How to write about the
last few weeks without being dramatic.
Hmmm.
Well let's see, we had
to go get my mom from Maryland because my brother was arrested for manhandling
her and my Uncle Wayne was keeping her at his house because um well it looks
like she's a wandering ghost who can't be left alone anymore. When did this
happen? I saw her in October, which is like three years ago in Covid years, and
I guess in that short span of time she had stop being able to dial a phone and
my drunk brother was not telling us how rapidly she was declining, and I did
get one phone call in April, in the middle of deadly virus, where she said
"could you come soon?"
So my uncle has her and
is saying "could you come get her" and then Emma is graduating in the
worst year for graduations ever so I said "could you keep her" til I could
graduate Emma and not miss that. Then we had to drive across the country to
pick up my mom because of virus and because my mom had hidden her wallet from
my drunk brother so she had no i.d. to fly her.
So there were 9 days
that I needed to cross the country and no one to watch my mom since my uncle is
80 and didn't feel like following a dementia patient around for weeks on end
since she liked taking his heart medicine or actually ANY medicine that was
left on the counters and she liked putting paper towels on the stove. So I
called my big brother up north to see if he could help, go fly and watch her
until I could get there. Our family on my side doesn't do anything like this,
we don't HELP really, there's no superhero situation or really any kind of
situation with my brothers. Like I said, the one was playing mean drunk nurse
in MD and the other is a bipolar pot smoker stage manager. But my friend
Linette said make brothers do things. If they can help, make them help.
My older brother has
this habit of talking like he's blowing up a balloon with how great he is. He
doesn't believe it, and we don't believe it either, but that balloon is getting
larger and larger anyway as we talk. It's exhausting. In the middle of our talk
I realize I am talking to a crazy person with a good heart but right now I need
a warm body at my mom's and he wants the job. Unfortunately he looks just like
my little brother, all pale and wispy blonde but that makes an interesting
effect on a demented mother who got attacked by that brother it turns out and
we'll reveal later.
So we have no money. So
we rent a big van and take out a middle row of seats and make a cushion bed in
there and this is our cross country castle. I have to find an army to take care
of farm here at home while we're gone. A family army of friends, who have never
taken care of a pool and chickens bunnies horses dogs and my horse boarder
helicopter pilot says he'll help with horses and then B's oldest son Bruce who
just failed at his PhD attempt says he wants to pile in the van and go (and
isn't this the plot for Little Miss Sunshine? Like exactly?) and we pack too
many games and we go.
Then it is countryside.
And Utah. And countryside. And Yellowstone. And countryside. And Cody Wyoming
Dairy Queen. And sunsets. And farmland. And Minnesota. And Deadwood. And Mount
Rushmore. And talking in the car. Laying in the car. Not one game is played.
All we do is look out the window and count the rivers. See the Badlands. South
Dakota. At one motel pool Emma meets another teenager and we say we love South
Dakota and what is it like to live here. He says South Dakota is ass.
We cross the Mississippi
and Bruce swims out into it. We pull into Chicago which is too much input after
farmland and Bruce swims into Lake Michigan. We ride bikes for 15 whole minutes
along the lake. We have dinner in a park and play frisbee happily with cousins
we never see. We see where Barry grew up. We drive to Pittsburgh. There is a
BLM protest one block from our hotel. We chant for trans black lives. We are
now in Forest Gump. We see where my dad went to college, in the drizzling rain
that feels like fairies are crying soft shyness on our shoulders. I pee by the
car on streets my dad ambled down at 19, feeling important, feeling his whole
life ahead of him. We see him there, young.
I cry alot in
Pittsburgh because I see the end of my life coming, I know I'm taking on
the life of my mom, and I know the weight of that commitment. I don't wear
commitment well, I can do it, but it chafes. I am a wild horse.
We eat Amish pretzels in
Maryland. I eat Amish Market everything because their simple clothes bring me
peace. Also, their hot sweet potatoes and green beans. There's an Amish guy
with hooks for hands. He can pick up change with his hooks. I feel wide eyed
like a nine year old Tom Sawyer when I look at his hook hands, so close to a
hot pretzel. If you have hook hands, you can do anything and how does he not
tear his shirt. He must have tons of towels with like holes all shredded
through them at home.
We spend time with Mom.
My friend comes and we have one day to attack her house and pack it and there
is sweating and arguing and finally silent depressing packing and then
rainstorm and there is so much memory and so much left behind, furniture that
doesn't fit you can't cram 77 years of a life into one truck sized packing
crate. There's no crate for all the caring.
We leave feeling
unsatisfied and wrecked and there's so much crying in the loft at my uncle's
because that's all that's left, is the mom who doesn't know anything is going
on and us behind the scenes, washed up the shore of destroyed, working aching
angry tired sick and still going. There are kayaks on the water and fishing and
every day we do that because my youngest daughter says you cast out your
problems and if you reel in a fish, your problems are gone. If there's no fish,
you cast them out again. I love this girl, watching the pain, and making it
lyrical, and physical.
Sunset water soothes. Also the friends. The friends, and family, near and far, that keep telling me like I'm still worth something, telling me I matter. That they love me. I can't hear anything, but they still build this bridge out of words and they keep me on the bridge, made of clouds. I can't do this, not even Dairy Queen is holding me up, and they say just hold onto us. We are here.
Their words are my eyes.
I am emptied out like a vacant medicine cabinet.
The day comes and we
pack mom into the van and tell her we're going to California and she explodes.
Our last leg of the road trip home lasts 10 minutes of fury and we have to turn
around. All the kids are crying. We meet my uncle in a parking lot at an Acme, where all disasters take
place, and he tries to talk her into going. She is not going.
So truth didn't work,
and we move smoothly onto lies. Gentle ones that will get her there safely. We
pack her dog in the van and send the boys on the trip home. We tell her we have
to find her dog. She is fretting. We are still getting to know each other and
now there's this pain.
My brother will fly her
home and my daughters and I fly home a day before her. These are anxiety
pancakes, these days. The dog missing. The mom mental. The trip home.
My friend drives three
hours to get us and take us to her house and then we realize her house is an
hour from the airport we fly out of. I can't stay at her house. I have to uber
at 9 pm to Washington. I cry for the entire hour to Boogie Fever on the radio
with my daughters in masks holding my hands in the dark.
The hotel has 18 floors
and we are all in weird family shock. The only thing that feels normal is the
shower. It is antiseptic there, and we are outside of our bodies anyway. We
sleep there for 6 hours and then catch our flight back.
The next day Mom comes
in at 9 pm after wrestling through 12 hours of traveling and horrible anxiety
for both her and my brother flying her. She gets her dog back. She is stretched
beyond her limits, and the next few days with my brother and fam and me in LA,
we try and pad gently around her, and pad her up with love and the life she
will hopefully accept. I also am scared like she's on fire and I'm made of
paper. What if I can't do this. What if I have no choice.
I get to ride and being
on a horse makes me feel normal. The horses look at me with slow blinks, and
the feet thudding the ground like nothing in the world has ever changed since
the beginning of (wo)man. There is security in that plodding. I don't believe
in security anymore, but I am looking sideways at it. In some tiny breath, in
the corner of my body, there's that silent thing raising it's tiny one finger. Hope.
It's been four days now.
Each day takes many minutes all of which we all feel, like skinny sharp
individually wrapped toothpicks. Waiting for things/mood to again dwindle down
to terrible. There is some terrible. Some faces of hers that are twisted, some
anger, all of it is warped though, not directed, just upset with no bag to put
it in. She is hanging on to, carries everywhere, her little embroidered bags
with quarters and dimes and pennies in them, and she has to have those with
her, and her dog. That's all she has to help her know she's okay. At 77. That's
all she brought. B always tells this story where he took acid and there was a
hamburger on his nightstand and when he was freaking out he kept staring at
that hamburger and if it was still there he knew he was still real, and alive.
That hamburger brought him through.
Today my (turns out to
be) good brother left back to Oregon and I was scared to do this alone. What
saved me and has saved me for 3 days is the pool. Put a mom in water and she
sings. She floats and sings, and moves her legs and arms and this is better
than any medicine. The water unties all the knots in her mind and her body
follows. It's Frankenstein's music. We put good food into her and talk gently
and slowly my life is melting back around ourselves. Maybe there is room for
her. We hope she will allow us in.
Tonight the pool had
tired her out and put her in bed at 730 and sang some Danny Kaye "Lullaby
in Ragtime" and she murmured happy sleepily, and her dog who looks like a fat footstool with legs was next to her. I went outside on the loudest night
of the year, July 4th, and before the loudness started, I got to see the light
on the tippy toppest of trees, that golden light that surrounds the end of the
day like silent orchestra music and is a million dollars, raining down on me. Reward.
My brother said getting
my mom here, we did a B+ job and I said next time let's shoot for C, C-.
Pool water and
twilight, the most basic elements. All free, if you just feel it, and wrapping
my mom up and giving her back to me, inch by inch. This day, at least.
