RussellSue
Not Active
I found out a couple of days ago that my stepfather just had one kidney, his prostate, and his entire bladder removed due to cancer. He has been sick for over two years, even before we left their area, but he did not want me to know and only gave my mother permission to tell me during our last conversation.
We saw them over the summer as we were moving out of the state, about a year after leaving their county. I asked my mother then if he had cancer because he looked like shit. She said no. I did not know what to think since he was recovering from thyroid surgery. I told myself that was the whole problem. No, I didn’t believe it, but we had two cats and all our shit with us and I figured that if something were really wrong she would have told me before we started heading out of state.
As former gun store owners, my parents live a mile down a desert dirt road in the middle of nowhere and are completely off-grid with wind and solar power and an Onan generator big enough to power a hospital. They live on 60 acres with no nearby neighbors and own more guns than I could fit in my mid-sized car in a half-dozen trips, I am sure. He is a combat veteran and my sister and I have many reasons to believe that my mother has high-functioning autism. They married when I was 15, permanently independent, and living 900 miles away.
My mother has no friends, at all, and never did, though she used to go out in public much more often than she does now. I was her only female companion in the area for a long time. I have never loved their intense isolation and the feelings that they are becoming more antisocial by the day but I have no choice but to accept it. I have hated the fact that my mother’s social anxiety increases and her chance of ever being relaxed around other people is pretty much over and done with after 20-some years sitting on that piece of dirt feeding rodents. She is 64.
She was a waitress in a city when they met, but he wanted this retirement and she was happy to follow along because that is what she has always done with men. She also got to "retire" at 38, I believe it was. In real life, she became his caretaker and their property maintenance person when he became disabled. He is her third husband.
My understanding is that I was not told about his illness because we would have stayed in the area if we had known, though we couldn’t do anything to change it. I get that and it is true -- we would have stayed. I am, nevertheless, feeling pretty damned protective of my mother right now considering that she has been absolutely isolated there and was forbidden to even talk to me -- her only source of support -- about something so serious as facing her husband’s (and my closest thing to a father's) bladder cancer.
I have little doubt that my stepfather has PTSD and at 76 with 20+ years sitting on the same dirt surrounded by guns, he probably does, in many ways, consider me an outsider. Oh, he does love me, but I’m not a representative of their culture and my fear of guns is a sore spot. I feel that he has put my mother in a very unhealthy spot as an isolated and emotionally/mentally differently-abled caregiver and I wonder if he hasn’t reached a level of distrust that is bordering on destroying them both. Neither of them knows I feel this way.
I am nearly 1300 miles away now and have been for a few months. They say they got all the cancer which why I was allowed to be told, but oddly enough, I haven’t been feeling that great about it -- he’s also a diabetic who’s now had a urinary diversion and is operating with only one kidney. In the meantime, my mother appears to be dissociating, as she often does.
Our new plan is to return to the state this summer rather than the summer of 2022, which was our original plan. I would like to at least throw healthy food at their house from the dirt road since my mother isn’t driving to town to shop, anymore. We don’t know if we can do it, but we are going to try.
I am planning a conversation with her today to try and make sense of the situation in the here and now. But I feel I have to be very careful of what I say because I am afraid that if I tell her I resent the position she is in, she will repeat it, and I will get pushed back even further.
I am a member of this site because I am in recovery from complex PTSD (caused largely by my mother's second husband's love of guns). I no longer have an active diagnosis and I am posting in supporter discussion for the first time due to the nature of the situation, though I would be thrilled to hear from anyone -- I know I got lengthy.
Thoughts, advice, observations? I’m still processing and remain in a state of shock.
We saw them over the summer as we were moving out of the state, about a year after leaving their county. I asked my mother then if he had cancer because he looked like shit. She said no. I did not know what to think since he was recovering from thyroid surgery. I told myself that was the whole problem. No, I didn’t believe it, but we had two cats and all our shit with us and I figured that if something were really wrong she would have told me before we started heading out of state.
As former gun store owners, my parents live a mile down a desert dirt road in the middle of nowhere and are completely off-grid with wind and solar power and an Onan generator big enough to power a hospital. They live on 60 acres with no nearby neighbors and own more guns than I could fit in my mid-sized car in a half-dozen trips, I am sure. He is a combat veteran and my sister and I have many reasons to believe that my mother has high-functioning autism. They married when I was 15, permanently independent, and living 900 miles away.
My mother has no friends, at all, and never did, though she used to go out in public much more often than she does now. I was her only female companion in the area for a long time. I have never loved their intense isolation and the feelings that they are becoming more antisocial by the day but I have no choice but to accept it. I have hated the fact that my mother’s social anxiety increases and her chance of ever being relaxed around other people is pretty much over and done with after 20-some years sitting on that piece of dirt feeding rodents. She is 64.
She was a waitress in a city when they met, but he wanted this retirement and she was happy to follow along because that is what she has always done with men. She also got to "retire" at 38, I believe it was. In real life, she became his caretaker and their property maintenance person when he became disabled. He is her third husband.
My understanding is that I was not told about his illness because we would have stayed in the area if we had known, though we couldn’t do anything to change it. I get that and it is true -- we would have stayed. I am, nevertheless, feeling pretty damned protective of my mother right now considering that she has been absolutely isolated there and was forbidden to even talk to me -- her only source of support -- about something so serious as facing her husband’s (and my closest thing to a father's) bladder cancer.
I have little doubt that my stepfather has PTSD and at 76 with 20+ years sitting on the same dirt surrounded by guns, he probably does, in many ways, consider me an outsider. Oh, he does love me, but I’m not a representative of their culture and my fear of guns is a sore spot. I feel that he has put my mother in a very unhealthy spot as an isolated and emotionally/mentally differently-abled caregiver and I wonder if he hasn’t reached a level of distrust that is bordering on destroying them both. Neither of them knows I feel this way.
I am nearly 1300 miles away now and have been for a few months. They say they got all the cancer which why I was allowed to be told, but oddly enough, I haven’t been feeling that great about it -- he’s also a diabetic who’s now had a urinary diversion and is operating with only one kidney. In the meantime, my mother appears to be dissociating, as she often does.
Our new plan is to return to the state this summer rather than the summer of 2022, which was our original plan. I would like to at least throw healthy food at their house from the dirt road since my mother isn’t driving to town to shop, anymore. We don’t know if we can do it, but we are going to try.
I am planning a conversation with her today to try and make sense of the situation in the here and now. But I feel I have to be very careful of what I say because I am afraid that if I tell her I resent the position she is in, she will repeat it, and I will get pushed back even further.
I am a member of this site because I am in recovery from complex PTSD (caused largely by my mother's second husband's love of guns). I no longer have an active diagnosis and I am posting in supporter discussion for the first time due to the nature of the situation, though I would be thrilled to hear from anyone -- I know I got lengthy.
Thoughts, advice, observations? I’m still processing and remain in a state of shock.
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