of the mother at all. It is risky to succumb to it: if, as an adult, an abused child mistreats his parents, he is doomed to remain a prisoner of the destructive inhumanity in which his parents forced him to live.
And on the contrary, if he behaves like a human being with them, he becomes the master of his own destiny, restoring the laws that his parents violated, and thereby finds a foothold to restore himself. It’s a difficult but liberating choice: “You can’t make me look like you!”
Avoiding the second danger, hope, is even more difficult. The worst thing for an unloved child, as Francoise Dolto believed, is not that his parents do not love him, but that they refuse the love that he would like to give them: “I don’t need you, and your love is useless to me.” !” Is it possible to imagine a worse suffering than hearing such a thing from a mother? Worse feeling than the feeling of being worthless?
The narcissistic wound is huge, and in many cases the child survives only because of the hope that someday the mother will change and finally love him. This crazy hope accompanies him all his life, often prevents him from looking for love elsewhere and is revived when his mother grows old: “She needs help, I will help her, and maybe then she will accept my love.”
And then the daughter or son gives, as they always gave, not counting the time, money, care and continue to hope for that gesture, that word, that look that they have always been waiting for. Although time passes, and often with the death of the mother, this hope also comes to an end. We have to come to terms with the fact that the long-awaited meeting will never take place. The thought is terrible, but it often brings liberation. After all, these chains, broken with such pain, can – and many will confirm this – open the doors of life.
About the author: Claude Almos is a psychoanalyst, including a child psychoanalyst, an expert in Psychologies (France), and the author of several books, including Draw Me a Child (Dessine-moi un enfant, Livre de poche, 2015).