My relationship with mum now

This is a container about how my relationship with mum has changed since being traumatised by her son and his allies. 

My relationship with mum now is nothing like what it was when she lived here, when she lived, briefly, in her house with carers or before dad died.

I used to see mum all the time, every week at least, often several times a week. For years, my parents ate here regularly, or dropped in for a drink, or a cup of tea.  Occasionally we ate there.  Increasingly, I took food there to relieve the burden on dad as mum's ageing carer.  I took them out, for walks often. Then I took mum out, for walks, to gardens, concerts, to places I thought she'd have fun.   

I am now too afraid to spend time with mum as I would otherwise choose. I am unable to take her for days out and activities as previously.

I am also too afraid to use mum’s money to take her out, even though I had Power of Attorney until last month and even though she is, despite the thousands disappearing into the Pigfamily bank account, very comfortably off. Meanwhile, I saw on the bank statements that Pigface regales his obese self at restaurants, apparently also with similarly obese Pigwife at mum's expense and sends himself large sums in "expenses" while mum is in full time care. 

When mum lived with me, for months I was terrified of spending her money.  Pigfaces's accusations and intimidations had made me a shell of my previous self.  So we didn't pay ourselves initially for her food, and of course not rent or care.  We used to go to church soup lunches where they only wanted £5 for both of us. It was OK, we ended up going to their services because mum liked to go to church each Sunday - a lifelong practice that has also been taken away from her.  

Those church lunch trips meant mum could go out, perhaps between a morning and afternoon activity with me, but spend next to none of her money and I wouldn't be accused. She didn't like sitting with what is euphemistically and unsubtly called in Scotland the "poor souls": people in poverty, on benefits, with drug and mental health problems who made up the majority of attendees at these city centre lunches.

But going there was better than going nowhere and she got exercise on the walks to the various venues but I could tell she would much rather be in a restaurant. Mum had a good, very middle class life with dad. They ate out, went to concerts, talks, dad played golf.  They met friends for sherry or gin and tonic once a week.  I did take her to concerts because as her carer, my place was free. 

After Pigface and Social Services locked mum up in the second Rothouse, I wanted to take mum to her house for privacy, familiarity and comfort and to get some pictures from there to put up in her Rothouse room that the supposedly devoted son hadn't bothered to do, busy feathering his own nest with them instead. But we never did because I knew taking mum to her own house, even for a visit, would be against his "policy" because my husband had seen my uncle and aunt, who were allied with him, at mum's house and they had told him they didn't want to "distress" mum by brining her there.  

In any case, I have long been too afraid to go to mum's house because of trauma memories associated with the cameras Pigface installed and being mocked, manipulated and abused there. After sorting through mum's clothes, shoes, and bathroom, I almost never went there, realising Pigface was spying on us via an alarm on his phone that activated on his phone as soon as the door opened.  

Now I see mum about once a month. We planned to see her every two weeks, but it is too emotionally draining on me and therefore on my husband to put ourselves through that more often.

He has permanently damaged my relationship with mum

I realised that even if I could take mum on a trip, I probably don't even have the right anymore, having renounced power of attorney last month to escape Pigface. If I wanted to I would probably have to seek permission from him, just as he always wanted. He knows I'd never do that, thus, he still constrains my current relationship with mum. 

 It's more than that though. He has polluted what we had. If mum and my relationship were a clear pool in a quiet place, with laughter, fun and care, it's as though he's come there, stamped over the flowers, taken a great shit in the water, laughed and walked off. So now the weather is permanently overcast, the whole place mostly shrivelled, barren, with no colour in it as though some great evil has come over that land and poisoned it. 

This is partly because of the invented accusations from Pigface, which is consistent with his behaviour over the last two years. Because of those accusations, even though nothing "beyond" losing mum, was done specifically to me, those accusations and the confirmation of them in effectively forcing us to give up mum trammelled and killed really our previously free and easy relationship. Now I see myself as a person not who harms mum but a person accused  by the State of doing so, due to his lies and manipulations and I am therefore always in danger of being harmed by him and by the State.  I am exactly where they want me and where all authoritarian regimens and individuals want people: squashed and terrified. Too afraid to oppose, too afraid to be a threat. 

When I see mum, I get upset if she mentions the past, or the future, because it has been so sullied. Then I get afraid of getting upset in case they find out and say my getting upset is harming mum.  I can see how easily it could start to  tip into paranoia if I am not careful:  what if they put a recording device on mum to see what we are saying?  But that's not paranoia, that's a legitimate reaction to sustained coercion, control and surveillance.  

Pigface did put me under surveillance: by using cameras to scare and manipulate me at mum's house, by reading the messages I sent mum, confiscating the cards and gifts I sent, eavesdropping on and ambushing mum's phone calls to me, sending proxies he had manipulated to my house or to demand interviews with mum that I tried to arrange and then was still accused, in at least once case, of witholding access despite having done the very opposite. Social services kept trying to come round and check on mum, despite having seen her visibly happy, content, and comfortable and spoken on the phone numerous times to her and having heard her and seen her speak her happiness with us. Constant monitoring, constantly jumping through all the right hoops and still being disbelieved through manipulation of a third party will eventually cause paranoia. 

Nowadays mum and I stay in this blighted present.  I try to make it as enjoyable as I am able. I bring my family. I bring roses in the summer through the autumn.  In the winter I bring photographs, often of things we did with dad although that's probably "against Pigface policy" too. But mum loves seeing photos of dad, or hearing my recordings of him. 

  We went through a sequence taken on a walk I took them on a few years ago.  Dad must have had a dozen different expressions and she could recognised, identify and laugh at them all.  Those few moments were just like old times. You wouldn't have known mum was terminally ill, or that we were sheltering in a crater made from our love, in a dead, bombed out, songless landscape. It was as though for just those few minutes, a ray of sunlight shone on the two of us and I could forget where we really were: in an over-expensive pub with arrogant staff a few minutes away from the prison she had been put in, overseen by uncaring, arrogant staff, put there by a monster and the faceless bureaucrats abetting him.      

I know that mum loves me and I love her. But third party harm means it can't be expressed as it was.

There is no way I can go to mum's funeral when the time comes, because Pigface will commandeer that, the way he now commandeers her Christmas, birthdays, mothers days and I couldn't go near any of Pigfamily ever again. I was relieved to hear today though about alternative or Quaker style funerals where people just sit in a circle and say what they remember about the person, maybe they play music or do other personal things to remember the person. So perhaps there is that option for us.  Or maybe my kids will go, though I doubt it. Maybe it will just be my husband and me.  Maybe it will just be me.

I was reminded also about practising non-attachment. Attachment due to care and especially from the hyper-responsibility that I suffer from, largely because of the way my parents brought me up, is responsible for all my suffering of the last two years. Perhaps I should be thinking that mum isn't just "my mum". Mum is primarily her own person first and foremost even though she would define herself in large part through her attachments to people, which makes it hard to practice non-attachment. One thing I know for sure is that mum wouldn't have wanted me to suffer the way I have suffered and she certainly wouldn't allow herself to suffer to anything like that extent.