Tags
Attention, Daughters, Depression, Family, Friends, Jelousy, Mothers, Selfihness, Sisters, Suicide
‘Invisible to my mother’ my friend kept repeating over and over.
All her life, she had to be in the shadow of her sister, her brothers and eventually her nephews and nieces.
After all these years, and now that her morther is on the verge of the onset of senility, she still wants acknoledgement.
It has driven her to bouts of depression, suicide and delusional tendencies.
What makes a daughter want that approval, or attention way past her childhood?
Some substitute with religion by becoming a nun. Some get married and married until they find that missing ingridient and some stay single and pray on their family for attention.
She’s the one that at birthday parties, not hers, wants everyone to read the card she gives outloud or make sure everyone knows where and how much she spent on the present. On holidays she socializes by telling her woes to visiting friends and relatives, or just wants to dominate the conversation with her art, her sewing, her new adventure to the mall.
After a while, even her family stops to invite her, lie to her when they have parties and eventually even stop talking to her.
The only link now is the parents, mostly the mother. And if the mother is more like her daughter, there are conflicts and indifference.
Now she turns to her friends. She tells them her tales of woes and pain, soon she actually believes it. When the friend helps to advise and tries to have her meet her family and mother half way, she resents you, she hangs up and she goes to a hospital on suicide watch.
Guilt sets in at first for everyone. She makes sure there is a designated caller to inform everyone of her hospital stay.
At first everyone rushes to support her, after 10 years of these attempts, no one visits. Then, she uses these hospital stays for making new friends with her roomates and fellow group.
After all said and done, she comes home and she calls everyone she thinks slighted her, and informs them on lenghty phone calls, all about her new friends and the new parties she is planning now she is home and better.
About mom? For now she’s out of the picture somewhere in Florida.