Dear members and Contributors,
I am new here and dealing with a very unique, unorthodox, unimaginable, perplexing set of circumstances.
My name is Mark and I am from Seattle currently in the north end and have been for some years since high school, which will ironically come into play later in my story. Since 2010 I have been caring for my mother with stage 4 terminal cancer Mantle Cell Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. Prior to that I was also greatly assisting her due to other health related issues since about four years before. So yes, since 2006 I have been helping her in some capacity or another, as she is a larger person and was very unsteady, falling all the time smacking her head, broke her nose and several teeth as well as her back ALL three incidences at separate times mind you. Hitting her head falling on the sidewalk was in 2006, her nose and face in 2010 right after the cancer diagnosis and fracturing and breaking several vertebrae/bones in her back happened March of this year 2016.
It has been an uphill battle and in the beginning with her poor health and starting chemo and what it was doing to her - I was already preparing myself to lose my mother and yet because I have been so loyal to standing by here through everything medically that has happened to her the last ten years, plus the things I have done for her daily as her caregiver I know she wouldn't be here if it weren't for me. I get all the groceries since she can barely walk and her meds as there isn't much to speak of with our relatives that have not offered and aren't willing to help in any way. I have also taken a lot of verbal abuse from her myself as she is not a very warm or caring person and has no depth or compassion for others. She was somewhat when I was a kid but since she has gotten older and sicker, and can't get down stairs very well and go out and enjoy life anymore she has just become very selfish and cold. And it's all about thinking that everything should be about doing whatever to keep her alive and nothing else matters! Not even me or my health and wanting a family of my own. I know I gave too much and should have walked away from this a long time ago, so she wouldn't be able to keep this up pushing the envelope taking me for granted. I have been told this many times and to set boundaries, and have done all that I can but once things reach a certain point it's hard to turn things around.
I met a beautiful woman a year before all this happened or began in 2009 and she was a professional caregiver in Eastern Wa. in a care facility. She helped me greatly with her and went out of her way to be an aid to me in caring for my mother, but my mom even when sick and battling cancer can be so ungrateful & nasty and resentful and that's how she was towards my girlfriend at the time. My mom went back and forth from being sweet and kind one minute to gossiping and backstabbing about my ex and her kids the next, because she wanted to be in control of everything and since she couldn't would say all kinds of mean, terrible things just out of spite. My ex and her clashed a lot and my mom's whole side of the family is pretty messed up, and this woman I was dating at the time after six years walked out of my life last year because of all this in 2015. I loved this woman with my whole being and prayed for her to come into MY LIFE for over 20 years, and then I finally see her on a dating site and it was totally magical and this is what happens and how it ends !???
Then after months of wandering around every day in the cold and rain last fall and winter trying to sort all this out grieving my lost relationship because of family interference, just wanting to scream, but my health has already suffered enough from getting angry over this so I just held it all in for all long as I could until I would have a complete breakdown/meltdown right in the middle of the grocery store and then crying letting it all out! (yet the pain never went away because this wasn't right and didn't make any sense) ..... I decided to reach out to an old girlfriend from high school that I dumped almost 30 years ago. She has two girls one adult that was heavily into drugs and then a nine year old. It's been a year and her daughters especially the youngest will not give me any kind of chance and doesn't want me dating her mom again period! She throws tantrums and causes scenes every time we have been in a public place or on the way going in the car. My ex from high school and I still were trying to make a little time at least a couple times a week to hang out and talk, and even more when the girls went to visit their father's in Alaska and Oregon. We went to lots of movies and cuddled and played card games and it was really nice reconnecting.
Just recently within the last 5 weeks however a close childhood friend of hers died of breast cancer that I think had spread. Now as you guessed she isn't texting/calling anything anymore and she just lives a few houses down and over, in the same house she grew up in with her parents til she gets situated enough to get her own place. She has been back for two years now after a 14 year stay in Alaska where she met her youngest daughter's father.
This time back in my life earlier this year she has said now that I found her again that "she wasn't going anywhere and I wasn't getting rid of her again!" :-) But I haven't been allowed to see her in two months even a month prior to the death of her friend and even then wasn't seeming like herself on my birthday. She also has HSV1 and 2 oral and genital herpes from someone she was with in her twenties. I'm wondering if the stress from loosing her friend has caused an outbreak that she isn't telling me about, though we have not shared in any intimacy in the last year from when we started dating again and at that time is when she did tell me that she had the STD. I don't have any and am choosing to keep it that way.
I'm just trying to figure all this out the best I can and make sense of it all, while feeling sick and having pains in my stomach every day after all that has happened! there are bits and pieces more to the story yet that is the jist of it.