Boundaries

I emailed my parents today and told them the Antarctica trip was "too long" of a trip to take during the school year. Who knows if they'll buy it – who cares. I read and reread the last post about 100 times and we both came to the realization that we'd be idiots to lock ourselves on a boat with them for 14 days.  We'll pick another destination I told them… I'm not sure if I believe that. Frankly, the toll that visit took on me was astounding. I came back so depleted that I wound up getting an incredibly bad cold that I'm still not over.  Maybe it's turned into pneumonia or asthma or just simply got my chronic fatigue so flared up that I feel sick all of the time. But as I told my self and this blog a few months ago: taking care of them does not work and only makes me sicker. Occasionally I should listen to myself…

So the new rule will be this: I will never, ever, agree to spend any time with them while I am in their presence. Clearly I get too dysregulated to make good decisions. I will make up some excuse about needing to check with work or something but I will never commit until I am home and in my right mind. There probably should be other rules, but for now this is the easiest one I can think of and that's the most likely to be able to implement.

I cannot control them, but I can control my own actions. And it's becoming ever increasingly clear that I must control decisions around my health. I feel like this post should have some sort of big mic drop at the end but honestly… The whole thing is just sad.

Fool me once

This is going to be a bit… scattered. I’m trying to work out what the hell happened this weekend so I can see if I can make sure it never happens again.

So back to Christmas. (Yes, sorry, the saga goes that far back) We visited my parents at their house and it was not a great visit. My husband got a terrible stomach bug, which meant that some of the diversions I’d scheduled didn’t pan out. Most disturbingly, my parents’ didn’t really seem to appreciate that my husband was incredibly sick and just could not do certain things. I could tell that they were frustrated by his lack of energy and how limited our activities became. I wound up spending a huge amount of time worrying about everyone. On the last night they’d scheduled a dinner party with friends of theirs – even though my husband had barely eaten in a week and was weak as a kitten. It was one of the more thoughtless things they’ve done in quite a while and I seethed the whole night. Afterwards, with a major snowstorm barreling down on us, we drove to the airport where we stayed overnight so we wouldn’t miss our flight. My father complained and chided us for taking our rental car to the dinner party. As I drove through the terrible storm with my very sick husband next to me, I wondered if we should ever visit them again.

However. Since we’d had all this down time, my parents became obsessed with planning our “annual family ski trip.” Their main criteria were that we commit to plans ASAP and that we find a location that could accommodate their dog. My husband and I grudgingly agreed to a time and place – though both of us felt bullied into it. But what could we say? No, we’re not going skiing with you because we don’t like you? All the excuses are too implausible or too harsh. And on some level we like skiing but we always approach these trips with such trepidation – especially since it usually means that we’re taking almost half our vacation days with my parents. Finally, when they insisted I choose plane flights on the spot I had a meltdown. I told them that I was far too overwhelmed to make a decision on how we’d fly to this pretty inaccessible location. I couldn’t even consult my husband since he was too sick at that point. I promised I’d take care of it as soon as we got home and things had quieted down. And of course, when I did book the flights I was so distracted and upset I still wound up making costly errors.

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So fast forward to February and we make the incredibly long & complicated trek out to the mountain they’d chosen. But the entire trip, I just kept thinking about how my husband and I would finally have a few days out of our busy schedule to spend together, doing something we loved. But when we arrived, dead tired, we were informed that they’d decided (since this was a school vacation week) the mountain was too crowded. To remedy the problem, they’d hired a private ski instructor to take us around for 2 of our three days. All dreams of spending time alone vanished. We’d be with them – and more importantly, living by their dictates – the entire time. I seethed. The ski instructor was a nice enough guy but by that point I’d shut down. Seeing me so upset, my husband shut down as well. We’d taken off the better part of week for this trip, spent a fair amount of money, and we were having a terrible time. On the last night as my father criticized me for mentioning my Chronic Fatigue diagnosis, I wondered if we should ever visit them again.

And unlike other visits, this time I had data. For Christmas, my husband had bought me a heart rate monitor. One of the symptoms of Chronic Fatigue is a racing pulse and it’s been helpful for me to keep track of what sets it off. Well, during that brief visit, my resting pulse shot up to unhealthy levels.

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By March, I’d decided that I wasn’t bringing up any future trips – we’d just let things lie. But of course, my dad couldn’t have that. One night on the phone, he informed me that he and my mother were signing up for an extended cruise in December. Despite promising to celebrate Christmas at our house for the first time ever, he went back on his word. Insulted and frankly incensed, I decided to draw a hard line in the sand. They were still welcome but we were staying at our house regardless of what they did. They could not bring their dog and the day after the holiday we were going to go on a trip by ourselves somewhere we’d enjoy. Although my husband said my email wound up coming off as business-like, I tried to soften what I knew would be a blow: “If you'd like to plan another time to get together you are always welcome here. We could also come to your house this summer to celebrate your 70^th birthdays in person if that would interest you.”

They finally relented, agreed to come for a few days at the holidays after their December cruise and said, of course they wanted us to come visit for Labor Day weekend. I felt like I’d stood up for myself but I also worried that I’d played on their fears of losing contact with us to my advantage. I try to take the high ground whenever we interact because otherwise, I find that I can all too easily stoop to their (childish) level. And then I end up feeling even worse about myself.

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So as you may have noticed, yesterday was Labor Day. And we flew out for the weekend and it was awful. (I know, you’re shocked.) We’ve had a hell of a summer. For a short time this spring we were worried that I had ovarian cancer. (I don’t – I just need a hysterectomy.) One of my students was diagnosed with a rare, terminal cancer. Our friend DIED from a rare, terminal cancer. My husband had a strange health problem that caused him daily pain for reasons that remain a mystery. And then on Thursday, one of my husband’s students was diagnosed with a rare, terminal cancer. We’ve been running on fumes, dreading this trip to my parents’ house and now we were leaving completely shell-shocked. The trip was doomed to failure.

Still, we tried to be patient with my parents and do whatever made them happy but our frustration tolerance was incredibly limited. I immediately ran a 100 degree fever, developed a blinding headache and my resting pulse shot up by 10 points overnight. Finally, Sunday night, my husband and my dad got into it over politics, which led to a particularly heated argument. I knew my husband wasn’t actually THAT mad – he was just exhausted and upset. (And in his defense, my father was saying horribly racist statements.) But my parents couldn’t read any of this and my mom got very judgmental. “Don’t lecture me,” she said as my husband tried to calm her down after the storm had blown over. Hurt, tired and confused, my husband gave up and, then after my father begged us to pretend that all was well so my mom wouldn’t yell at him for weeks, we filled the remaining few hours of the trip with stony platitudes. Leaving for the airport yesterday, my husband offered an olive branch and said he was sorry to have lost his temper – that he’d just been overwhelmed lately. My mother barely acknowledged his statement. “Well it’s all over now, right?” She said. No mom. No, it’s not.

And of course it’s not over. Because as a present for getting tenure, my parents gave my husband a present with so many strings attached it’s kind of hilarious. They offered to pay for a family trip for the four of us wherever he wanted to go in the world. He’s dreamed of going to Antarctica since he was little and we’ve been eyeing a great trip we’d planned to go on when he turned 50. We’d have to save up a bit but it we could afford it by then. But then, hearing my parents’ offer, we – stupidly – jumped at the chance. We got all excited about the idea and started looking up dates and facts about penguins. And then the fight happened and as we drove to the airport yesterday, bleary-eyed from a fitful night’s sleep, I wondered for the 1 millionth time: should ever visit them again?