Hungry Vanity

The Devil sculpture in the Tarot Garden of Niki de Saint Phalle in Italy

When I was a kid, growing up under the cruel indifferences and compensatory faux caring of a mother diagnosed with manic depression, her common dismissal and put-down of anybody (mostly me), anybody whom she perceived to not be gifted with the superior intelligence that she had in abundance; was to hiss-strike:  You know nothing!

It has taken me some twenty years to uncover just what a parochial short-sighted narrow-minded dumb ignorant small-town white-trash country hick my (thankfully) now dead mother was, and to map the co-ordinates of the mirror-world of denial and self-delusion that she preferred to inhabit.  It took a great deal of inner work on my part to cross the borders of that fantastical reflective world and to blow it off the topographical contours in my psyche.

I speak metaphorically, symbolically, mythopoetically because, frankly, any other language is not up to the task. In poker parlance, mundane language doesn't hold the nuts.

I managed to crack the nut that my mother was through examining the society and culture of her times, a process facilitated by pondering over astrological cycles and the recorded facts of history, shuttling back-and-forth through known genealogical lines, and allowing time to pass.  It has perhaps taken me 50 years to realize, to self-realize, that while I walked in the world of my batshit crazy mother; I was not of her world.  Having reclaimed my true citizenship, it became less treacherous to walk away from the mothershit.  That only took a nano-second.

In the late-Eighties, my mother had been the focus of an eminent body of specialists after her first cataract surgery went pear-shaped.  Her case now being a footnote in ophthalmic history. My concerns were more pragmatic and centered on the reality of the medical malpractice. I was very alert to the creeping freakshow vibe of an esteemed professional medical entity that was holding out a carrot-on-a-stick ~ 15 minutes of fame ~  to my mother.  This tasty treat had mother fizzing with self-importance and bubble-boasting to all and sundry about the "rarity of the surgical complication". 

She crowed that Very Distinguished and Important Doctors - not doctors - Misters, said she was special and would like to have her attend an Extraordinary Gathering so they could discuss her case.  Not being able to dissuade mother from her vainglorious path, I made sure that the Extraordinary Gentlemen covered all her costs - transportation to-and-from the venue with a restaurant lunch - or no show.

 

They did not expect this gullible sixtysomething widowed housewife from a working-class poor suburb to have a daughter who was a Medico-Legal Secretary and wise to the subtle nuances of these medical muck-up sideshows.  The Esteemed Company of Uh-Oh ensured that mother signed a contract that stripped her of the right to lodge a malpractice suit. She signed that document without reading it.

But mother didn't care about the fact that she now legally blind in one eye, that if the opthalmic surgeon had not deceived her and covered up his tracks for six months, that she could have had timely corrective surgery, and not lost as much vision.  The treachery of the first doctor was only uncovered after I took mother to another opthalmologist for a second opinion.  That doctor quickly judged the lay of the land and the fraternity of eye-doctors closed ranks to protect one of their own.

I had a series of discussions with mother, trying in vain, to raise her awareness of the issues. Attempting to blast though her obtuseness and know-it-all-ness and to give her a sense of how she was being lab-ratted by these specialists. That they were no different to the psychiatrists who performed experiments on her when she was resident at Royal Park and Larundel.

"No. No. You're wrong. You're wrong. You know nothing!  Don't interfere.  I know what I'm doing. Don't upset the doctors....you don't want to upset the doctors.  You know nothing!"

This was the point at which I considered getting legal guidance myself as to the processes I would need to follow to have mother declared mentally incompetent and be awarded guardianship.  It had been obvious for some years that her capacity to make appropriate choices was becoming more and more impaired.  Yet her siblings and friends were maintaining a stonewall of denial; not really wanting to look at issues of mental incompetency in a woman who had been a proxy-mother to them.

The irony of the quote, the one-eyed man in the valley of the blind is king, fits hand-in-glove as to the dynamics I observed my mother had with her....fans.

Mother kept me distracted on a daily basis with the consistency of her dramas and the constancy of feeling angry, frustrated, upset, mad on her behalf - me acting as the container for those traits she had exiled out of her fifedom of mirros.  In the Eighties,  I was adequately FOG-befuddled to not realize that if I had cared less about being villified as the classic 'bad daughter, terrible person', that the attainment of a Guardianship order would have safeguarded my future.  Simply: I would have had control over my physical and psychological welfare, present and future. My mother was then, and had always been, the sole threat on my safety and wellbeing.  I had the chance to take that power away from her. I stumbled in doing so because I had been sufficiently duped to believe that the worst thing I could be called was : a bad daughter.  To be seen as a money-grubber.

Perhaps it was vanity that stayed my hand.  Perhaps I just wasn't skilled enough then, as a shaman, to know how to take out the mother-knows-best propaganda and to permanently disable the radio station. 

Mother dined out on her 15 minutes of fame for years.   I think she tried to get a copy of the Very Serious Medical Journal in which her case appeared.  One of the Misters said that he would send her a copy of the paper although he never did: a narcissistic insult that mother whined about when she had stopped whining about everything else.

Vanity is said to be an important indicative in bipolar disorder: the excessive belief in one's own abilities or attractiveness to others.

Aren't we all full of ourselves in one way or another?  And where does blogging sit on this slithering scale what They consider to be excessive, moderate or sparse when it comes to the pathologizing of vanity.....