Okay it looks like I can post now.
I'm going a bit crazy. My father is high-achieving in his field and his career has dominated our entire lives, closely followed by the needs of my mother and brother, both of whom have been chronically unwell for decades. I'm now beginning to think Aspergers may play a large role in my father's personality as he meets all the diagnostic criteria.
I'm a single mother of a 10 yo and my father has basically espoused me in all but the Biblical sense. We live in a separate house a few suburbs away which he largely owns, although I have a small mortgage on it too, so I can't just move somewhere else and rent. Since my son was born we have gone over to my parents' house every week for Sunday lunch. Around 5 years ago he started employing me part time in a notional capacity through a small private company he owns. His response to my deepening need to find a career of my own has now been to offer to employ me on a much higher rate of pay to do light duties as required, but there really isn't any work to be done. It isn't a real job. So he's in charge of my housing and my 'job', and family lunches form the major social commitment of our lives. We turn up when they want us to, and we go away the rest of the time. There is little or no sense of any of them being there to meet our social or emotional needs or need for practical assistance, such as childcare.
All this confuses me immensely. I believe my father's thinking is that he wants me around to help care for my mother and brother, so that if they're ill it won't interfere with his work. Last November he was overseas when my mother became so critically ill that she almost died, at a time when I had exams for the course I was trying to get through (which he'd commissioned me to do); my son had been ill that year, my brother also needed intermittent help, and I was dealing also with my son's end of year break-up activities. I was on the phone to my father trying to sort out medical issues and fees and costs for nursing agencies when I realised that my mother would in fact have to die before anything would bring him back from a business trip - by which time of course, there wouldn't be much point in returning. A funeral can always wait a little while. So I found this pretty distressing. I found myself in floods of tears in my lecturer's office withdrawing from my course for the second time, and I haven't gone back to study since. My son and I spent the summer holidays looking for a nursing home for my now disabled mother, which wasn't much fun for my boy.
I'm so enmeshed in and financially dependent on this situation that I don't know where to begin to separating from it. My dad has made it clear that once he retires, the same money won't be available and my son and I will probably have to move in with him - as if he thinks this would be a workable situation with my sick brother in the same household. Not only do I have no support in trying to get out into the workforce once more, but I feel I either have to work against them, or try to gain qualifications and experience in secret. He has long encouraged me to view my future inheritance as the source of my financial security in old age, but my mother and brother will also be needing that money; as will my son. It makes no sense to keep me out of the workforce, and even less to ask me to view their deaths as the key to my independence and financial well-being. It's all starting to feel quite icky and rather weird and anxiety provoking. I just feel completely swamped.
My son and I are very lonely in this situation. My mother has never been able to get up the steps to our house, so we've never able to host family gatherings in our own home. I asked him years ago if we would could change our housing to something more appropriate, but he has not been willing to put any time into it. I asked years ago if we could do something, just sometimes, that varied from the formulaic Sunday lunches, but it falls on deaf ears. We function only as a satellite to them, and our significance is defined only in terms of how well we fit into their schematic paradigm. It just isn't enough, so my son is already seeing a psychologist for anger problems. I don't know that an Aspie forum is the right place to be posting this, but does anyone have any suggestions?
08 Jan 2013, 8:47 pm
