is it right for me?
my mother got sick with covid in february 2022. time flies so fast when you're in the middle of a pandemic! we'd spent most of 2020 and 2021 in isolation and thought ourselves safe from the virus... until my uncle got the bright idea of moving in with us and refusing to follow any protocol to ensure we wouldn't get sick. well! she got sick almost a month after he moved in.
she was fine after two weeks. none of us anticipated her developing long covid until around april, when she began to experience bizarre issues with her stomach. it was a two week long spell of constipation, followed by her blood pressure spiking to near-death levels that eventually prompted us to get her to see a doctor. she was put on meds, and we all thought she'd be fine. come june, she wakes up to find she's lost sight in one eye. she goes three days without letting us know, thinking it'd be back, and by the third day, she was in emergency, being told she had some obstruction in her heart. my mother, being the type of person she was, chose to forego any additional treatment, and that's when her health REALLY began to decline. by the end of june, she was struggling to communicate properly. she began to experience difficulty controlling the right side of her body. she developed brain fog, struggling to finish sentences or saying something while meaning something else.
it was a great time, then, for my aunt to pressure my mom and uncle into selling the house. the new owners wanted us out months earlier than anticipated, and we end up purchasing a house by october. her health drastically declined even moreso by then, and i suspect she had a stroke sometime in early august, when she was in the middle of a call with someone. we moved in by october, her health seemed steady, all seemed well. then comes july 2023, when we experience one of the hottest summers on record. her symptoms manifest again, except this time, she struggles to breathe. it hurts to breathe. she loses energy in the middle of a conversation. she loses nearly 30 pounds. her feet start to swell, a sign of water retention and skyrocketing blood pressure. we have to drag her to the hospital in order to save her - she would have likely died in a matter of days if she hadn't.
she's there for two weeks, and it feels strange to say i was somewhat calm about it all. you see, in the time all of this was happening, she decided that everything bad happening to her was my fault. it didn't matter if i was busy with work, or doing chores, or what have you. everything was bad, and i was the cause of it. suddenly i wasn't cooking correctly, because she used to cook one way, and i was taught to cook another. i wasn't scrubbing the floors well, because she did it one way and i did it the other. i wasn't watering the yard right, i wasn't picking the right movies, i wasn't working hard enough, i wasn't feeding the cat enough. nothing was ever right, and she made it known by screaming it at me. throwing it at me. whatever she could get her hands on. we've lost nearly a dozen plates and gone through twelve glasses before i decided to put them all up far too high for her to reach. i had perfectly good excuses for all the cuts and bruises that suddenly appeared on me.
it was whatever. she's back on her meds, and is gaining the weight she lost. we struggled financially because i ended up losing my job due to taking her to various appointments, and those appointments ate up almost all my savings. i had to sell most of my expensive items, sell my car, scrounge around, eat less and drink less, and eventually found a well paying job to support us. she's looking into benefits, and hopefully, she can get them.
so i guess the point of this title is - is it right for me to resent? my mother's sickness, her abuse, all it cost me? i don't know. everyone expects me to grin and bear it, that daughters are meant for this kind of thing. i was used to sacrificing a lot in my childhood and teenage years. it seems it's a curse following me down to adulthood. i don't know.