It was another bloody Sunday. Anna would not accept the carer at all and I am trying to think why. Friends came with their little girl in the afternoon and everything was fine. The three-yeard looked curiously at Anna but mostly concentrated her beautiful eyes on fascinating me. Then the carer came again and made an omelette. I could not get Anna to walk to the table. She went round in circles, as we all did in our heads. There was no way of helping her, not then, not later. Anna said to me, she’s got into you. So she was talking about projective identification?
In ‘The Unfaithful Brain’ Anna wrote about mediators and busybodies, as a useful distinction between those who were helpful and supportive to her and those who were interfering and intrusive. But it is more difficult than that of course, because the mediator and the busybody can be the same person, doing the same thing. The everyday helpful action is also intrusive, supporting her independence and undermining her autonomy at the same time. That way she does not get to eat.
Increasingly she refers to objects around the house as belonging to her mother. Anything, she likes, that is comforting, ‘that was my mother’s.’ You would not know from this that there were long periods in her life when she and her mother were hardly talking. There are letters from her mother which are hurt and resentful of Anna for getting out from under her powerful personality.
Anna says she does not recognise the carer, or that she is there because I want her (which is partly true). But I think this is an alibi. She has to reject the carer, however good she is, or recognise her own fearful dependence.
Yesterday was a bad mother day.