Tag: caregiver

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Gone Girl

I’ve left mom alone for ten days for a petsitting job, and I’m as nervous as she was when she dropped me at summer camp, age eleven.

She’s not alone, really. The caregivers in her memory care home look out for her 24/7. The care director texts photos of her at cooking club; playing the harmonica; modeling new hats. I should enjoy this time away.

It’s hard, though, after spending four years with someone who panics when I’m not there every day. Parenting roles are reversed in our demented lives and each time I leave, it’s as if she were a child again, scared her mother won’t come back. Even after the hundreds of times I’ve left and returned, all she knows is that in that moment, I am gone.

Eventually, worry lifts; fear subsides and I learn to trust the process.

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Write On

You write because you can’t imagine life without writing. You write because you can’t imagine life as a writer. You write because at eight years old, you told everyone you were going to be a writer. You write because you don’t think you’re good enough. And then you write because you are enough.

You write to give meaning to a life beyond sales calls and quotas. You write to quash self-doubt. You write 140-word blog posts to remember who your mother was before she forgot who you were. You write a novel because fiction creates a world of escape.

You write because you dream about writing and the story awakens you.

You write when you can’t wait to write, and you write when you don’t want to. You write in notebooks with different colored ink marking your mood, after a shot of nicotine courage in pre-dawn darkness. You write on your laptop. On your phone. On grocery receipts.

You write because you’re an addict and the page is now your bottle. You write every day now that you’re sober, because when you drank you wrote shit, if even at all.

You write to help others. You write to give purpose to passion. You write because that is what a writer does.

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The Fairly OddParents

He was my mother’s first love. At twenty-one, she joined my father in the adventurous life of an itinerant oceanographer that took them from Boston to Miami, San Diego and finally, a return to the Maine island where they’d first met.

I grew up on that island, attended the tiny three-room schoolhouse, built a treehouse in the apple orchard of my backyard.

We were the odd family from “away”: two intellectuals and their only child. My mother, a stay-at-home graphic artist, and my father, a marine scientist who had worked with Jacques Cousteau. Their divorce, when I was eleven, came as a shock to all of us.

Eventually, my mother remarried and became a local celebrity, writing a monthly newsletter and cookbook. My father’s wanderlust continued as he moved through locations and relationships.

And I was a wild child for a quarter-century.

Our roles have reversed now, and I’m the parent to my parents. I became the stay-at-home-mom to a mother with Alzheimer’s. She’s the toddler who needs help getting dressed; my father’s the wild child who fancies himself a young Casanova.

And we are still the odd family.