I'm her true love.
I remember her when she used to be herself and tell me about my birth and how happy she was, over and over, that she had a girl. That it was me, that I was the best thing that ever happened to her.
I felt the same way when my kids were born. I don't know if I was programmed as a little girl, because of the mom I had, to love all things maternally, to want to touch and gather and smooth the little things in my lap. You only have one person whose body forms and squeezes you out, she's what I got, what the stars sent, what shaped me
What I want to say is I was watching ER on the couch near my mom who has late stage alzheimer's, it's been a year and a few months since we brought her here, it's been 8 months since she stopped walking, she, the unstoppable, swept her last sweep and sat down, unsteadily, in December.
And now this version of her, this scrambled eggs mom, is over in Poppa's big chair, and either anxious, or babbling, or I'm feeding her, or I'm anxious or babbling. But I decided not to work, to stay here with her. And on ER, there is Abby, my favorite character, and Sally Field as her manic depressive mom, and there is Abby smoothing out her mom, and her mom saying you were born, you were the love of my life
And I'm crying because my mom, we were one person at different times. I hated her, I merged into her, she didn't shield me from her disappointments, her problems, her mistakes, I grew up fast but I had a horse so he carried me away from it periodically, and pounded nature back into me, and I had Chris, I had a house with food, I had a brother, so I lived. I belonged, to myself. What I didn't get, I made up. I wrote the family I wanted. I dreamed it at night so I wasn't lonely. I had all their voices in my head and I wrote them down so they lived, real as I lived.
I am in this mess with my mom, the end of her life, and she feels it all, the blanket of dementia that is usually pulled over her head and secured tightly around her neck sometimes whoever is holding down that blanket gets distracted and walks away and the blanket falls away and she looks at me quickly and says all the things urgently that I know she wants to say she says
you are the most worthwhile thing I've done with my life
I love you
Thank you
I'm sorry
Then the blanket goes back over, the noose. Noosed Moose.
When Abby was sitting on that bench on some dumb made up show in Chicago, in winter, and puts her coat around her freezing mom who is crying, and wraps her arms around her mom who is apologizing, and hurting, and loving, and sorry, this is what feels like love to me. The kind of love where you know your job, you fit with this person because she made you, she tripped and fell on her face a bunch, she mothered you but she was a real person, with real huge pain, and we became a family of pain.
So when she needed me I went.
She couldn't talk right, I put my coat around her.
She can't eat right, I feed her.
She was my whole world, when I was 13. 14. 15. 5. 3. 11. 8. 0.
She is an orphan. No one wants you when you can't think or speak or walk or shit.
I want her. I am the love of her life.
