madeline aperture's Open Salon Blog

gun control for the mentally absent

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:06:51 -0400

I keep not writing anything because I want what I write to be perfect documentation. Just how it happened, freeze-dried for future reference, perfectly preserved, no unsightly blips and bumps and double-exposures. Just the truth. Presented with grace and humor and peaceful acceptance, of course.

Unfortunately that's not what I'm feeling. I'm feeling anger and betrayal because my mom has turned into a bizarre, sad, and often maddeningly irritating stranger right in front of my eyes. I'm upset that she's left me - that for all intents and purposes, she is gone. I don't care that I'm 48 years old - I still need my mommy! I'm mad because now I have to do things like call her doctors and call about lawyer appointments and call care facilities and I am a princess and I do not care to have my serene days disturbed with thoughts of having to fling my poor mother into a nursing home because she won't eat and she has to have someone with her 24/7 and if it's not my father she wants to know where he is every 1.3 seconds and she's currently making my poor father's life a living hell. That's not how the world is supposed to work! Isn't everyone supposed to be catering to ME??!!??

No, no, I'm not really a princess. I just play one on the interwebs. I do however bitterly hate and resent intrusions on my time and space, and I can't easily make these calls at work and I wish someone else would do it and I'm even more annoyed that now, when my sister-in-law and I have finally managed to figure out how to get home health nurses in every couple of days to help out (and please note that I made the initial call and the SIL did pretty much ALL the rest of it. I live an hour and a half away; she, poor soul, lives right beside them) now I get a call from my brother today. Just as I'm leaving for lunch.

He needs me to call my mother and talk to her and see if she will please stop yelling at my father and telling him she is going to shoot him and she is going to kill him and she isn't going to stand for any more and she is finding a gun.

"....!!??!!??...."

Because my brother is on the road far away and won't be back for hours and the SIL is at work and won't be home for hours and maybe if we call her she'll calm the hell down. And quit mentioning guns and shooting because that is, well, ALARMING. She weighs 90 pounds tops and my father probably weighs 250, and although they do have a rifle in the back of the closet I'm pretty certain she has no idea where the bullets are and even if she did, she can't figure out how to use the coffee pot or which way to turn the phone around to speak to whoever's on the other end, so I'm pretty certain she could not figure out how to load a rifle and shoot my father with it. However they do have knives and frying pans and a rolling pin somewhere and many other assorted potentially lethal objects and maybe this has all gone way too far to be taken care of with some home health care nurse visits.

So of course I call and of course she is as pleasant and cheery as she can be. As always. Daddy sneaks off around the corner and tells me she's settled down. For now.

Jeeze. Now what? She won't eat so she's off her Alzheimer's medication now, as well as the "mood stabilizer" medication. I guess the home health people could give some suggestions. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before it's not a problem anymore, but I don't want to consider that possibility either for sure.

And perhaps the worst thing of all is the thought of how she'd feel if she knew this was going on. My mother, back when she was the person I knew, was the most pleasant, kindest, least violent person on earth. Who never swore, never threw things, and certainly never threatened gunplay. It would be funny if it wasn't so awful.

CrazyQuestions House

Sun, 8 Mar 2009 03:03:59 -0400

I’m spending the weekend in Crazy Questions house. My mother, Dorothy, has Alzheimer’s. It’s somewhere in the moderate stage at this point. She was diagnosed about three and a half years ago, but we’d known for a number of years by then that she had some serious memory problems. She was on Aricept for awhile, and is on Ryzadine now. That’s slowed it down, but she’s getting worse.

If you didn’t know something was wrong, though, it would probably take awhile to realize it. She’s good at hiding her confusion. Well, she used to be good at it. She’s not as good as she used to be. She’s slipping.

She can remember names. She remembers everyone’s names. She remembers names of people she went to school with 70 years ago. She remembers the exact type of cirrhosis of the liver that killed my aunt. I can’t remember it. It starts with a “b”, but that’s all I can pull up. She remembers all these details, but she’s losing the connections. She knows us all, but she’s forgetting why she knows us.

She asks how my mother-in-law is every time I talk to her. She asks how my mother-in-law is numerous times every time I talk to her. She often brings up how much she enjoyed talking to my mother-in-law when we brought her to visit several years ago, and she points out the chair where my mother-in-law sat. She also asks about my husband when he isn’t with me. She asks about him repeatedly. Yet last time they were at our house, she asked my husband where he lives.

A couple of months ago she turned to my brother and said, “Now, where do you live?”

My brother laughed and said, “Well, I live in that house right behind you, Mama!” We all laughed. But it’s not very funny. But we still laugh.

There are baby pictures of me and my brother hanging on the wall in the livingroom. Every time I’m home, she points out those pictures and tells me that’s me and my brother, and speculates on the color my dress was (pink or green) and the color his overalls were (blue or red). The pictures are black and white, so those colors are as lost as her memory. Sometimes I think I remember the outfits, although I couldn’t. I was just a baby. Sometimes I think they were one color, sometimes the other color. But she always points them out and she always talks about them. A few months ago she pointed out my picture, my pink or green dress, and I said, “That is a cute picture of me.”

“That’s you?” she said. “I thought that was Beth!”

“….well, yeah,” I said. “That’s me. I’m Beth.”

“OH,” she said. And changed the subject.

When she said that, I remembered something that happened when I was maybe four years old.

I woke up on the couch in the livingroom. It was dark. It felt like the middle of the night. A radio had been playing in the kitchen, but suddenly the music had turned into an off-the-station buzzing. I think that’s what woke me up. My mother was giving my brother a bath. She’d left the bathroom door open, and I could see them in there, in the greenish light. She was kneeling by the bathtub, soaping up his hair.

“Where’s Mama?” I said.

“I’m right here,” she said. “I’m giving John a bath.”

“But… where’s Dorothy?” I said.

I can still, all these years and years later, remember exactly how confused I felt. I can still remember how my mother and Dorothy were, at that moment, two separate people in my mind. One of them was there; one of them wasn’t there. And I can still remember how suddenly everything clicked, everything slipped back to normal, I woke all the way up. Then it was just Mama giving John a bath in the tub at night, with the radio sliding back onto the station.

Maybe this is kind of how she feels, when she looks at someone and she knows, “this is my daughter” or “this is Beth”, but the connection between Beth and daughter has evaporated. One of us is here, one of us is not. The radio is off the station.

time time time

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:02:34 -0500

I'm trying to think of how to start. I want to blog about time, and about memory, and about how time affects memory and memory affects time. And how you can't really trust either one. But you can't not trust them either.

I've always had an excellent memory for things that happened. Or at least I have an excellent memory of my own version of what happened. And I have a very bad memory for day to day things. Like did I cut off the coffee maker? Did I pack my yoga clothes? Did I ever eat lunch?

The earliest memory that I can pinpoint exactly is when my brother was born. I was two and a half, and I remember going to the hospital with my father and my grandparents to pick him and my mother up. He was born in December, and there was snow and ice everywhere. I fell down in the parkinglot and got wet from the slush, so I had to wait in the car with one of my grandparents while everyone else went inside. I still remember the terrible disappointment, and my tights hanging on the steeringwheel to dry. Apparently I pitched a fit and they reconsidered - the next thing I remember is seeing my mother far off down at the end of a long hallway, sitting in a chair, holding my brother wrapped in a blanket.

It seems like an awfully detailed memory for someone who was two and a half. Maybe it's not really what happened. I also have a vivid memory of being in our old GTO with my mother and my brother, and following a witch into the tunnel that crossed into town. The witch was wearing a tall pointy black hat and driving a miniature red convertible. Another time I remember standing in our pasture, looking up at a very very tall blue woman who was wearing a huge wide brimmed hat like a rice picker in China.

So, who knows. That's what I'd like to write about. What's memory, what's imagined, what was a dream, and how do we ever know the difference?

The really funny thing is that I'm listening to my iPod as I write. I have over 1100 songs on my iPod, and it's on shuffle. As soon as I started this, my first entry, the first song it plays is "Time." The Tori Amos version, not the Tom Waits version which is the original and who I was hearing in my head and quoting with the title of my blog - Time Time Time- but close enough. Must be a sign.