Tag: memory care

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Sex & The City

My mother has a boyfriend and they’re inseparable.

It happened when I left for ten days on an out-of-town petsitting job— the longest I’d been away since she’s been in her memory care home. When I returned, there they were, sitting together on the patio love seat.

She’s giddy, obsessed. “Am I wearing enough lipstick? How’s my hair?” she asks, when he knocks on her door. As I let him in, I’m struck by another Freaky Friday reverse parenting moment. Did she feel the same apprehension when I went to the freshman dance with my first boyfriend? When a college boy took me to a concert?

“They’re definitely an item,” says my favorite staff housekeeper. When I ask if she’s ever walked in on a romantic moment between residents, she grins. “At one assisted living place. . . ” She half-kneels, pointing to her mouth.

How could I not laugh?

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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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Excited Utterance

We’re in CVS, picking up lipstick and Fig Newtons and suddenly my mother shouts: “HOW MANY DAYS DO I HAVE LEFT?” Her voice is piercing, frightened, all caps.

It wasn’t her first startling outburst. She’s living an unfiltered life lately: half-disrobing in a parking lot; loudly commenting, mid-sermon, on how cold church is. In her pre-dementia days, she was outspoken, airing her conservative politics at the island general store where she’d shopped for decades. When Alzheimer’s took root, she withdrew from the community, aware she was—as she put it—“less than her brilliant self.”

I was alarmed at first, at this recent return to speaking her mind. Yet, last week when she shouted, “WHAT SHOULD WE DO RIGHT NOW?” the pastor never missed a beat of his sermon. I held her hand and, like everything else these days, rolled with it.