Tag: reverse parenting

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Soul Cleanse, Act One

Part One of a Three-Part Series
There’s no iced tea in the fridge. No beach towels on the clothesline, only weatherworn clothespins laden with dew. My mother’s favorite chair sits empty, a soup-stained throne awaiting its queen.

She’s not coming back.

I’m here for a month, at the island farmhouse of my childhood, with its fifty years of scrapbooks and hat collections, colored pencils and muffin tins. Room by room, I flit, pruning the weeds of a once brilliant mind. Armed with plastic totes, a fresh box of contractor trash bags, toilet cleaner and my pink Do it Herself toolbox, I’m cleansing the soul of this house.

I find multitudes of notes scrawled in her once-meticulous handwriting: “Church Sunday and Wednesday.” Her name. My cellphone number taped to every doorway. Baskets. Yankee magazines piled high. Broken pens. Thirteen spiral-bound notebooks, filled with sketches and daily observations.

I’m exhausted. just looking at it.

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Midnight Caller

My mother wants a phone. “If I only had a communication device,” she laments. It’s become her daily mantra.

She misses grasping the receiver, hearing a familiar voice on the other end. For years, the landline was her lifeline. It kept her company when she stopped driving. It reassured her I was alive. She rehearsed conversations, cleverly scripted to prove she was normal while Alzheimer’s stripped away her identity.

She struggles to come up with the word, but she remembers the comfort a phone represents. Besides church, it’s the only thing I wish she’d forget.

I hate phones. Robocalls aside, I prefer my conversations face-to-face. Even though I visit her every day, she forgets. My efforts to refocus have failed; I finally caved.

And so, the dementia-friendly phone patiently waits, ready to unleash fear-laden midnight calls upon a sleeping daughter.

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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?