So, yesterday, while friends and family are emailing me links to great pieces like this about Laura Bush and the Poets Against War effort, and this by Breslin about his moving experiences with the NYC anti-war protesters, and this in the Village Voice about the impact of the anti-war marches, I’m driving my mother 85 miles in minus-four-degree weather to visit my brother, her son, who has not been feeling all that well.
I’ve been having “discussions” with my mom about her starting to take Alzheimer medication in hopes of slowing down a process that I see starting but she refuses to acknowledge. Her brother, two years older than she, is (again) in the hospital with pneumonia because he keeps going outside in below zero weather without his coat. The really bad thing is that he now believes he is a kid back in Poland, keeps pulling his IV out, and rarely recognizes his daughter. This kind of stuff runs in families. I worry about that.
Of course, we “discuss” this most of the way down to my brother’s, so when my brother comes out to help my mom out of the car and, in her usual disfunctional way, she starts yelling at him for going outside without a coat, we are off to our usual bickering start.
I’m immersed in battles — planetary and familial, with the weather, with myself. (We’re in the middle of another really bitch of a snowstorm.) I’m out of energy, out of motivation.
Today, one of my best friends calls (she’s retiring next month) and tries to get me to sign up for a program at the community college where a bunch of retirees will be getting together once a week to take day trips to cool places in the region — every Thursday for five weeks beginning the middle of May. She and I always have great times together — used to go out and dance every Friday night — “out on a tear” we would say — watch out world!
Living with my mother drains me. Just agreeing to do the program with my friend makes me feel like I’ve climbed a mountain. But I’m going to do it, because I know that doing it will be like sledding down the other side.
Breathe, I tell myself. Have a cup of tea and a Peppridge Farm Milano (double chocolate, of course.) There will be a spring. There will be a spring.