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Fri 21 Mar, 2008 08:42 am
Hi all
Needing some advice here. My mum and dad have been having marriage problems for a while now and have always argued. As an only child I've been stuck in it and have been able to see both sides of the story with things.
My Mum recently started going on a rambling club and my dad started going with her too. After a while she asked him to stop. I took this to mean because she wanted a bit of her own life. They have always lived in each others pockets, in my opinion and not had any friends at all outside of themselves.
A man on the ramble made a kind of pass at her and said that if she was his he would never let her go. Well last week my dad kissed her while she was sleeping and she woke up in a rage. My dad went into the garden and when he got back in she had gone out. He later had a phonecall from a phonebox. Her words "I've had enough and I'm not coming back tonight I'm stopping at a friends". Now this was 7 days ago and we have heard nothing at all. No further phonecall, she has no mobile and we don't have a clue which friend it is or any names because she was always cagey before to give details. I wondered if she was having an affair and asked her outright a few months ago. She said not and I believed her. She's always had problems sexually.
Anyway my dad and I have ended up today contacting the police. I've travelled 150 miles to come home to see my parents and she's not here. No phonecall nothing. What do people think of this. Should she be behaving this way? Should she have called. Were we right to rign the police.
My God. Did it ever occur to you that something may have happened to her?
Yes, you were right to involve the police. There's a big difference between I'm not coming home tonight and vanishing for a week.
er... what's a rambling club?
A rambling club is an outdoor activities group who do walking, hiking and other things of that ilk.
ah... thanks, Heeven. Has anyone contacted the leader of that group to see if there was an event the day (or day after) she called?
the leader has been informed about her being missing no events taking place i think she is with the man that gave the comment
The phonebox which she phoned from (because we checked local phoneboxes in the area to find her) is in the vacinity of where the man who sort of made a pass at her lives. But on the otherhand some of the women she is friends with on the ramble also live on that estate (from what she told us) but wouldn't give specific house details ever.
Everything just seems so cloak and dagger. Why couldn't she tell us where her friends live before. Could this have been planned out?
My father asked the leader if a Pamela was on the ramble because my mum had told us that her friends name was this. But he says there is no pamela in the ramble club.
At the moment it just seems like we are sitting around worrying now and can do nothing. My dad thinks she has left him for this man.
The police haven't been in contact yet and we just don't know what to do.
That would be pretty cold. Now, if she's really had it with your father, I guess not contacting him would be understandable to a degree, just to make him suffer, but she should have contacted you at least, so you wouldn't be worried about her safety. Has she ever disappeared like this before? For this long?
I understand that caught-in-the-middle business all too well. I was the only offspring of my parents during their volatile marriage and eventual separation and it was often not an easy spot to be in.
I hope your mum's okay and makes contact soon.
No, she has never disappeared like this before because she has never really had friends like this before. I thought she was enjoying a new kind of social life and making more of a life for herself so that they weren't under eachothers feet.
She did tell me at one point when I visited and she was saying she wanted a divorce that she was trying to make a new life for herself and started crying at that point.
I also had problems in my own life with an ex fiance and had to split with him because of how he was treating me last year. i never was quite sure as to whether he was cheating on me. I discussed with my mother how I didn't like cheating and her reply was "well if you are dead inside i can kind of understand why" which is what makes me think she might be having an affair. Either way her not contacting even me and her friends not advising her to seems odd, maybe she just wants to punish me too. In previous arguments she refused to speak to me on the phone when she was asking for a divorce because she said i upset her and maybe that's why she isn't phoning now.
In the recent past she has also been going to the shopping centre, so she says and comes back with nothing after 9 hours of shopping. I would ask her if she'd had anything to eat and she would get all cagey and tell me to mind my own business.
It sounds like you're fairly convinced there was/is an affair, but that doesn't rule out that something else may have happened. You were right to go to the police. I hope you hear something soon.
Helen--
You were absolutely right to call the police.
She may think your father deserves to worry--but you certainly don't.
If she's absent voluntarily, she's being terribly immature and self-dramatizing. If something has happened....
Did she take a suitcase with her? Are any if her clothes missing? What would she be doing for money?
Try to remember, your mother is not doing this to hurt you. She ran away to hurt your father and it is a pity to think that she didn't realize she'd be hurting you as well.
The kindest thing I can say about her behavior is that she may be very confused and her inner turmoil may have led her to dangerous actions.
Helen, I hope the police can find your mother soon, and that she is safe.
that day she had a head ache and taken aspirin she fell asleep in arm chair i kissed her on her cheek and she was angry you woke me up i said do you want to go to bed i will bring you a hot water bottle leave me alone so i went in to the garden half hour later came back she had gone then two hours later got the call from the phone box she only had her coat shoes hand bag purse and makeup bag has gone with her no tooth brush or paste
also no money taken out of cash machine
Re: Problems with my mum
helen26 wrote:... last week my dad kissed her while she was sleeping and she woke up in a rage. My dad went into the garden and when he got back in she had gone out. He later had a phonecall from a phonebox.... I've travelled 150 miles to come home to see my parents and she's not here.
helen26 wrote:... that day she had a head ache and taken aspirin she fell asleep in arm chair i kissed her on her cheek and she was angry you woke me up i said do you want to go to bed i will bring you a hot water bottle leave me alone so i went in to the garden half hour later came back she had gone then two hours later got the call from the phone box
Not that it matters a great deal, but I'm getting confused over who she was angry at before she left.
Was she driving a car when she left?
Well, we just had a call from the police and they have found her. Of course the police can't tell us where she is and all they have said is......................."she doesn't want to come home and things will have to be sorted at a later date"
My dad asked if she was having an affair and with another man and he wou;dn't answer.
No mention of a message to me from my mother......................NOTHING!!
Meantime I'm left to pick up the pieces for my father!!!! An only child and in the process of selling a house 150 miles away after splitting up with her ex fiance because he cancelled the wedding a month beforehand. You know out of the whole time since last July that i've been getting over it and sorting things she hasn't once been down to visit me with my dad. Just gave excuses the whole time no doubt because she was nipping off to see the other man!!! My dad has been the only one to visit!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I've no bright advice or even lucid observation, but I am thinking your mother is not mentally well and may not have been for a while. That is hard to distinguish from her perhaps many legitimate gripes and her exhaustion from dealing with them, and the latter may be true instead of the former.
I'll grant on the other side that your father had or has had gripes, and has not been able to work them out with her.
This is not really your problem to solve. You can point ways, to counselling, and so on, for each separately if need be. But it is not your role in life to fix their mess.
I know that sounds cold, but it's true.
It is your role to figure out who you are.
(I wish someone told me that.)
I don't mean that you don't care about your parents.
Retain yourself, listen to yourself.
I'm sorry, Helen...It's terribly, terribly hard to be the only child when your parents go through things like this. My dad was the one to become involved with someone else, but my mom was the one who acted strange and horrible and took it all out on me--so I've had experiences kind of like what you're going through...
Read Osso's post over again, she said it all! --I had to have people tell me over and over and over that it wasn't up to me to fix my parents' lives... just try not to shoulder too much of this yourself.
What are we, three only children in a row?
I probably care more for my parents now than I did then. Hard to say, different kinds of caring. I lost mine both in hard ways fairly early, though not as early as some people do. Many conversations left unfinished. I think of all the unfinished ones with my father, a man interested in the whole world, a writer, a poet, something of a director, at one point a quite high up colonel, and at another, a quite battened down person. We have many missing conversations. Near kills me, really.
And my mother, I probably spent more years resenting her than joyfully loving her. She was a woman of rules of life.. though of good heart. I understand her more as decades pass, though not yet all the rules. She developed Alzheimer's before we could ever really talk as adults. I am not so sure she and I are as as different as I thought all that time. No, not re rules, but re the good things we saw out the same window.
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