Help Me Fix My Mess!

I’m Shelley MacGrady and I inherited my parent’s 280 acre (1/3 mile x 1 mile) farm. It has lush green fields, trees, marshland, bush; comprising a largely unexploited property. It has all kinds of wildlife including: raccoons, rabbits, ground hogs, porcupines, skunks, deer, wild turkeys, geese, ducks, coyotes, and a bear or two in the back somewhere. With a picturesque 200 year old stone farmhouse, an old wooden barn, plus a large steel shed; it kills me that I’m destroying my husband’s dream of living and growing in the country. In a way I’m already dead. I can’t seem to bring myself to even ask my husband a simple question. Something inside of me reaches through and chokes me silent. So I avoid truly dealing with what I have to. The way I am and behave has only now slowly started to make sense now that my mother is dead.

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I lost control of the finances, and now we’re faced with bankruptcy and losing the farm. This was our one chance and I ruined it because I couldn’t keep track of the money. I feel hopeless and depressed because it was all my fault.

I messed up badly. When my father died in 2018 I went into a brain fog and my short-term memory stopped working. I felt lost and couldn’t focus on anything. It made being an executor for my father’s estate terrifying because I didn’t know what to do and I wasn’t able to take in any of the documents I read. To add to the pain and confusion my uncle was also an executor and he proved to be a liar and thief. He and his wife couldn’t move fast enough to get my 80 year old mother, Margaret, out of her home so they could loot it. My aunt had formerly been a nurse and yet she didn’t collect mom’s medications or suitable clothing for when she was taken to the nursing home. My mother was taken away with her two cats Monty and Rumple which were hastily crammed into cat carriers.

Donald, My father had been taken to the Smiths Falls hospital because he had trouble breathing. He was taken by ambulance to Ottawa General where he died aged 88. My uncle and aunt were at dad’s deathbed and my uncle was looking like he was going to take away dad’s oxygen. I was relieved when a nurse intervened and he sat down. I was ashamed that I hadn’t tried to stop him myself. I have trouble standing up when I see something wrong.

All I could feel was a cold sweat and an overwhelming sense of dread. Now I had to look after my mother and her cats. I was still reeling from holding dad’s hand as he died. Even now I still feel that I haven’t properly grieved for dad and that makes me sad. I’m so scared. I’m blind and have social anxiety and I’ve been learning about narcissistic abuse. Every day since my father died I’ve felt rudderless and a general sense of depression. Everything's grey. The body blows kept coming. My uncle tried to sell the farm to a neighbor for a fraction of its value and when I said no he said I didn’t need the money and was just being greedy. My husband reminded me of this exchange. I didn’t want to sell to the neighbor for any price because I’d been bullied by their boys on the school bus when we were kids. It makes me sick to think about it.

My mother’s abuse makes it difficult for me to express my feelings. I am having a hard time dredging up the anger that I know is in me. It’s a struggle but I have to get it out so I can heal. Ralf and I have lived in poverty for at least the last 30 years with no help from my parents until around 2013 when I wrote them a letter (we sent two copies: one to dad’s office and one to the farm); describing how we lived, and were aware that any gift we gave to them was matched dollar for dollar despite the discrepancy in our incomes. They started topping up our income after the letter. I didn’t speak to my mother and father for the next five years and they didn’t speak to me. My mother talked trash about us to my aunts, uncles and cousins and they ate it up. They never bothered to try to get to know us as people. I was written off pretty much from birth by my mother. My father was under her thumb too and just seemed to go along. I realize now that my development as a person was stunted and I’m not socially capable. I’ve never been able to cultivate long-term friendships.

My husband and I’ve been together for almost 32 years but things have been strained for a long time because of my shortcomings. I couldn’t hold a job for very long and I couldn’t even look for a job because my social anxiety made it impossible. My husband should have left me decades ago but he had his own pain to deal with. He didn’t want to be alone. His father had been locked up for cheque fraud and his mother died at the age 39 from drinking, smoking and overwork (stroke). His sister committed suicide and her son was taken to Papua New Guinea by his adoptive missionary parents. Ralf’s whole family was gone and he was only in his early twenties.

While dad’s estate was wrapping up, other things were going on. Everything in dad’s will passed on to my mother and eventually would pass on to me. My mother and her cats had to be housed. She could no longer live on the farm. She couldn’t live alone because she was frail and her mental capacity was in rapid decline. She’d been dumped in a nursing home in Smiths Falls by my uncle and aunt. So we moved her to Ottawa.

Monty was the more personable cat so we took Rumple to the humane society where she was evaluated to see if she was adoptable. Sadly she wasn’t; she was morbidly obese, looking like a beach ball with fur. Her hind quarters were arthritic and she could only move with pain and certainly couldn’t clean herself properly. We were forced to have her euthanized. That added to my stress and sadness. I felt so bad about having to go that route but we couldn’t keep her.

I thought mom and Monty were settling in well at her retirement home but on separate occasions Ralf noticed mom using her cane upside down. Or noticed her sitting on the couch because her recliner slid back when she stood and eventually was too far from the television. We discovered she was eating the cat’s food because she didn’t want to go to the dining room for meals. One of the PSWs on staff suggested having her mental capacity evaluated after we were lost concerning her mental deterioration. During the evaluation with the psychiatric nurse, I couldn’t help but try and answer one of mom’s questions but was stopped when Ralf hit me in the thigh. After the evaluation she was deemed incapacitated and we were able to place her on the LHIN (Local Health Integration Network) waiting list.

Around this time I had been laid off from my casual kitchen cleaning job that I’d had for five years. Ralf had kicked me out of the apartment to volunteer somewhere. I did. A few weeks later I was offered a few hours a week employment. It helped with my social anxiety, but now that was gone. That was in March 2019. It was a shock to not have my job any more. It seemed so sudden but it was due to the pandemic. My father had had an SUV and my aunt and my cousins wanted to have it. They already had their own cars and we had nothing. We signed it over to Ralf and now he could drive to the farm daily to check on it. We went to see mom each day at her Long Term Care home. We adopted Monty and he lived in our apartment.

Monty tilted his head to one side because as the vet said he had a brain tumor. He lived with us for 5 months before the tumor caused him to scream in distress and claw at the ground as if he was trying to anchor himself. We took him to the vet down the street the next morning after I begged for an appointment. The vet checked him over and gently released him. I burst out crying as I brought the cat carrier to the car. When I got there Ralf started crying too. This was another heartrending event. It hurt so much. Monty was such a sweet cat – such a little gentleman. He insisted it was time for bed at 9 pm each evening. When we did get to bed he had to sleep between us. Both of us still miss him. We used to take Monty to see mom in his pet stroller. It was the only way to take him anywhere because he’d get very upset if he found himself outdoors.

In February 2020 I was diagnosed with endometrial cancer. I had a radical hysterectomy then began chemotherapy. All my hair fell out after the first treatment, my taste buds were affected by the drugs making everything taste awful. I slept most of the time. I had no energy and I didn’t want to experience my taste buds. By this time I lived alone at the apartment because Ralf had moved to the farm to oversee renovations. I felt guilty and relieved that I didn’t have to help with the farm and couldn’t handle the extra stress. I was not good company. My treatment finished up with radiation and by late 2020 I was finally done.

My mother got the private room at Royal Ottawa Place which was the number one spot on the list Ralf researched. She was an artist so we decorated her room with pieces of her artwork. Ralf got mom’s TV set up so that the sound went to her hearing aids that he put in daily and he made sure she had fresh flowers every week. Restrictions grew tighter because of the pandemic. We visited less regularly. My aunt and uncle were trying to convince the estate lawyer that we were treating mom badly. They had discussions with my aunt about mom’s care but didn’t include us. My aunt (mom’s sister) wanted to get mom moved to Arnprior for her convenience. Ralf and I were doing everything and yet they were trying to take control. For all their talk of caring about mom’s well being my co-executor aunt and uncle never visited her once at Royal Ottawa Place.

My libido had been declining for a long time and now was gone. We had negotiated having an open marriage two years prior. Ralf met Katherine and they hit it off. I was happy for him that he’d found someone to spend time with. My visits to the farm were rare but I did see Katherine a few times over the two years she was with Ralf. I went up for a visit just after the relationship ended. Ralf was thin and was wrung out. He was so thin and gaunt I was afraid he was sick.

He’d noticed that the behavior of Katherine and my mother seemed too similar. This was when he started learning about narcissism as a personality disorder. It taking time for this to settle and feels like the ground is disappearing under me. The slow realization that my life was/is, like when you watch the most disturbing part of a horror movie, and feel that you can never return to the comfort of normal life. I’m full of regret that I can’t have my chance at life back. It makes me want to throw in the towel because I feel I can never make myself a whole person now. I feel like I destroyed Ralf’s life because I understand that I behaved like a narcissist. How can I possibly make this right? I spent 30 years of my life unconsciously making my husband’s life a living hell. I feel awful. I’ve made Ralf cry so many times in pain, rage and frustration. It hurts so much! It makes the tears start and my nose run. Daily, I say hurtful things and make ugly faces all beneath my cognitive awareness. It took decades for Ralf to get through to me that this was happening. I couldn’t see it, I didn’t and wouldn’t accept it. It was only after this revelation of what pathological narcissism is that I slowly began to accept with massive resistance, what I was being told by someone I’m supposed to love and whom I’ve trusted forever. Ralf has never betrayed me and that guts me even more. He doesn’t deserve to be treated like this. I hate my mother for what she did to me and what she set up in me to do to my husband and anyone that got close.

I want more that anything to make things right with the finances and the farm for Ralf’s and my sake. I owe him that many times over. He saved my life by getting me away from my mother. He taught me to love food after my mother made me not care about it. Mom made me hate sandwiches because she was so miserly with the fillings and the bread was almost always stale if not actually moldy. My mother told me that my grade 2 teacher had told her I wouldn’t amount to anything. I was an adult before I realized that no teacher would ever say that. She trained me to anticipate what she wanted by punishing for asking questions, punishing if I did things too well, and punishing if I failed. The only way to avoid the worst was to basically read her mind. She hid her abuse of me from my father. He couldn’t be blamed (even though I believe I somehow do) for her torture of me because she manipulated and tortured him too. She made me not believe in myself. That’s why I was so lousy at jobs and looking for work. Going for a job interview felt like going in front of a firing squad. I would shake so much I could barely speak.

My brain fog and memory problems were still plaguing me. I was trying to understand what was going on around me. My aunt visited every week. As mom’s decline became more obvious I noticed that a couple pieces of her artwork disappeared. My aunt expressed concern over mom’s wedding rings which she still wore. They went missing after that.

My mother died in May of 2022. Now I was co-executor for mom’s estate. With the additional paperwork I felt ever more lost and confused. The estate dragged on and on. Neither of my parents prepared me for this, or anything, and there’s been no one to turn to. I made so many bad decisions that could have been avoided with some sound advice. Not only did I have no advice, I avoided everything associated with the finances because I found it all deeply depressing and disturbing. Everything magnified by the loss and pain that just kept coming. The cost of the renovations ballooned and ballooned. Nothing helped by being abandoned by my uncle, my aunts, my cousins, my entire extended family. Everyone except Ralf, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell him we were running out of money.

Our current situation is dire. Because I couldn’t keep track of the finances we are out of money and cannot afford to put gas in the car or pay our bills. The home insurance has lapsed and the car insurance is about to. We’re behind on the hydro bill, property taxes, fuel oil bill, snow plowing bill. We can’t buy wood for the winter. I’m scared shitless. We’ve tried to get a mortgage or a loan. We’re about to go bankrupt and it’s all my fault.

We’ve been through far too much pain, hardship and misery to see it all come to nothing. We’ve been working hard at improving the house and grounds over the past 6 years. We built a chicken coop and run last summer. We raised 24 chicks into healthy and happy laying hens. We have big plans for the farm. This is our dream and I don’t want us to lose it because I made mistakes. Ralf wants to build a windmill to help generate our own energy. We want to extract lye from ash produced by the wood stoves and make soap products. We want to expand our apple butter business. We want to look into animal husbandry. We want to conduct a survey to catalogue what we can exploit. We want to build an artists or writers retreat in the back with an eye toward renting through ABnB. We want to buy an ATV and another chainsaw for removing the deadfall from all the fields.

It means so much for your help during this time of our direst need! We need to move on with our lives by the hard work of making ourselves and the farm as whole as each can be. Which includes seeking therapy for each of us. After half a lifetime of having nothing and being nothing we desperately want for this to work! Please find it in your heart to help us through this difficult time. To kindle hope, life and joy within us.

With humility and gratitude,

Shelley MacGrady