Category Archives: family

going gray

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Soon after every birthday, I take a photo of myself. My 68th birthday was last Tuesday, and here I am, way past the time when I would normally touch up my hair color. I’ve begun to go gray:
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I took this photo with a new webcam that I just hooked up so that I can video conference with my grandson, who will soon get, from me, one of those indestructible XO laptops that are no longer available for private purchase. It comes equipped with a webcam. In order to buy one for him, I had to buy one for a child in a 3rd world country.
I went to visit my kindergartener grandson and family last Sunday, and I’m sure that, as a result, I have a few more gray hairs. By the time I left on Tuesday, both my daughter and grandson were seriously sick with sinus infections and the construction of a second floor had begun on their home. After I left, the workers had accidentally put two sizable holes in their first floor ceiling, letting the cold in and further endangering their health. You can read about the fiasco on my daughter’s blog.
I wish I could have stayed to help out. My son-in-law has his hands full. He even had to take time off from work because my daughter now has laryngitis and can’t talk at all. Just imagine how that works out with a chatty 5-year old.
Ah, if only there were such a thing as a Star Trek Transporter.

this for you

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This is for you, my offspring, both of whom have the gift of insightful sight.

Snapshot
Charles Tomlinson
for Yoshikazu Uehata
Your camera
has caught it all, the lit
angle where ceiling and wall
create their corner, the flame
in the grate, the light
down the window frame
and along the hair
of the girl seated there, her face
not quite in focus —that
is as it should be too,
for, once seen, Eden
is in flight from you, and yet
you have it down complete
with the asymmetries
of journal, cushion, cup
all we might have missed
in the gone moment when
we were living it.

Thanks to Jim Culleny‘s daily poetry emails for the above poem.
I wrote a poem long ago about a photograph. And I posted it, along with the image.
And because of that post, I’ve been translated into Chinese by Yan, who left a comment to let me know.
I just love the Web.

this manic mama

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Not, not me. My mom.
When she’s on her 16 hours-awake binge, she talks in rapid fire nonsense, can’t stop moving. If I can get her to sit down and eat anything, her foot taps on the floor like an idling motor, just waiting for the gas pedal to be depressed.
She opens drawers, moves her belongings around so that, later, I can never find what it is she decides she wants. She bends over and roots around in the bottom of her closet, packing and unpacking her shoes into a duffel bag. When she stands up, she’s on the verge of falling over. Her back hurts. Her arm hurts. But I can’t get her to stop. She is driven by her dementia.
Sometimes she will sit long enough to eat something, sometimes not. She rants about people stealing her money, her shoes, her dishes. It doesn’t help that I show her the shoes, the money, the clothes. She is beyond reason. The world is dangerous and deceptive as far as she is concerned. She refuses to take any of her meds, and that only makes things worse. Eventually, she will collapse and sleep.
After sleeping away most of the past few days, she again started in with her manic behavior this morning. I slipped her med into her mouth (it dissolves on her tongue) and in fifteen minutes she had calmed down enough to have some of her fake coffee and toast.
And then she went back to sleep and is still sleeping.
She says she always feels cold, even under her electric blanket.
There is so much I should be doing to clean up my own space, to keep on with the purging of stuff. Instead, I shuffle around, waiting for the electric eye alarm to go off to let me know that she is up.
I am not used to living in such personal stasis. I have always courted change, created it if necessary. Here, my days are caught up in the cycles of her dementia.
In slow motion, I plant seeds, shred mounds of old paper files, watch my hair grow out gray. If I can just keep moving forward in these small steps, keep making small changes, I will survive.
I sure can use some of her manic energy.

sun and moon and seeds

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I’ve been trying to find the time to plant the seeds I want to grow for my planter garden this spring. (No more dig-in-the-earth garden, where pests of all sizes devoured what I had last year.)
The sunny day seemed auspicious for planting, so I got out my supplies and got to it.
sunseeds.jpg
I planted seeds for flowers that might not be too tasty to the critters who munched and lunched here all last summer. Mostly, I planted ornamental hot pepper plants — colorful fruit and foliage, and inedible by, or unappetizingly firey to, any living creature. But they sure do look pretty in pots.
Perhaps the full lunar eclipse tonight will also mean that it is an auspicious time for planting seeds. I guess I will find out in a few weeks time.
Meanwhile, I hope this also is an auspicious time to open up my CPU and insert more RAM. I printed out instructions, and am ready to tackle another project I’ve been waiting to find time to do.
My mother has had a few days of either sleeping for 16 hours straight or being up for 16 hours straight. Her 92nd birthday was on Monday. On Tuesday, we had a local Polish Catholic priest over for lunch. They knew each other well back at the old parish in Yonkers. She doesn’t remember him. But he remembers her and tried to talk to her about the old days. She sat and listened, and the only thing she seemed to be able to say was “How long have you been here?”
She is growing smaller and lighter, a drying pod waiting to fall.
Over in the corner, seeds wait to wake.
Now I will go out and watch the eclipse.
Then I will tackle the RAM.
Auspicious days are too few.

my funny valentine

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I can’t remember when the last time was that someone sent me a Valentine. And it’s apparent, as I continue to sort through all of the stuff I’ve been carting around all of these years, that I didn’t think any that I got in the past were important enough to save.
Except for this one, from about 28 years ago, by the little guy who still thought is was OK to give his mother a Valentine card:
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a deep sleep

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It’s six o’clock on Sunday. My mother went to bed around midnight last night, and she’s still sleeping. That’s 18 hours.
We tried to wake her up, but she only mumbled something about her whole body aching. We check her periodically to see if she’s still breathing, the way new parents do with their new baby.
I take a shower and wash my hair and make sure I have all her medical information is ready. In case.
What if she sleeps through tonight. Do we take her to the hospital. Do we just keep an eye on her and wait until she wakes up by herself. If she does. What if she doesn’t.
These are questions, but I write them as statements because no one has the answers. It’s one day, one hour at a time.
I spent hours this morning, while she slept, shredding old bill statements, throwing out things I’ll never use and probably no one else will, packing up more books to take to the library, and filling bags of odds and ends for the Salvation Army.
I am letting go.
Is she, also?
———————————————————————————————————–
She woke up at 8 pm, weak and disoriented. I got her to take her meds, and then I fed her some Jello. And then some homemade turkey soup with pastina. A cup of her fake coffee and a couple of cookies later, she felt better. It’s now after midnight, and she’s still up and weepy again. My brother is watching tv with her. I need to sleep, because I’m sure that, when she’s finally ready for bed, I’m going to have to lie down with her.
What do they do with dementia patients in nursing homes who won’t go to sleep and want to go home?? That’s not a rhetorical question.

mother to son

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The following poem is from one of Jim Culleny’s daily poetry emails:

Mother to Son
Langston Hughes
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So, boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps.
‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

pillow talk

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pillow.jpg

This is one side of the pillow I made for my mom to encourage her to “self-soothe.”

I used cotton poplin photo fabric on which to print out the 25th anniversary photo of my parents, my mother’s favorite photo of the two of them. Then I pieced washable satiny fabric around the photo to make the pillow the size I wanted it to be. The great thing about the photo fabric I used is that it’s washable.

On the other side of the pillow is a photo of what there is of my mother’s immediate family. (It’s the same photo I used in our holiday card.) I call it the “family pillow,” and she holds it while she falls asleep. She doesn’t like sleeping alone in her bedroom; she says she’s afraid (not unusual for people with dementia). But when I tuck the family pillow under her arm and remind her that she has the whole family with her, she relaxes and is able to fall asleep.

We all need ways to self-soothe. I’ve been doing it with chocolate. But that hasn’t been enough.

So, today, just as the heavy flakes started falling, I had my first visit with a therapist who uses approaches to which I respond better than “talk therapy” and who takes Medicare. I’m still processing what went on in this first session, but I will say that I felt much lighter as I left than I felt when I got there.

Maybe I will make myself a pillow with the images that I need to empower myself to relax.

what the hell is that on her head?

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My mom is sitting down at the table having a cup of her fake coffee. AsI look down at her, I notice a thick smear of something light green stuck in her hair. Huh?
So, I touch it. It’s sticky. I smell it. It smells minty. Aha!

Toothpaste!

I have to admit it. I laughed a lot.

She has a spot on her scalp that always seems to itch her. When she tells me about it, I put Scalpicin on it, and that helps. I guess this time as she combed her hair in the bathroom mirror, she picked up the first thing that looked like an ointment tube and rubbed it on the itch.

The last time she rubbed something strange on her body, it was on her lips and they swelled to the point where I had to take her to the doctor’s. As far as anyone could tell, it was an allergic reaction to something, and I think she had been rubbing her 30-year-old Lancome cream on her lips. I cleaned out her beauty lotion drawer and it hasn’t happened since.

She always seems to be fidgeting. Mostly she takes sheets of Kleenex and folds them into squares and loads her pockets with them. She insists on having tops and pants with pockets. Sometimes I miss emptying a few when I do her laundry. Even if I use those scent-free dryer softener sheets, those little bits that stick to the clothes are a bitch to pick off.

She would love to fold blankets and other larger squares, but she has a torn muscle in her left shoulder. Not only can’t she raise that arm, but the whole shoulder is painful, even though she’s had a cortisone shot. After Thanksgiving, I am going to arrange for a physical therapist to come over and help her with that arm. I think I finally found a place that is certified for Medicare.

Very often, she snaps. No, literally. She snaps and unsnaps those closings on the tops I buy her so that they are easy to get on and off. Last night, she was desperately trying to snap closed the edges of a very old pillow case that she had long ago sewed snaps on to keep closed. (I guess she’s always been obsessed with snaps.) When she went to sleep, I resewed the ones that were coming off and sewed on a few additional snaps so that she could have yet another snap-happy fiddle thing.

Actually, I found a site on the web where you can buy fidget things for people with dementia. Other sites suggest these stress-reduction toys. My mom will not fiddle with toys. She will only fiddle with things that are familiar to her; things that she has used in her role as wife and mother. Safety pins are one of those things. She finds them and pins them to the inside of her slacks. The other day I found her picking her teeth with the point of a large safety pin. She has a drawer full of various dental picks that I bought her. But she uses a safety pin. Sigh.

I spend a lot of time Googling for ideas on how to calm my mother, since her fidgeting is associated with her nervousness and anxieties. As a result, I sent for a really soft furry teddy bear and made a sweater for it with a Polish logo. You’ve heard of Polar Bears? Well, this is a Polish Bear:

bear.jpg

I thought that stroking the bear’s fur might relax her. I thought the Polish theme would attract her. Nope. She knows it’s a toy. Cute, but no cigar.

Well, I tried.

In another day I’m planning to try to leave to go to my daughter’s for Thanksgiving. Actually, I’m going no matter what. I don’t know how my brother is going to manage, but I’m leaving enough food, clean underwear, desserts etc. so that my mom will have whatever she needs. He just has to make sure that she gets it all.
I can’t wait to see my grandson, who has been unofficially adopted by the guys in the local firehouse that his mom takes him to visit periodically. The last time he was there, they gave him a piece of real fire hose (including nozzle) and a door chock (whatever that is). His firefighter suit, of course, is compliments of Grammy.

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He wants to be a firefighter when he grows up. Also the owner of a tree-cutting service. Or a road construction worker. Or some kind of para-medic/rescue worker.

I think he’s going to spend Thanksgiving rescuing his Grammy.

another anniversary of b!X’s crime spree

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Every year, On June 17, our family commemorates b!X’s arresting crime spree.
It was 1987, and he and some of his friends were celebrating graduating from high school. Only they made the mistake of celebrating by lighting firecrackers late at night in the schoolyard of a local Cathlic School. There recently had been vandalism in some neighboring schoolyards, so the cops were on the lookout. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong kids.
And so we all went to court, and b!X got community service. But that wasn’t the bad part. The bad part was getting handcuffed and tossed into the back of a patrol car and having the police wake your mother up at 3 a.m. to tell her to come and pick up her son at the stationhouse.
I wasn’t even mad when I saw him walk through the door that led to the back of the police station. I was just relieved that he was OK and that all he did was get caught shooting off illegal firecrackers.
Any trouble that b!X has gotten into since that time has been more the verbal kind, and this little cartoon of him that I attached to the firecrackers was once published in a Portland area newspaper But at the other end of the arm was a computer.
So, sonb!X, in loving remembrance of the gray hairs you gave me that night, 20 years ago:

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