staycation

staycation

all the kids

all the kids

Sunday, July 12, 2020

Momumental

When your mom stops knowing your name exactly, you love her because of her sounds and shapes, every single one of which you know. It's scary to love someone as they are fading away. She isn't fading away physically although that is lurking. She's blowing mentally with the breeze.

She notices the colors of things.
She is extremely grateful at 5 in the morning when you show her the way back to bed.
She loves her little dog.
She is running on fumes even though I am pushing her up the mountain.
A daughter cannot stand a mom who can't stand, and will not stand for it. Until I saw how tired she was the next day after forcing her to go to the beach. There were no old people at the beach, I noticed as we were leaving, as we walked her brokenly across the sand, and my little baby son who is now 19 and 6 feet tall finally picked her up like a fireman and set her gently on the pavement. She did the beach because I wanted her to do it. But. She sees it from through a mist. Her eyes spray a mist and she feels her way through.

It's mentally tiring to see new things and not know where your shoes are. It's not fair to not know where you're living. All her stuff is in a little bag.
We're building her a little place she can have all her stuff and not lose anything. She can have a refrigerator and get all the apples she wants.
I don't mind the wave of sorrow that happens when she coughs and says I can't do things like I used to. She can't even cough like she used to. It frustrates her. She was so busy always.

She sweeps all around the pool. In the morning she sings.

I make fun of her when she is being annoying but I always did that. I don't know what I'm doing, I'm clearly unqualified to care for someone at the end of life, how can this be near the end, at only 77. If there was a me next to me, the me that I trust who sees me through most things and cleans up the messes of the other me, that me can stand up and help her out of the pool. That me is the one doing everything while the other me sees only the world as a bunch of spilled paint and I'm wiping the colors all together with my flat bare palm. That me sees love and pain.

All the emotion and all the people helping and all the dogs and the kids who used to count on me to feed them and my other life from before all of it is spilled everywhere and there are so many tears here. Not for me, mostly for child me who wants mom to be like she was, annoying as she was, loving as she was, not shelled and unsalted like this spent pistachio.

Luckily no one is in charge not even me. So I can cry and all of us can cry and we'll still build the house and we'll not have a whole world of conversations but we'll see the blue flowers I planted from the pool and she'll float and point out the blue and say did you see those

they're wonderful.