Tag: mom

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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.

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Free Fall

Second in the series “A Trilogy of Morning Pages”

“What should I write in here?” a girlfriend asks, of the blank journal I’ve given her to celebrate six months of sobriety.

“Something. Anything. Everything,” I respond. “Write as if no one were reading. Hate. Love. Anger. Gratitude. Write as if your life depends on it.”

This is how I write each morning, as I begin the Morning Pages.

Aside from brewing a pot of French press, I do nothing, read nothing prior to writing. Freedom flows best when you’re propelled by the unconscious rather than down the avenues of distraction.

Fall awake in your Pages. Transform an overheard conversation into dialogue for a short story. Describe a character that didn’t exist until this moment. Write from the lens of your six-year-old self; from the tangled mind of a demented mother.

Write not for accolades or prizes. Write to understand.

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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.