Category Archives: family

one hundred minutes of solitude

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She got up early this morning, appearing , already dressed, at the side of my bed, saying that she would just stand there and I should go back to sleep. Right.

So, I got up made her a cup of coffee, which she drank and then went back to sleep.

Ah. Found time. My rare chance to revel in the healing hush of the now-lush landscape.

I took a cup of Earl Gray tea and a Portuguese sweet roll embedded with Muenster cheese and went out to the rocking chair on the screened-in breezeway. Calli, my cat, glad to follow me into the dappled morning, scooted out the door to hassle the chattering jays who have learned to keep their distance from the chittering cat.

I sit and sip in the peace of some needed minutes without demands. Hummingbirds come and go at the red and white plastic flower. An indigo bunting perches on a tree branch, uncertain about approaching its favorite feeder. Calli has her eye on it. A pair of mourning doves bill and coo on a fallen tree trunk. Somewhere behind the thick screen of leaves, the lake glistens at the clear blue sky. I wish I had a hammock.

We took her to a geriatric specialist last week, hoping that the doctor might have some advice on how to deal with where mom is at — which is a moderate to severe dementia. My sibling, who has been in denial about the severity of her condition, finally, I think, got it: it’s only going to get worse. His handling of her situation, and his attitude toward me, makes my work here much harder than it has to be. If I leave, it will be because of him, not her.

She is 91, but she still dances with me almost every night before she goes to bed. We are both still good dancers. It’s about the only thing we’ve ever had in common. Dancing calms her down.

Calm. It’s what we all need here.

And lot more than only 100 minutes of solitude.

8 1/2

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That’s eight and a half hours in the ER. We left at 5 p.m. It’s now almost 2 a.m. I haven’t eaten since lunch, and I’m sitting here eating baba ghannouj with a spoon and drinking V-8 Fusion because it hurts when I chew because I had a tooth extracted yesterday.

Mom was severely dehydrated and we couldn’t seem to stop the diarrhea. So they took all kinds of her fluids for testing, stuck a hydrating infusion in her arm, X-rayed her and did a CAT scan of her stomach and intestines. They didn’t find anything that we didn’t already know was there — nothing that would be causing her to spend so much time sitting on the commode. So, just in case, they gave her an antibiotic and we loaded up on gatorade on the way home.

And just to make the day complete, as I was rushing around making sure I had her health insurance info and stuffing extra clothes for her in a bag, along with a water bottle, kleenex etc. etc., my flip-flop caught on something sticking out of her wheelchair and I did some damage to my second toe on my left foot. No time to worry about that, right?

At the hospital, my toe started throbbing; turning purple. I had the option of signing myself into the ER too and have my toe X-rayed, but that would have left my sib to deal with my mother all by himself. My toe hurt and looked gross, but I could bend it and move it, so I figured it’s just a bad bruise. I opted to tend to the reason we were there in the first place.

She is supposed to consume nothing but ginger ale and gatorade for the next two days. If she refuses to drink — as she has been doing midst fits of dementia — it’s back to the hospital and back on the IV.
I’m wondering how they ever manage situations like this in nursing homes. It took two of us to manage the care of one of her.

I’m still hungry. But I’m also tired. I don’t know which need I’ll fill after I post this. Either way, it’s been a hell of a day.

diarrhea, diarhea, diarrea

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It doesn’t matter how you spell it, google will find it.

And my mother has had it for four days now. We called the doctor today and will be bringing a sample to the lab for testing.

Nothing has worked to get it under control. I’m trying to make her drink Pedialite, but she’s not very cooperative. Right now she’s up combing her hair with a toothbrush. I’m making her some chicken broth with cut up baked potato. That’s supposed to OK for her to eat.

We’ll soon see.

a mother’s day reality bite

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The Limerick Savant has put out a call for Mother’s Day limericks. I dare the jester to print this one, an original by this burned out, currently bitter caregiver:

Of mothers there are varied kinds.
Some are honored; some are maligned.
There’s no perfect mater
and sooner or later
you learn to accept what you find
To “mother” with grace is not easy.
You’re expected to always be breezy.
And when you mother your mother
‘cause a choice there’s no other
you likely go out of your mind.

Anyone with a Mother’s Day limerick to share, email your creative endeavor to limericksavant@gmail.com.

Obviously, I had a meltdown today. Told my sib I just don’t care anymore. Either he agrees to let me hire someone to come over here and give her some companionship, or I give him whatever money she gave me and I’m out of here. (The reasons why I only have those two choices are too dysfunctionally private to share here.)

I left home when I was 17 because I couldn’t get along with her (I’ve blogged about that before). When I thought she couldn’t live on her own anymore and she was always calling me long distance about various ailments, I decided to take her on, hoping that we both had changed enough to find a way to coexist — if not actually enjoy each other’s company. What an idiot I was.

I find that I don’t mind at all doing all of the chores, both for her personally and just general cooking and cleaning. I just can’t stand her company. I am a terrible daughter. And I don’t feel bad about that at all.

According this site, she’s nearing the end of stage 5 dementia, moving rapidly into stage 6. There’s one more stage after that, and she could live another decade. F**K!.

the state of things

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Bush is scheduled to give his State of the Union address on Tuesday. I doubt if I’ll watch him. I don’t need any more reminders of how disillusioned I am by life on all levels these days.

I can’t even get the Sunday edition of my local newspaper, the Times Herald-Record, delivered the way it should be. It took me seven phone calls and six weeks to have them get the Sunday paper here the first time. And they still haven’t put up one of those tubes for newspapers delivered to rural customers. They leave the paper on the side of the road in a plastic bag. I’ll make phone call number eight tomorrow and give them one more week to get the tube up. Otherwise I won’t renew my subscription.

There’s a commentary by a local resident in the paper today, however, that deserves mention because he quotes the words of General Dwight D. Eisenhower 45 years ago as he was ending his term as President of the United States.:

‘In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence … by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this … endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. …

Today … the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system – ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society. … and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Whatever happened to that kind of moral Republican leader??

And here, on the home front, she washes paper plates, folds up sheets of paper towels and makes neat piles of them in her dresser drawer, keeps wanting to dance, takes out her hats (of which she has boxes) and reorganizes them. She needs something to do, something she can do. I ordered a “pencil by number” kit of flowers and hope that she might occupy herselp with “coloring.” We can hang up what she finishes on the porch.

I’ve been giving her iron and B-12 pills, and she seems to be stronger physically, even though she still sleeps away half the day. What the hell, she has nothing more interesting to do.

This week I will get a massage and a hair cut — not from the same person, of course.

I sit by my window and wait for a sunny day.

And chaos reigns supreme.

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This is the view across the top of my roll-top desk, past my room divider, into my kitchen. Like my life. Chaos.

— Still getting over major tooth abcess and root canal work.

— Now mother hearing voices singing Polish Christmas Caroles while the podiatrist (who she insists is Polish but he’s not) is working on her hammer toe.

— While making broccoli soup in my Vita Mix, didn’t realize that the machine was set on high speed and the cover wasn’t on tight enough and — heh — broccoli bits all over everything, including me.

— Made batches of pesto with the harvested basil after I cleaned up the broccoli mess.

— Still not ready for the craft fair that I do once a year; need to print up signs, finish a few more items, and price everything. New items this year, thanks to a brainstorm of my breast-feeding daughter: washable nursing necklaces and shawls.

— Am almost done using putting transfers (that I printed up on my computer) on a special t-shirt to wear to BloggerCon.

— Finished harvesting my tomatoes, basil, and parsley; now have to clean out my garden before frost hits.

— Gotta get to the library to return Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons, which was so enthralling to me that I read it in one day (instead of cleaning up some of the chaos). As an ex-Catholic who went to 13 years of Catholic school and is totally fascinated with the lore of Church and its roots in paganism, I just loved this symbol, taken from the book:
earthairfirewater.jpg

— Gotta pick up The Secret Life of Bees, which is waiting for me at the library, as well as one of Judith Jance’s’ mysteries-on-tape that I can listen to on my way back and forth to Boston.

— Next stop is at Hannaford to pick up my mother’s prescription for Quinine for her leg cramps and then to Joanne’s for fabric to cover seams that I let out from a jacket I love that I made smaller years ago when I WAS smaller.

When my friend P stopped by after the tap-dancing class that we’re taking but I missed because of my root canal, we commiserated about how being retired isn’t what we wanted it to be. (Her 87-year-old ex-mother-in-law, to whom she’s close, has just been diagnosed with advanced breast cancer.) She thought that she would be spending her time resting, traveling, reading, having fun.

Whoever keeps trying to tell us that life can be just fun and games at any age is really selling us a bill of goods. I don’t know anyone whose life is that way.

Meanwhile, I’ve got to go battle chaos. And entropy. Always entropy.

Yes. America as a whole seems to have succumbed to entropy. And apathy.

Battle on, Xena.

The Crone Evolution.

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These are my two grandmothers in the mid-1940s, when they were a few years younger than I am now.

That’s my mother’s mother on the left — the small, straight-backed, serious woman — the one who saved my life with her Old World medicine magic (see poem below).

My father’s mother is bigger, softer-looking, but was no less strong. She remembered growing up in Sklody, Poland, admiring her third cousin, who became the famous Madame Marie Curie. Strong women, all.

But how old they look to me now, even though, today, I am older than they are in that photo. Life was hard for them — very serious business, with five kids each and hard-working blue-collared husbands. They cooked well, cleaned well, and passed along to me their matriarchal genes — the blessings and curse of my crone heritage.

On this day of memory, I remember my grandmothers.

HEART OF ROM
Cyganka! My grandmother shouted
as I bounded off the front stoop
onto the wet city street,
propelled by the promise of stolen kisses
and the musky taste of Tangee
still slick on my lips.

Gypsy! Even the word
brought blood rushing
to the pit of my stomach.
How I wished for the wild hair,
dark eyes, skin like old copper,
for the freedom to gleam
like crystal when I walk,
for a wisdom ancient as the land,
as the sweep of continents,
the shriek of willful wind
through openings in stones.

Cyganka! She hurled it
like an epithet,
but I role it like a broom
over landscapes grown deaf to her fears.

She named me true, my Polish grandmother
— a small strong-handed woman
with gypsy fire in her voice
and a back turned straight
against truths too bold to hold.

Yet, they tell me once,
as I lay young and dying
lungs rattling with rifts of air,
fever lighting my face to flame,
(the doctor came and went,
scowling at the earth) —
in the draped and stifling room,
she unfolded her family secrets:
holy candles, crystal cups,
vials of spirits, leeches, as
my mother watched from shadow,
willing demons away with her eyes.

They tell me when the priest arrived,
surprised to find the child alive,
he never commended on the faint red circles
following the tender length of spine,
or the sprinkling of blood marks
along the back, like the bites
of mythic bats or the denounced
touches of wizened old wives.

And so I keep signs
of these grandmothers, still
–in fragrant herbs sprinkled in tea,
in shells and stones arranged on shelves,
in faint red circles, drawn in firelight.

Cyganka! I call to my daughter,
offering gifts of crystals
that fire the sky
where she walks.
(copyright EF 1980)

Mother Load

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“I sent you to college. You’re a teacher. You should be perfect.”

That’s what she said to me yesterday, my mother.

I don’t even remember what it was I did this time that didn’t meet with her approval. Not that it matters. I’ve spent my entire life repelling her disapprovals. But it does burn my butt that she still doesn’t get it.

Over on her weblog, Jeneane Sessum shares her current struggles to get beyond the load her mother laid on her. Mother-daughter stuff. Tough stuff.

I think I managed to do the mothering thing less destructively than my mother, although I certainly didn’t do it perfectly. Of course not.