This morning after feeding my mom I had about 10 minutes to get her into the house before my class started and I had to wrestle her up and hold her up while pulling up her diaper which is the cirque du soleil level of difficulty especially if she goes limp suddenly which she did and I whipped up the diaper all messily but just in time before we both half crashed onto the side of her bed. Which is better than the floor you cannot get off the floor. I found out once. Messy and half crash and her saying I’m going home is success.
After zoom class I wheeled her out to the sun
even though it’s a cold 68 and I’m trying to feed her lunch by hand and she’s
slumped sideways with one eye shut and I can’t get her to sit up the brain part
that says “tilt over all crushed up” is the only working part today. For a
second I see her the way she is, not faking but with disease that love cannot
stop.
Dis. Ease.
I do not understand how love cannot stop this.
I’m doing everything right.
I don’t know why MY brain will not stop seeing the regular person with the familiar train track of her body that I have hung off literally every part and sat on the rest. I have used this person in entirety after coming out from under her skin in the 60s. You don’t seem to get rid of those little people.
I drove to McDonald’s later as the sun was
setting and Nathan watched her while zooming a college class next to the fat
couch chair where she was slumped and I was thinking
I cannot fathom disease. It’s not real. Parents don’t lose their minds. I could handle when she lost her mind in my teens, when she became a dancing queen and dated young guys some of whom we met at the state fair dunking booth (because those guys, despite being raging alcoholics, are fucking hilarious). It’s the losing control (without your consent) of all life and washing up here under my untrained fingers.
I’m not that good. Loving is not enough. I have to, I guess, do the unfathomable, which I think is admit there’s a problem. That’s like in a court room standing up and saying you forgive the guy who murdered your entire family. I'm not that good yet.
I had to jump up just now because there was a rat in the dog food closet I’ve been trying to catch and it ran into the ceiling when I threw open the door. Goddamn it. Ha though. Life mirrors life.
This disease is too close to vulnerability. I
see that and she has always been the wounded flower and me the sergeant
protecting her. I am vigilant and I can’t protect her. I have like all the
shame of Japan on me.
On the little ride I took right before McDonald's, when I was still blurry from tears of the impotent daughter (also a japanese play I believe), I started feeling better as horse legs chugging under you seem to zip up all your bad feelings and throw them down the storm drain. It was the fluttery butterfly, though, dogging me, riding alongside, flitting in front of me, and ahead of me and zigzagging ahead then beside then loopy up then erratically left, like a kid's doodle of a smile. Stayed long enough to say life is not straight ever
Then disappeared
