ADULT CHILDREN OF HEART PATIENTS: RENEE AND ADAM’S HISTORY
Renee Thibodeaux and her husband, Adam, were settling into a stage of comfortable security after eighteen years of marriage. Three years before, they had moved to a suburb of New Orleans, where their extended families lived. Renee and Adam were happy to be living near their aging parents at last, after having lived all over the Northeast because of Adam's multiple career moves. They were thriving: Adam was enjoying being in the prime of his career, Renee was rapidly climbing the ranks in her own work as a real estate broker, and their three teenage children were flourishing in their school and extracurricular involvements.
Then Renee's mother had a massive heart attack, and everyone's life began to change. Adam and the children were very supportive of Renee's increased involvement with her parents at first. They assured her of their blessings as she absented herself from them to help her frightened parents adjust to this unexpected crisis.
With Renee's help, her parents adjusted quite nicely. After three months of closely monitoring and participating in their lives, Renee began to skip calling on her parents for a few days at a time and to focus her energies once again on her own family and her career. Her parents, of course, had been encouraging Renee to trust that they would be all right and to spend time with her husband and children. They were concerned for their grandchildren and for their son-in-law as well as for themselves.
All was going as well as could be expected by the sixth month of Grandmother's rehabilitation when a subtle shift in the family patterns occurred. Renee's father began to drop hints to Renee that her mother was spending long periods of time crying, refusing to get out of bed, and lamenting her poor health. Grandmother was depressed. In his talks with Renee, Grandfather became progressively more open in his expressions of concern for his wife. The two of them developed multiple strategies for encouraging and facilitating Grandmother's return to a more full and active involvement in her life.
Daily phone conversations with her parents and frequent visits once again became Renee's predominant focus. She had many private conversations with her father to get "progress reports" on her mother. She tried to act cheerful and encouraging when dealing directly with her mother, but the concern that she shared only with her father began to feel like a family secret that was placing a strange feeling of distance between Renee and her mother.
Renee's stress level mounted as tension began to develop between herself and her only sibling, Loretta, who began to question Renee's handling of their parents' efforts to recover. Loretta lived in another state and, through periodic phone calls and letters, noticed her mother's growing depression; she encouraged Renee to "visit Mama and Daddy more often." In response, Renee felt understandably angry and unappreciated. Here she was, changing her life out of concern for her parents, and her sister was accusing her of not caring enough to visit more often!
Further fueling Renee's anger was the tension that was mounting between herself and her husband. Adam began to complain about her increased absences during evenings and weekends, reminding her that he and their children needed and missed her. Renee, too, was frightened and distressed by the eroding intimacy in her own family. Even when she was home, she was often upset and preoccupied with her mother's health and with her father's worries and fears. Three generations of her family were in a shambles, and her own career was suffering.
As tension between Renee and Adam led to a cool distancing within the marriage, Renee's second child, Robert, began to serve as her confidant and nurturer. This son, who had always been the emotionally sensitive peacemaker in the family, was an inevitable participant in the family drama. Robert began to express concern to Renee that she was worrying herself into exhaustion. He encouraged her to take a break from nursing her parents, offering to spend weekends with them himself so Renee could travel with Adam or just relax or catch up on her mounting backlog of work. He also began to bicker with Adam, accusing him of not understanding the pressures that faced Renee. In gradual and subtle ways, Robert began to organize his life around his concerns about his mother and his parents' relationship. Soon the son was as extensively involved in the drama between Renee and Adam as Renee was involved in her own parents' adjustment difficulties.
In the nine months following Grandma's heart attack, the Thibodeaux family had become filled with tension and with triangular patterns of struggle. Renee was caught in a triangle with her parents and in a similar pattern involving her husband and her son. Robert was triangulated between Renee and Adam. And Adam, feeling left out of everything, was at high risk of triangulating either another of the Thibodeaux children or one of his own extended kinfolk as his ally against the growing tension. Finally, tension between Renee and her sister, Loretta, was growing, thereby increasing the likelihood that yet another family triangle would develop.
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