Pandamomium

My mom did not come home. My mom is never coming home in fact.

I didn't realize it until we were in the car with Nathan and his friend Patrick my fake son. We took her for a spin in her own her fast car and even though she knows it's her car, she is rambling about stuff. The boys think it's funny. It is funny maybe if it's not your mom. I take it all so seriously it's like we're watching two different movies, the kids and I. Mine's more tragical. As Anne with an e would say. Because I have to see her like this all day and they only have to be in the car for a few minutes.

Why did they send the shell of my mom and get rid of the meaty part. Her meaty part wasn't even that meaty, she was more for decoration, with some dancing and sexfiendishness and suffering, intense suffering since I was 9 years old. Maybe since she was 9 years old. We did play alot of comedy records. Steve Martin. Monty Python. Sam Kinison. Smothers Brothers. Alot of funk music. Prince. Who Let the Dogs Out. The unfortunate Billy Jean album. Diana Krall at least. Movie musicals.

Why did I get this dish served up to me right now.  Momdemic.

She was a nurse in a dementia ward in Crofton Maryland for so many years. She zoomed there in her fast car in her white nurse's uniform that she ironed every day with her white nylons. She was small and spastically happy, she worked hard. Those people needed me, she said the other night. They had no one.

We would visit her at work and we were used to guys walking down the hall with no pants on. Hallways that smelled like pee. No natural light. One nurse, two aides and 30 patients. No one wants to work in the convalescent centers. Everyone wants to work with babies. Babies without pants are cuter. Baby pee is cuter.

So she worked and then she had Lyme disease and lived with us and then got better and then left and now she's back or what's left of her is back and I'm sitting here with here everyday thinking what happened.

All that is left is she likes to pick up sticks. She's obsessed with things that have fallen on the floor. She was always clean but now she would never wash her hair if I didn't do it. She would never change her clothes. She would only eat apples.

She is back to becoming an animal. Returning to the earth when I see it from a more beautiful spot but tonight I can only see that I got ripped off and she, she definitely got ripped off. If she could see what she is like right now she would be horrified. She would be disconsolate.

Instead, I am.

I was the closest thing to being her that she ever was. Heaped on me at a young age, her distresses, her heartbreaks, her loss. We became one. A giant mother.

I went on to giant mother my own kids with that superpower and my kids have come out pretty damn amazingly even the last one who has gone tiktok lesbian because her phone tells her who she is. Technology and boredom have taken the real person away right now.  Instead of stopping it I sit with my mom who hates flies and sings nonsense songs and doesn't remember how much she loved me.

She told me so much, so many times over and over all these years how happy she was that she got to have me. Now she doesn't know that I'm her daughter or have any memory of the importance of all those years and all those moments, including my birth. This magical thing that started me. That cheerleader is gone.

This is my sadness.

I feed her and I clothe her and I exercise her and I am patient and I scratch her head and give her happiness. Today sitting outside at the table she cries with joy when she finds her bag of quarters because she thought she lost it. She's sitting right next to me and crying and thanking god for the bag of quarters.

This hurts.

I don't know what to do except be wildly inconsistent because I am not a trained objective nurse, this is my mother and she has forgotten me.

It scares me to see how much you can forget. You can be wiped dry. There can only be some froth left, and a sore body. What was it for, then. All those years she loved us kids, if she can't remember them.

This is so incredibly sad. It is just like alcoholism. I am left holding the bag, standing with my mom in the bathroom while she is numb and I am feeling it all. Eventually I stopped trying to solve her problems and just watched her go to rehab. This time, I don't know.  Today I am standing to the side and seeing that I can love her greatly and it is nice to do that. Or I can stand to the side and while she might be slightly sadder not to have me she is not devastated. She is just sick with the kind of sick they don't send the doctor out for. There is zero mental help here.

I guess I wanted her to have everything to the end. I have no power here. Bonnie no Powers.