Hi,
So first a little background to our situation. My mum was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, the prognosis was good, early surgery was successful and shes just finished her last round of belt and braces chemo. All good right? Except I feel like my whole world has changed and the bottom pretty much fell out of it when I found out, despite people telling me that she was lucky she found it so early. It didn't feel lucky, it felt like the worst thing in the world and I'm still finding it hard to accept that my mum isn't immortal and this has been a massive wake up call. So before all this my mum sister and I were really close, we spoke every day and she was absolutely my best friend in the whole world. But things have changed so much, I honestly feel like I will never get my mum back. Without going in to great detail, she has reached out to people that she either hasnr seen for a long time or who are going through similar to her, and that's been quite hard for my sister and I to accept. We want to be the ones who help her through this, but we can't necessarily offer her the support she needs. This was an issue at first because she wasnt honest about who she was spending time with as she was trying to protect us,, but we discussed it and ironed it all out and agreed that going forward we would be honest with each other about how we felt. Naturally my dad is very protective over her and wants to do what's best for her, and so any emotional upset or disagreement results in him getting quite angry, which is understandable. However, I feel sometimes that my sister and I are kept "out of the loop" as such when it comes to what's going on, but I think this stems from the fact that they didn't tell us about her diagnosis straight away, we had to beat it out of her so there's perhaps a trust issue there on my par. So skip forward a few months, things have been hard but we've got through it, my sister and I have both stepped in where my mum would usually have been, and for probably one week out of three of every chemo round she's been OK. This has been hard though because we've had to fend for ourselves and find our own routine for those two weeks but then when she's having a good week, she wants to take the reigns again and it's hard to find a balance and she inevitably wears herself out. Also I've found that as I said previously she is surrounding herself with acquaintances for want of a better word and spends her good weeks socialising with them and not us. I find that quite hard to accept but as someone has recently suggested to me, I wonder if it is because she can't escape from the reality of the situation when she spends time with us and maybe she can't face what it has done to us as a family. So it's all come to a head this week, I've found myself more and more lying about where I am because I don't want to spend time with her, I'm very frustrated with her and feel very resentful towards her, and I have hardly spoken to her the last few days despite her saying that anything she does is never with bad intent which of course I know is true. I don't know how to move on from this. I feel like I just want her to acknowledge the fact that she's pushed us away a bit and then hopefully we can move on and talk about this and rebuild our relationship. I don't know how to support her anyore, I can't talk to her for fear of her getting upset or my dad getting angry a d even if I could I don't feel like I could make her understand , I'm exhausted with it all, I feel very selfish and beat myself up a lot about how I'm feeling because I'm not actually the one going through it, but the bottom line is I just want my mum back and I'm scared she's gone forever. I feel like even though the cancers gone we might always be broken. Any advise greatly appreciated.
