CFP: The unbelonging mother

I totally support the old saying “what happens inside the family should stay inside the family.” I find it difficult to relate to people who talk badly about their family members, with or without a reason, in front of strangers. I see it as a lack of care; if they feel that they care about and belong to the family and every member, then they would respect the whole family and shouldn’t disdain any member in front of strangers especially, in a destructive critique 'Caregiver' Mr. and Mrs. John, 72 and 70, have been patients of mine for a few years and live in a fully serviced retirement home where the entire cost is paid by their children. They have three daughters and one son, who all live on their own. When the couple moved to the retirement home, they asked me if I could continue seeing them, which I agreed to do. It happened a few times that Mr. John got sick and Mrs John had to come as a “caregiver,” however the way she acted made everyone feel more like she'd been hired to look after him and as if her support was a duty and not out of genuine care. One day Mr. John was in my office, very sick and hardly able to speak, so I looked at her to get some answers. Most of her answers were "I don’t know," "Ask him," or just shrugging her shoulders in an unsupportive way. 'An old grumpy lady' One day, Mrs. John came to the office with one of her friends in the retirement home; she claimed that Mr. John stated that he didn’t want to accompany "an old grumpy lady." I asked her about her situation, her husband and her kids in general. She looked at her friend and said, "Would you like to tell him yourself about my lazy husband, and my greedy careless son and the three b**** I have?" Uff...! That was an unexpected answer! In shock, I asked: What, and why, does your friend know about your family? "She knows everything. I don’t hide anything from her," she proudly replied. She actually talked about her family in front of everybody in the retirement home. Her friend interjected and added: "I have advised her several times not to talk about her family—and by the way doc—her kids are very nice, supportive and helpful." My kids are mean, greedy, lazy and selfish, she angrily said Mrs. John, I said, don’t you think we need to bolster and cherish our kids—not besmear and disgrace them in front of strangers? I asked her this. She looked at me and said: What do you know about my kids? I replied that "I don’t know them but I know they are part of the family you belong to and we don’t usually talk down about our family—and won’t let anybody do that." "I don’t mind people talk against my family and it doesn’t bother me," she said. I told her that I understood from her friend that they are nice and supportive. "Doesn’t matter. I won’t stop talking against them," she said. I decided to change the discussion because it was making me feel uncomfortable, annoyed and. . . . Wait a second . . . Recently there was controversy over an editorial in the Canadian Family Physician (CFP) journal. Is that not what the CFP just said about its family members when it besmirched and degraded them when it said, “family medicine is not a business”? Dr. Jabir Jassam is a family physician who works at Health Treasure Medical Center in Ottawa.

CFP: The unbelonging mother

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