Irritable Bowel Syndrome Message Boards | long post about family issues...

Will (hubby) and I are planning on spending time with both our families over Christmas. However, like some of the rest of you who are getting ready to see your families, this may not necessarily be something to look forward to. Don't get me wrong � I love Christmas and there are certain people in my family that I enjoy spending time with, however there is one key relationship that is particularly twisted in my family that tends to cause problems for me and is making me particularly dread the days next week that I will spend with my family in Pennsylvania.
I don't know how much I've posted here before about my mom, but I don't think I've gone into a lot of detail. Will and I have been talking about this more recently since I've been getting ready to go up there. My mom is needy to the point of being neurotic and to the point of harmfulness to herself and her children. I'm not exaggerating. She has a need for affirmation of the fact that she is devoted to her family and her children and that she is holding us all together and if it weren't for her devotion to us then all of us would be consumed by overwhelming problems. She has to feel like she is the one who saves us (meaning me and my sister mostly) from those problems and everyone must know that without her we never would have overcome said problems.
So where does this put me in dynamics with her? Well, I've come to realize that my mom is a more fulfilled person when I am struggling with some sort of mental, physical or emotional problem where she can view herself as "saving" me and therefore showing everyone how devoted she is to her family. It's nice when you have parents who care for you and some people may think I shouldn't be whining about it, but I feel like this manifestation is not the way it's supposed to work. On the emotional side of things, before I started dating my husband, my mom encouraged me to stay in crappy relationships because the problems they caused in my life were problems that she could then "save" me from by being the constant supporter and the one to pray for me. Will is the perfect husband. I truly can't imagine anyone better for me and I am 100% a better person with him in my life. My mother was visably disappointed when we got engaged and hated him for the first three years we were married.
Now comes the physical manifestations and sometimes this is even more twisted. My mother waits for me to be sick so that she can take care of me. There have been times in my life she has kept me sick. When I was four years old I broke both arms. My mom would only let the doctors set one of them and insisted the break in the right arm was not bad enough to require casting and it would heal on its own. I have permanent damage to the bones in my wrist from that incident. When I was in 3rd grade I got two strains of the flu at once. My mother refused to take me to the hospital. Finally, my father, with my mom yelling at him to put me back on the sofa, scooped me up and drove me to the hospital himself � when my temperature had reached 106! It spiked at 107.1 before the doctors got it to drop. I could have died. I have permanent problems with depth perception because of minor brain damage that happened that night from the fever. When I was 19, I got a UTI while I was at the beach and went to a clinic on my own and got a prescription for bactrum. One day later the clinic called and said my infection was resistant and I needed a different antibiotic. My mother would not let me go to the pharmacy to get it. She literally took away my car keys and insisted that I would be fine if only I drank enough cranberry juice. The infection went to my kidneys and five days later, again I had a fever over 104 and ended up spending 3 days in the hospital on an IV. I could go on with this. I was up with Will last night and counted at least 16 experiences in the past 25 or so years of my life that I remember in which my mother has caused or aggravated a physical condition in order to make me more reliant upon her.
I'm seeing the pattern more clearly now that I really do have a chronic illness and honestly, and sadly, my mother thrives on it! She has tried several times to convince me to stop taking my medicine. Will has noticed that every time I spend time with her she consistently redirects the topic of conversation back to how sick I am so that she can again talk about ways that she wants to take of me or make things better some how. She has put echicnacea in tea that I drink, knowing full well that it subverts the purposes of the immunosuppressant drugs that my doctor has prescribed and that I am not supposed to take any substance that could boost my immune system. She discourages me from seeing my doctors when I am sick, insisting instead that she wants to come to visit me and take care of me � I let her do it once and I count that in my 16 times of mom aggravating an illness since it landed me much worse off than when she arrived.
With me and Will talking about this pattern and with me getting ready to go visit my family, I'm dreading the whole experience. I know this post has gotten painfully long, but I guess I'm just wanted advice on how I should deal with this. Since I've identified this pattern more in the last few years I've been trying not to tell my mom much about my health issues and just pretend like things are fine, even when they're not, in order to avoid feeding into her issues. But that's not easy � she's done her best for as long as I can remember to push me to no end to talk about how sick I am or how I have whatever problem that's ruining my life. So I guess I'm looking for advice, both on how to react and how to cope. To anyone who can offer it, thanks for your advice and thanks for wading through this overly long note!
wondering and worrying like always...
Min

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