Sometimes the Lamp Breaks

Yesterday was my mother’s 94^th birthday.

Robert and I drove up to see her.  Because she has dementia, it is difficult to go to a restaurant with her, so we brought flowers and took her for a drive, which she very much enjoys.

In the car, she said, “I thought you were coming around dinner time.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Mom,” I said.  “I told you to write down that we were coming at twelve.  And you said J [her caregiver] was writing it down as we spoke.”

“I don’t remember,” she said.

“Well, I’m sorry you were surprised,” I said.  “J must have written it down wrong.”

“Oh, J is wonderful,” she said.  “I don’t blame her.  I blame you.  It’s easier.”

She said this without a trace of humor or sarcasm or irony.

I know that dementia is a terrible, insidious illness that wreaks havoc on one’s essential self.  But what she said—“I blame you.  It’s easier”— is my mother at her most truthful and least inhibited.  This is the way it has always been between us.  (“I had the most beautiful legs when I was young.  I weighed 125 pounds all my life until I had you,” she told me when I was a teenager.)

My father, who has been dead 36 years and whom I adored, had a thing about ownership.  “It broke,” I said once over the shattered remains of a lamp I had unintentionally knocked from a table.  “It didn’t break!  You broke it!” he thundered.  I can still hear him saying it.

My parents really did a number on me.  I am responsible.  Always, I am the one to blame.

Oy, that word.  Blame.  For many years, I seemed unconsciously drawn to people who liked to affix blame.  Years of therapy later, I’ve learned that the people who want to blame you for everything are usually the people who are afraid they are responsible for whatever is wrong in the world.  You are their scapegoat.  They are hiding behind you, terrified of their own flawed selves.

I’ve learned this, but I have to keep reminding myself that it’s true.  My subconscious self is very used to taking the hit.

Over the years, I’ve become defensive.  It’s not a quality of which I’m terribly proud.  I think I became defensive when I was learning, in therapy, to refuse blame, to stand up for myself.  Now, it’s just a bad habit, a behavior I no longer need.  I am trying to learn to squelch the impulse to defend myself against all complaints and grievances.  Because, you know, sometimes I really screw up.  And then I have to own it.

Oh, here’s another thing I’ve learned.  Sometimes, the lamp breaks.  (Not that one that I knocked off the table when I was six.   I broke that one.)  Sometimes, the washing machine overflows or the cell phone won’t pick up a signal or the car won’t start, and it’s not your—or anyone’s—fault.

That’s a really freeing thing to learn.

When my mother said, “I blame you,” I didn’t say a word.  Two years ago, I would have read her the riot act.  I would have felt righteously indignant. 

Yesterday, it was easy to stay silent.  

Later this week, I'll write about my mother's thing about men.

In Advance of Mother's Day

Mothers and neediness are much on my mind these days.

Yesterday I met my adult daughter for a little lunch and a little shopping.  I bought her a blouse.  As I did so, I realized that I haven’t bought her anything for a while.  She works, pays her own bills (including payments on the student loans she incurred in college), and is extremely independent.  She doesn’t need me to buy her much of anything.

My 93-year-old mother with worsening dementia needs me desperately.  But she doesn’t like me much these days and meets any of my attempts to help her with disdain and a supreme lack of graciousness.  (Recently, I bought her a new phone, but I had to let her think my ex-husband bought it for her in order for her to accept it.)  I do what I need to do behind the scenes and without thanks of any kind.

There is a dove nesting in an old clay pot outside my laundry-room window.  She hasn’t left her perch in three days.  I think her hubby brings her food at odd hours, when I haven’t been looking.  Sometimes we stare at each other (or, at least, I assume we are staring at each other: it has occurred to me once or twice that maybe she’s dead).  I imagine that she is warming eggs beneath her, that soon there will be babies.  I tell her that she is a good and devoted mother.  Yes, I really whisper it out loud (and then hope to God I’m not talking to a dead bird).

It occurs to me that we tend to think of children needing their mothers (and fathers), and of elderly mothers (and fathers) needing care and comfort, which almost always falls to their children.  But we don’t tend to think about young (or middle-age) mothers needing their children.  Or, more specifically, needing to be needed.

But we do.  Or I do, anyway.

Last night, I was reading Alice Munro’s great story, “Gravel.”  In it, the main character, now an adult woman, says, “All the eviscerating that is done in families these days strikes me as a mistake.”  Of course, the woman who is saying this did something terrible as a small child: she depends on being able to smooth over misery in order to live with herself.

I don’t know how to do that.  (And neither, thank God, does Alice Munro.)

I was going to write something flip about being a bird, how you just lay the eggs and shove worms down your babies’ gullets and then die when they fly away.  But I see from Wikipedia that doves feed their babies—called squabs—dove milk, and that they may raise up to six broods in a season.

That’s a lot of being needed.

 

And a lot of eviscerating, if you’re a disgruntled squab who’s into that sort of thing.

Why I Am Exhausted

Questions asked by my mother while I was at her apartment this afternoon:

--Can I get you something?  Some soup?

--What can I get you to eat?

--Do you still have those crappy curtains in your bedroom?

--Is it Thursday?

--Can I make you some soup?

--Why isn’t that Huntsman winning?  I like him.

--Why has that damn clock stopped again?

--Do you like Wolf Blitzer?  I love him.

--Can I make you something for lunch?

--How’s Richard?

--Do you like tuna?  Can I make you a tuna sandwich?

--Why doesn’t she (CNN’s Candy Crowley) lose some weight?

--Why is Piers Morgan on television?  I can’t stand that Piers Morgan.

--What is the matter with that damn clock?

--Are you hungry?

Casting Off

Last Friday, I got my cast off.  Also, my mother told me she didn’t want anything more to do with me.

My mother has had some sort of mild dementia for quite some time, but it’s apparently getting worse.  Her anger at me stems from my having made a request to the DMV to give her a driving test.  An actual driving test, in a car, not a written test.  You would think that the state of California would assess the driving skills of 91-year-olds routinely, but it doesn’t.  You have to ask.

I got my cast off a few hours before my mother told me she didn’t want anything more to do with me.  In the car on the way home from the “fracture clinic,” I thought about other things I had cast off recently:

--glasses;

--anything made with wheat;

--curly hair;

--gray hair;

--suburbia;

--people who blame me for their own unhappiness;

--jobs in which I have to wear suits and have a boss;

--friends who aren’t really friends;

--the conviction that I would always have a dog;

--as many delusions about myself as thirteen years of therapy will allow;

--tax returns from 1997;

--aluminum pans.

I’ve talked to my mother almost every night since she first yelled at me.  She has hung up on me twice and been rude and nasty.  Every once in a while, she has called me ‘dear’, as she used to.  She sounds scared and confused.  She is steadfastly unwilling to accept any kind of assistance with grace.

I don’t know if my mother is going to continue to take her fear and frustration out on me.

But I am going to call her every night.

Old Age

My 91-year-old mother has some sort of dementia.  Not Alzheimer’s, probably.  She gropes for words, can’t remember what she did three hours ago, insists that I grew up speaking Hungarian, as she did.  She calls my partner “Richard.” 

I am sad a lot now.

The weird thing is that my father died when I was 19, and I would give a lot if he could have lived into old age.  I miss him every day. 

But I miss her, too. 

I call her every night.  Usually, we talk about three things: the weather, politics (“Do you watch Rachel Maddow?  She’s such a doll.”), and whether she went for her walk.  Recently, her foot has been bothering her.  The half-hour walks have become 15-minute walks.  I think it’s an omen.

My mother has become less hard-edged in old age.  She oozes love. She hugs receptionists.  Once a woman who complained about everything her friends did (“She walks too slowly!”), she now has mostly nice things to say about people, assuming she approves of their politics.  It’s a nice change.  And lucky.  Dementia can make you nasty.

Last night, at dinner, she told the waiter at the Lark Creek Café how old she was.  I almost fainted into my steamed asparagus.  One of the hallmarks of my mother’s life has been her easy ability to lie about her age.  I didn’t know how old she was until I was 20.  Even then, she told me that she was 57, and told my brother that she was 56.  Lying was something she did even when there was no benefit to be gained.

As soft and mushy as she has become, my mother is still infuriatingly stubborn.  She lives alone and insists on driving.  (A few months ago, I stole her car keys.  My brother had new ones made.)  She has control of a lot of money, and she Will Not Let Go.  I have begun the process of taking that control away.  She wants to argue about it with me all the time.

It breaks my heart.

At dinner last night, I needed a tissue, and she rummaged in her purse to find one.  She pulled out a paper napkin wrapped around a brownie.  “I forgot about this,” she said.  “How long has that brownie been in there?” I asked.  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said.  “I got it at the JCC.  They serve lunch for six dollars.  The meatloaf is fantastic!”  Then she leaned in close and whispered, “But everyone who eats there is so old!”