Dear Rosie:

When I first read your short original post, it crossed my mind that someone is pretending to be me, telling my story. My mother (who is older than yours) also suffers from arthritis (Rheumatoid arthritis) since she was young, in her thirties, I think, and like yours, “she has to walk up stairs to get to her second floor apartment“. Like your mother, my mother had limited options in regard to work, one of which was working in a factory. She refused that option and chose house/ office cleaning instead.

Like you, I felt “weighed down by the problems” of my mother. She told me about her problems and suffering a whole lot and I was heavily weighed down, so much so that I was- as a teenager- exhausted much of the time, lying down a lot, resting from.. doing nothing but carrying the weight of her complaints and her suffering.

“The family that I am from is kind of chaotic“- living with my mother (my father was out of the apartment by the time I was 6, so it was my mother, myself and a much younger sister) was CHAOTIC. Oh, how I wished and longed for calm and quiet.. it feels like it’d be a dream come true, if I could (go back in time ) and have Calm instead of Chaos.

“In the past my ex thought that I would be better off if I separated myself from my family, but that is something that I am not willing to do. I love my family and I want the best for them“-I wanted to separate from my mother since I was a teenager, to be free from the heavy weight that robbed me of LIVING life. I felt too guilty, of course, Guilty with a capital G.

My love for my mother and Guilt kept me imprisoned in a state of .. not really living.

“I wish that I was successful enough to get her a house“- this was exactly my dream: to be able to buy her a house so that she no longer lived in the apartment (on the 2nd floor) which she complained about, and I tried, as an adult, to make this dream come true.

“My younger sister wants to move to Florida and has had this dream for the past three years…  I also wish I could help her get to Florida… and I’m worried that if I do help her she will start to talk to her ex again“- her ex lives in Florida?

“A part of me wants to help my mom get a car, but a part of me doesn’t want to because I feel like she needs to take care of her own problems. My younger sister…  I feel like she also needs to solve her own problems“- is there a history of your mother and your younger sister expressing to you that they expect you to solve their problems, or is it something that they didn’t express, but you feel to be your role in the family (their problems solver)?

In my case, all those years that I thought that my mother expected me to solve her problems,  I was mistaken. She didn’t value me enough to perceive me as a problem solver. I only imagined that she did.

anita