I haven't been writing about my mom because talking about my mom seems to be the same at every party. Oh how sad. Oh you've been working so hard. It's unfair this disease. Maybe you should kill her. Etc.
Yes my mom being sick is terrible. I sometimes forget she's sick because she's been this way so long it's just who she is.
I don't think of her (usually) as this burden that everyone seems to think of her as, when I go to parties and people ask. I have to improve my party conversation about dementia. Because I'm not sorry or burdened by my lovely mother. She's my mom. She's been many things to me. She's been confusing, and annoying, and baffling and not always what I needed, and funny, and loud and christmassy and comforting and beautiful and kind and affectionate and svelte. She's been chock full of laughter all the time. Except for those drinking years. Or maybe even more then, I was just not enjoying those that much.
I don't always want to do everything for my mom every day in her illness because who wants to do an incredible job all the time, it's humanly impossible. I've done a better job at this 24 hour emotional and physical and spiritual mom'snurse occupation than I did working on any movie or raising any kid. Maybe cause with the kids we would speed through milestones and the job would change, it was always speeding up and getting more interesting and complex. This illness slows down and gets more complex but the changes aren't easier. They're loss instead of gain. So I had to shake hands with loss. I have to invite loss in to tea. I have to keep wading into loss without losing sight of the half sunken ship that is my mom and keep pushing past the rising water to get to her. I'm her buoy.
I think getting rid of her dog to this new lady has been hardest on me because that dog I was secretly assigning the real task of keeping mom alive. She's an outer tiny fluffy focus that mom will sometimes look at and call over and laugh and be happy to see. I felt like the burden was on that dog, because she had the dog at her home in Maryland, the dog was her dot of reality that kept her out in the neighborhood walking and living, until she started getting lost and not knowing how to get home. So without her dog reminding her to be her, it's just me.
I guess mom got lost in dementia not because she wanted to, it just came in and swept her away and pieces of her are still clinging to the doorframe, and those are the pieces I still come and see, and take care of, and pat the corners of her eyes and smooth away the worries. My mom is still the same, whether she's sick or able to talk to knows my name or can walk. She's my mom and I'm going to stay with her.
How can you give up on someone when they're helpless. This is the time to not give up on them the most. What else are we made for than to help the people we love the most when they need us the most.
This is the thing I don't say at parties.
I did love my mom better when she was loving me and it was all about me and her making me food or telling me what to do or tucking me in at night. Because who doesn't like being doted on and adored. I would never have had enough of that, I'm going to put a craigslist ad out for that cause I could really use that, all of the time.
But giving yourself to a sick or dying person who needs help is maybe the luckiest work I've ever been given. I know it sounds impossibly lame but life shrinks down to just the love of the people you care most about in the world. I think it was always that way with the kids, it's so easy to see it there if you give yourself to your kids. It's the same with your parents.
What love doesn't hurt if you do it right, because it is so big.
