Tag: mother

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Book ‘Em

I come from a family of book readers and writers. My mother often read the dictionary for fun. We had seven: American Heritage, Oxford, Webster’s. You get the idea.

“Daddy always told us to look it up if we didn’t know how to spell a word,” my mother said last week, my grandfather suddenly cast as my father in the tangled branches of her Alzheimer’s family tree. “In that book with all the words.”

As an only child, books served as surrogate siblings. My childhood was filled with an eclectic mix of books, from Nancy Drew to Narnia, Little Women, Little House, and edgier titles as I approached adolescence:  Harriet the Spy, The Tunnel of Hugsy Goode, The Stand. The books are still in my childhood home, relegated to a distant corner of the attic.

This summer, as we readied my father’s house to be sold and I waded through the stacks and shelves and boxes of his books — 3,000-plus dusty, stinky, moldy hardbacks unwanted by anyone but him — I was motivated to declutter my own collection. Like newspapers and postage stamps, books felt like relics of half-dead generations.

Kondo inspired, I pruned the shelves. Weeded through overgrown piles of books on nightstands and coffee tables. And kept the ones that bring me joy.

As for the rest? They’re not far away. “They’ll be happy in their new home!” the librarian chirped, as I unloaded the boxes of my past life on the metal library cart. “Thank you for thinking of us!”

In keeping with my primary intention this year, I am creating more space in my life, in the figurative sense of being open and present and this literal tidying up, creating a wide-open yin to the musty mothball clutter of my parents’ homes.

And I have not lost my passion to read.  

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Crazy Talk

I’m glad I don’t have to work in this horrible place anymore, says my mother as we walk to the main dining room which I’m now calling “the restaurant,” like she does, where the assisted living residents eat their meals and I sometimes take her so she can get away from the horrible people she “works with” in her memory care wing then she tries to remember what the horrible things are, tries to find the words for the horrible things the bosses have her do and how they keep changing everything which really means she’s confused, confused beyond all rational possibility over the new bathroom routine, with the caregivers taking her to the toilet every two hours and assisting her so she doesn’t keep going on the lid or in the laundry hamper in the closet or throw shit and toilet paper around her bedroom like some teenage-TP-in-the-front-yard gag gone bad and then she says, maybe next year, not realizing, naturally, that we actually are at the end of the year, a day away from Christmas, which as we all know, she says, takes FIVE CIRCLES before it arrives and I’m as baffled as she is at the speed the holidays hit us, all Mack truck-like, how fast they come every year, how fast each week passes now and yet it’s not fast enough, maybe next year we can go “back,” she says, we can leave this horrible place and she doesn’t say back to Maine or back home and I’m not even sure she knows she’s in Arizona ninety percent of the time but like me she always wants something else, something more, something better, something different, to be somewhere else, anywhere but where we are, and again I’m astonished because it’s like we share a brain: I’ve been thinking for a month solid about moving her back to Maine, to the dementia care home by the sea where I originally wanted her to live two years ago when I realized I couldn’t continue taking care of her in her house, I wanted to keep her in a similar environment, a smooth transition from the old house of my childhood to another old house, isn’t it perfect, mom? You get to stay at a bed-and-breakfast, I imagine saying as the fantasy unfolds, I’d leave her there for a few months because lately I just can’t deal with watching her implode and taking care of my husband, I’d leave her there with people who really care and understand dementia, not this corporate “care facility” with caregivers who quit before they get their first paycheck and an activity director whose idea of art projects is finger-painting and coloring books which pisses the former artist in my mom off to no end, her high-functioning moral superiority still shining bright, then I’d return to Maine myself with or without my suddenly-wheelchair-bound husband whose staph infection just won’t quit, I’d spend a very long summer and fall in my old house and visit my mother often in her B&B by the sea, and I’m positive, I’m certain now that I’m going crazy, the slow drip of insanity from my drinking days has returned and my mother’s tangled mind is seeping into my veins and neurons and organs, I can’t not be crazy, can I, after all this, five years of crazy: my mother and my father and now my husband, taking care of everyone but myself and if it’s true, like they say, the caregiver is the first to go, well, then, toodle-oo, bitches, I’m gone.

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Sacred Sundays

“Never on a Monday,” says the text from a childhood buddy, in response to my question about her work schedule. “Mondays are sacred.”

And for a while, they were. Even 3,000 miles apart, we experienced Sacred Mondays together, texting each other photos of coffee mugs and couches. Having a day of rest was as mandatory as the weekends we filled with family obligations.

Yet, as it has since I quit my career five years ago, life changed radically this summer. Having proved my ability to somewhat successfully meet the endless demands of elderly parents, the Universe has now designated me caregiver to an injured husband, the most difficult job I’ve had so far.

Every day is Groundhog Day, my husband reminds me from his perch on the recliner; it’s true for both of us. And somewhere in the daily drudgery of living through the chronic stabbing pain of an injured hip, tending to medical needs and a household filled with pets and chores, my Sacred Mondays vanished.

I found myself missing that soothing relief of a day in which I allowed myself to do nothing. Never fully able to embrace self-care—even the term is as cringe-worthy for me as self-love—Sacred Mondays were at least a stab at putting myself first. Yet spousal caregiving is a far more emotionally draining experience than I ever imagined. Something had to change.

One Sunday not too long ago, I had coffee with a friend whose mother is now in hospice care, after an agonizingly slow trudge through the twisted maze of Alzheimer’s. “I disconnect on Sundays,” said my friend. “No workouts, no errands, no housework, no parents. A whole day off from my shitshow of a life.”

In my not-sober past, Sundays were spent nursing profound hangovers with brunch-filled mimosas and afternoons of beachfront reggae music. In sobriety, I find peace at Sunday morning 12-step meetings. But for the past three years, I’ve dreaded Sundays: taking my mother to church in an effort to maintain the routine so necessary for a person living in Alzheimer’s World. And when my new caregiving responsibilities took priority, she never noticed we’d stopped going to church, just one more of the merciful yet bittersweet paradoxes of dementia.

Sketch by my mother, c. 1988

Now, Sunday is the day I look forward to all week; the portrait my friend/dementia mentor painted has come to life. Sacred Sundays give me freedom from my shitshow of a life. Write. Read. Nap. Watch football. Or none of the above.

And serenity returns to our household, if only for a day.