are you there, God? It's me, Stephanie. (Haha, tongue in cheek.)
I have a parent in the city, and I"m parenting him. Yesterday I came down with a nasty stomach flu, and he arrived here this morning with two soup at hands, two mr noodles bowls, one package of lipton's noodles, and four microwaveable soup bowls, as well as two huge bottles of ginger ale.
While I did ask him to bring me soup and gingerale, and told him I'd pay him back for it, I was unprepared for the sheer overabundance of soups- it sounds harmless, but the kind of breathless urgency with which he gave them to me set off major warning bells. It felt like a tick- is one more soup enough? Better get one of these. Is this enough? Better get one of these, too.
It's especially worrisome given that he's recently declared bankruptcy, so uncontrolleable shop/spend patterns aren't something he can handle right now- and I did pay him back for the thirty dollars worth of groceries he unexpectedly delivered, but what if he does this all the time? Can I do anything about it? I'm his nineteen year old daughter, not his mother. Furthermore, I'm vomiting whenever I even smell food. If I believed in immaculate conception I'd say it was morning sickness. I threw up just from taking the elevator down to get said soup from him. I'm not up for dealing with this, either emotionally or physically. I don't even know for sure there's anything to deal with.
I guess it isn't unexpected. We had all been really thrilled about the change in his behaviour, recently- finally on the right dose of medication, depression dealt with, starting to look at getting a job. This is just the beginning phase of the 'manic' in manic depressive. The only thing I can actually do is keep watching.
He has a brother in the city, but he isn't really helping at all. In some ways he's even more childish than my father. He's also planning on moving soon- it's not fair to go to my mother. She divorced him for god's sake, and is marrying another woman in a few months. What would be ideal would be to get in touch with the people at the mental health centre he's with, so that I could give them my perspective on how he's doing in his day to day life- but then again, he's dead set on keeping me out of caring for him, and he's probably right about that. I'm a teenager, as much as I like to pretend otherwise.
Part of me is terrified that he's going to ask me to help funding him, and I won't have the backbone to say no. I truly believe it would be the wrong thing to do- I don't want to make him more codependant than he already is, but then, I don't want him targeted by a predatory loan agency either, and I definitely don't want him out on the streets. He's my father. In some cultures children are expected to take care of their parents the rest of their lives- maybe I'm just going to end up looking after him?