I was having a pretty good time being mad at my brother.
He came all this way, not really wanting to, from up north, to see our mom, the one with dementia. The one who on the the outside doesn't look like she's in control of herself, how she looks, how she feels, who she is, anymore.
I was outraged, he's only here 3 days. He kept showing up in the afternoon. He kept wanting to leave as soon as he could. He kept not connecting.
And it's almost the end, tomorrow's the end. He leaves tomorrow.
I put her to bed and everyone left, people went to the movies, to go snowboarding, to go to a comedy show. Everyone in my family doing something, escaping.
I went to the couch and ER, a dumb old show that's been my family through this dementia.
I was trying to watch all the episodes, and I had started at season 10, gone to the end and then started over at 1. I'm somewhere in 6 right now.
Then there's this episode that got me hooked watching it in the first place. It's the Abby one, with her bipolar mother. And the scene I can't watch without just crying and crying. Abby hugging her mom. Her mom crying telling her you are my angel. When you were born I knew everything would be allright. Please don't leave me, she's saying.
Then all that outrage left me. I was crying wedged between dogs on the couch, because why do I have to see this episode again. Is this where I started, am I done with ER? I think I'm still short a few seasons, I must have seen this one randomly before I was hooked. But that's not the reason
I'm crying because the reason I am taking care of mom is the one I forgot. Because when she was fully alive with her brain still all here, she laughed so much. She loved me so huge. It was the one thing I knew, I could count on her grabbing me and telling me over and over how much she loved me. How important I was to her. Like her voice could not stop, tripping over itself to tell me how my birth meant everything to her. Over and over again. How happy she was I was born. She wrote flowery gushy things, she said flowery gushy things. She owned me and my heart, she drowned me in her love. I knew it.
I think my brothers didn't get this. I think this visiting brother especially. Aside from maybe having a birth trauma that has impaired him, giving him early epilepsy and later mood disorders - I think at 15 she moved away with my little brother and me, and we started over, so far away. My big brother, at 15, lost that immeasurable love cloud, which maybe he never had as devoutly as I did anyway. I don't know, I wasn't him. I was me.
So then he didn't get to grow up with Mom. To see her crushing sadness, and her single womanness. Her working life, and her mothering in wintery Maryland, in seasons, where things blew in and out, weather changed, and she shrunk to a teenager and started her life over, growing up along with us, and we had to roll along with her, there was only her to look up to.
When I put her to bed tonight I just cried telling her I am here. Then cried watching Abby hold her crying mom. We are who we are tied to with extreme love. I don't know anyone else's experience, all I know is her love meant I was safe. Even when she fucked up so bad, so she went to rehab, so she dated the wrong guys, I know I know she worshipped me.
This has given me the ability to worship my own kids, to leap even further than she did, to improve on her model the way I see Emma and Nathan and Lilly, how they will improve on MY version, with their kids.
This visiting brother has a new camera and he looks neat and he's on the surface mellow and functioning. And then avoiding being here and sleeping for three days when he's home and embellishing every story so you can't ever believe anything he says.
My mom could only love one of us really well. Maybe because I was the only one listening, or living off of it, or modeling myself, or lonely enough, or female, or all of the above. I wanted to be the good daughter, she had had so much pain. But now I know there is so much I don't know because it's all built into me under the murky brain heading DYNAMICS, I don't know myself at all. I am programmed because of how I grew up, what I decided was important, what got in anyway, what the weather blew at us, who happened to blow through our house, the music my mom played, the patients she talked about, the traditions we worshipped, the love she heaped.
My little brother and I had a shorthand, we grew up the whole way together (before he stopped growing altogether, veered into a vodka train station and lost all his tickets). We grew up with mom and if he had had a different life altogether, if he had shaken off the bad, grown, matured, loved himself, made better adult choices, if I had called him now at this dying time he would have come running and we would have laughed and lifted mom together, wiped her together, cheered her up together, done this whole dying thing together. Like we did it unconsciously when we were teenagers. We were one mind. Really, I didn't know it was only my mind. Not because I am better. Maybe because I was older, or because I wanted better, and more. Or because I was me.
Everybody loses. The way it is, here. The boys get nothing. I get the dying alone, here with my now family.
I have to be there for her, I think I've hung on despite myself, because of all that love that I've forgotten because she has forgotten how to tell me, so it's not throbbing in the air, it's turned from a hulking cloud of joy into a thinner and thinner line of steam that maybe will become invisible and then be gone. Maybe by summer.
I wish I didn't see Abby love her loving mother so hugely. I wish I didn't realize that my brother not wanting to be here isn't because he's a dick but because he's in so much pain. Pain that requires cigarettes and weed and sleeping and anger. I understand.
I might have all that pain, and anger, and would like the sleeping to hide from it. But at least I didn't get cut off at 15. I had that huge love, as damaged as it was, it was epic, from my mom for I'd say a solid 45 years.
So then you get a Juliet Myfanwy. Me.
