SECRET BIRD

“No one here has a secret bird, but me.” My mother whispered as we sat at a table in a diner, eating our Thanksgiving meal. I can’t help but think of how far we’ve fallen from the family that gathered around the dining room table set with the good china and laden with serving bowls of steaming lima beans, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole and a giant turkey carved to perfection by Dad. My dad worked in a butcher shop in his teens. He was the one who cut up our chickens and deboned them. He was the one who would get out the ancient electric knife and carve the turkey. We haven’t gathered as a family around that table in more than twelve years. The family has shrunk from age and deaths, leaving behind a shell of what we used to be.

But Mom was whispering about secret birds.

Whenever my mom starts saying something that sounds fantastical, I lean in. “Ooh, tell me more!” I respond, giddily. It’s almost like I’m about to get some really dishy and juicy gossip. But also, Mom was never the fantastical one when I was growing up. Practical and serious. The silliness was left for Dad. On this day, I lean in and ask more about this secret bird. What kind of bird is it? Where does it sit? As per usual, she doesn’t give me an answer other than it’s “a kind of bird”. Mom was also not one to answer a question. She has always answered around the question. My mother is the bird.

The last time I saw Mom was in August and now I was shocked by the change in her. Just a few months ago, she was still walking and speaking clearly. We sat outside and watched the terrapins roaming around the yard. She even stood up at one point to reach under a table and grab a tiny baby terrapin for us to hold and inspect. In just a few short months, my mother’s mobility has greatly declined, requiring a wheelchair and a chauffeur. She is in a constant state of resistance, always attempting to slide out of her chair, but she lacks the strength to hold her body up for walking. So she crawls. Her voice comes out of her mouth in whispers and slurs, often sticking on a word and repeating it like a skipping record. And she doesn’t remember me.

By order of my birth, I have drawn the short straw of memory.

She was happy to see my face but my name had to be prompted from her mouth. Even then, I am not sure she ever truly grasped our connection to each other. I often caught a look of suspicion in her eyes when she looked at me. It was almost like she was thinking “I think I should know who this person is, but I don’t.” Later, I helped my sister move Mom from her chair to her bed. We’d worn her out with all of our morning activities. Showering and dressing and going out to dinner is a lot for her. My sister and I got her settled in her bed and Mom asked about going to see her dad. “We go see Daddy?” she asked. I wasn’t sure what she meant and asked “Do you mean Pepaw?” She nodded and I said “Yeah, we used to always go and see him this time of year.” We spent so many Thanksgivings in Mississippi with my Mom’s family. I told my mother that we wouldn’t see him this year and then left her sleeping.

There was a moment when I was driving to the diner. Tulsa feels unfamiliar to me now and I followed my brother-in-law. Breakfast at Tiffany’s was playing on the radio, a song that Chris and I would poke fun at. It is disconcerting to be someplace that is no longer familiar, yet so full of memories. It felt like walking through a field of stinging nettle. We stopped at a stop light and the car in front to my left sported a sticker that read “Every thing is going to be okay.” I eyed it suspiciously and wondered if that were true. Some days, I feel like maybe I’m some sort of immortal, stuck at age thirty four while those around me grow old (and or sick) and pass on from this world. I don’t change while every thing around me is shrinking and aging. This isn’t true, but seeing my mother’s rapid decline in a matter of months makes it feel true.

On my drive home, I tried distracting myself form the state that is my mother. I listened to a podcast about salt, attempted a French lesson, and flipped through music. But it’s a long drive and my brain couldn’t help but flick and pick over earlier moments of the day. I kept looping over the moment when my name was prompted and how my mother doesn’t know me. I kept seeing the state of her, shrunken and frail. Unrecognizable. Now I realize that we don’t know each other. She doesn’t know me as her daughter and I no longer know her has my mother. While she’s become a stranger to me, I’ve become some tiny memory that barely tugs at her brain.

Maybe…maybe I’m her secret bird.

WE'VE ALL GOTTA GROW UP SOME TIME...

I got a notice last week that my undergrad was hosting a ‘ceremonial demolishing’ of my old dorm building, Willard Hall. On the day of the demo, I also read a headline about AOL discontinuing their dial-up service. I can remember every single time I listened to computer wind chimes as my Dell computer attempted to sign into AOL. Those computer wind chimes opened the doors of the interwebs, but now most of us don’t even have landlines anymore. It’s all Wifi and fibers and space magic. More than half of those times, it was Chris signing in while I sat on my bed with some science book open in front of me. The news of the end of both of those things felt slightly unfair after spending the weekend with some of the very people I lived with in those dorms. More than unfair, really. It was too much of a kick in the guts for a Monday, particularly when it was the first Monday back after a week of vacation.

I can remember every tiny detail of my first kiss with Chris and how it took place outside the north east double doors right outside my dorm room. The very room they’re tearing down right as I type this. My dreams the last few weeks have been filled with variations of Chris. Which is something I find unsettling, disorienting even. There’s a part of me that wants to whisper “go away” while at the same time begging him to never ever leave. Oh, the duality of the heart, but when I’m not waking up with neck sweats, I’m dreaming of Chris doing typical Chris shenanigans. He’s always just simmering there under the surface of my skin. At some point in our weekend, Deborah pulled out her old photo albums from our time in college. So I sat pouring salt over wounds that will never heal, flipping through pictures of us in our most gloriously ridiculousness.

And that’s the kicker or the meat of it or the everything….

Every time I think about my time as an undergrad, I can honestly say that this was the happiest I had ever been. Even before meeting Chris and becoming friends with a list as long as my arm of people I genuinely like and admire to this day. I spent so many nights sitting in the lobby watching TV with a group of people and hoping with my whole heart that this boy named Alex would notice me. This was before I knew about things like friend zones, which is where I firmly landed with Alex. It took countless ice-cream runs and Taco Bell trips for me to figure it out. Though later, that boy Alex would notice me as more than a friend, but it would be too late. That one conversation over tater-tots and burgers at the snack bar with Chris ended all of that nonsense with Alex.

It is not that I haven’t been happy since my time at school. I just know that I can pinpoint that spot on my timeline where there was no possible way my body could hold any more joy in that moment. The biggest most stressful thing I had to deal with was any Dr. McGrath test, which I miraculously always managed to pass with flying colors. Mom and Dad still paid my bills and made sure I had a working vehicle. I was an adult without having to be an adult and it was the most carefree time of my life. Willard Hall was the center of all of it. I don’t care if it was run down and gross. We all knew it was haunted and there was that summer of hoards of crickets, but it was my home, my world, for three years.

The school is not completely tearing down the building, just demolishing the inside. Amy went to the ceremony and reported back with disappointment. She was hoping for more pomp and circumstance and maybe seeing more people from the old days. I have to agree with her. They missed out on an opportunity to interview those of us who once lived there, to hear and record our stories. I am certain that those present, knew nothing of Nellie the resident ghost or that one time we had a real fire in the boiler room and three of us resident assistants ran back into the building, shoving firemen aside to get to a dorm room where someone’s boyfriend was hiding under a desk. Those stupid fire alarms went off all the dang time and it was usually always a false alarm. Except that one time, but even then it was well contained and only damaged a boiler. I am more than certain that those present know nothing of the hours and hours that were spent just laughing and laughing.

I hope the hallways still echo with our laughs.

I received a note from the Jens last week that said something about how getting old is hard. We’ve all become the age of knee shots and hip replacements and I can’t for the life of me figure out how it happened. I like the idea of being trapped in amber with my head thrown back in unabandoned laughter, all of my people surrounding me and trapped in the very same way. Forever joy and silliness. Chris in the middle of it all like a goddamn bonfire. It’s not aging that is hard. It is the losses because of aging that makes it so difficult. In one of the movie versions of Little Women, a young Amy says “Oh Jo, we all have to grow up sometime. We might as well know what we want.” Maybe that’s the thing. Maybe I never really knew what I wanted with the exception of one thing and I didn’t feel like a grown-up until I lost that one thing.

But I refuse to grow up any more than I am right now. I will continue to share fart jokes with my Insta friends and hide ridiculous things in their homes. I will dance and sing along to the music playing in the grocery store. I will put cartoon figures on my science posters. I can be old. I just don’t have to grow up.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

The other day, I was helping a graduate student set up auto imaging of a slide on a very old microscope. This microscope is the system I have used for years to run batches of slides for one of our labs. It requires me to run a fairly complicated program that works with a slide loading robot and over the years, I have developed a love/hate relationship with this system. When it is working, it is great. When it is not working, there are a million possible reasons why it is not working and I have to troubleshoot all of those reasons to fix the problem. The older the system has gotten the worse these little issues have become. So it is finally time to replace this system with something new. By the time I had given a hard stop to accepting any more slides for batch scanning, the program had become so glitchy that it was randomly not imaging slides. 

The lab I run these slides for had a really hard time with the concept of pausing their imaging experiments while the new system gets installed and we learn how to use the new robot. Finally we agreed they could still use the system until the company moved it, but they would not be able to use the robot and would have to run only one slide at a time. I trained a graduate student to set up the program and run the slides. Of course, he had loads of problems but the company came to move the system. So this week, I was once again going over how to set up the program to run one slide at a time on this old microscope that has basically been decommissioned. Part of setting up the program is entering in a number representing the z plane of your sample. I always think of it as years because the numbers are usually 1771 or like 1884. This time around the number came out to be 1998 and I said “1998! That’s the year I got married and graduated undergrad!” The graduate student I was training said “Whoa…uh…congratulations? I was one.” I did my best to laugh at this and not murder.

Then I thought…wait…he’s just starting! When he was a year old, I was getting married in Vegas and graduating college! Chris and I were just beginning to move into grownup land. We managed to postpone grownup land by going to graduate school, but we were doing the thing. Living the life. In fact, while this person was navigating through childhood, adolescence, and undergrad, I was doing the most grownup stuff of my life. I got a little woozy at the thought of all the life I have lived during this young person’s lifetime. It’s a lot! I’ve seen a lot of things, experienced a lot of things. It’s staggering to think about it. There seems to be swaths of time between milestones and events, yet no time has passed at all and I am confused about how I’ve managed to crame so much living into this amount of time. Michael keeps reminding me that we’re almost fifty. “I’ll be fifty THIS YEAR!” He’ll exclaim. It’s possible he’s more surprised by this than anyone considering he really believed he wouldn’t live this long. He seems to be leaning into being ‘old’. This week, J would have turned forty five and I am sure that if he were still with us, I’d be teasing him about a midlife crisis. He probably would have taken up Cage Fighting as his midlife crisis. This is also the twenty year anniversary of his death. Both of his children are no longer children, but married adults. Yet I do not feel old enough for any of this to be the case. 

I am old enough to have an elderly parent who no longer remembers my married name. 

But again, none of that seems possible because I am a child. If you only knew the number of fart jokes my friend Lauren and I send back and forth to each other in a week. Also, I heard a joke recently that makes me laugh every time I think about it and it is so dumb.

If science were easy, it would be called “your mom”. -unknown

Now doesn’t that make you chuckle?! When I told that joke to a coworker, we laughed so hard that tears leaked out. Because ‘your mom’ jokes, along with ‘dees nutz’ jokes are juvenilely hilarious. So while I have lived a life and grown, so to speak, I am mentally a thirteen year old teenage boy. I sent a text to Michael this week about Sweden being the place to go for moose spotting and I included a link for a place that offers Moose Safaris. I told him if we spotted a moose on the first day, we could then go to that outfitter’s Beaver Safari, wink wink. He did not respond about the Beaver Safari, but I like to imagine he found it just as hilarious as I did.

While, mentally I’ve remained childlike, I am also very aware of the possibility of retirement. CBS Sunday Morning last week was all about retirement. Then I went over to Billy and Dean’s for a game of dominoes and tea where I met two lovely ladies of retirement age and we had an enlightening discussion about my possibilities. My take away from all of that is that I will one day retire so that I can be even more childish and playful. I know exactly what the ‘little old lady’ version of me is going to look like. Spoiler, she looks very much like me now just with more wrinkles and gray hair. I’m lucky because I got my mom’s hair where the gray and blondish brown blend in a way that makes the gray look like it was put there on purpose and you’ll only notice the wrinkles when I come to a stop on my Vespa. I may end up retiring in Italy or Portugal, but I’m thinking about opening an adult only disco skate rink. Something that combines skating and dance music and maybe bingo. 

So to that young grad student who was only a year old in 1998, thank you for the congratulations. Graduating college was a big life milestone that led to so many more. That alone is worth congratulating. But maybe really the congratulations should go towards the quantity of living I’ve managed to do in the twenty seven years since then. It tells me a lot about just how much I can accomplish in a short amount of time. And there is an unknown amount of time left for me to fill up with adventures big and small.

I better get busy.

THE ARCHIVES

She asked me if I had gotten married. My mother. She has our names and phone numbers written on a piece of paper, taped to her wall above her phone. My sister took away the smart phone months ago, replacing it with a land line. The smart phone became too much to deal with. Mom was answering spam calls, becoming agitated by the telemarketers telling her she owed money. So the phone went away. I was having breakfast with Mom when she asked me about getting married. She didn’t recognize the last name written on her paper. My mother speaks in random riddles and usually I go along with it. I do my best to live in her world when I am with her, but this one threw me off my game. I explained to her that was indeed my married name, with Chris, but that I had not remarried. She seemed to take it well enough, saying something about how she was sure that I would at least tell her I was getting married. Later, as I was leaving, we passed another resident and Mom introduced me as her granddaughter.

This came at the tail end of a long two days. Michael and I along with my siblings and their spouses spent two days clearing garbage from our mother’s house. We sorted through baskets and piles of papers, taking loads and loads out to the dumpster bags. We sorted through trash looking for treasures and deciding what should stay. We’ll have an estate sale at some point, but my goal for this trip was just get rid of the garbage. Michael and I cleared two rooms the evening we arrived. It feels like garbage was the theme. We slept fitfully on mattresses on the floor and ate meals that consisted of shades of brown. We ended each day dehydrated but too tired to lift cup to our dry lips. One night, Michael found me asleep with my book open. I don’t even remember opening the book in the first place.

I brought home two boxes that are sitting in the living room, waiting for me to sort through. The boxes are filled with old photos and newspaper clippings. Among the treasures discovered was a large scroll with a handwritten family tree of my dad’s side of the family. I know close to nothing about his side, the Graham side. The little I know comes from word of mouth, mostly from a grandmother late in her life. We were not close with Dad’s family. Our visits to Mississippi were always centered around my mother’s family with only short visits any one from Dad’s family. My fingers are itching to open the scroll up and pour over the details. Michael joked about having our very own Finding Your Roots moment where we discover some famous relative. To think that scroll was found in a trash pile previously sorted by my mother as if to erase that side of my genetics. One of the items she took with her to the new home is a card, covered with old buttons and her named scrawled at the bottom. As we sat chatting, she pointed it out and said that my father must have made it. She said “I do things right and that was not made right.” while attempting to tie the ribbon that had come loose from the top of the card. Even now, she still finds faults in my dad.

Complicated feelings.

There is nothing simple about these relationships. I want to be forgiving and forgetful. She is not the mother I spent hours with as a child, watching old black and white movies or baking cookies. She’s not the same woman who would lay on the floor of her sewing room while painstakingly attempted to sew a straight seem. She hasn’t been that woman in years. Someone asked me if we were cleaning out her house because she had passed and I had to bite my tongue because as horrible it is to say it, it would be easier it that were the case. The witnessing of her mental decline is torturous. Not remembering my married name stung me more than I would have thought. What else does she not remember about that part of my life? Does she remember attending my wedding in Vegas or the beautiful reception we had at the old house? Does she remember Chris? These are all things I will never ask her.

She’s never been one for silliness or jokes, always playing the straight man to my dad’s goofball shenanigans. There are glimpses of a hint of silly in her now though. She talks about how they never let her out. She’s a flight risk and you can see the delight in her eyes when she says it. I wouldn’t be surprised to get a phone call from my sister frantic because Mom has escaped and gone missing. Just find the nearest junk sale. That’s where she’ll be, rummaging through someone’s yard sale. Yard sales are her heaven.

AND THEN I DIDN'T SMILE FOR TWO YEARS

Last Thursday, before leaving for my weekend with Heather, I went to the orthodontist to get Invisalign. I thought they would just hand me some plastic teeth covers and that would be it. That is not how this works. First, the technician had to glue a bunch of nubs onto my teeth as well as a metal hook because I have to wear a rubber band on the left side. I was not prepared for any of this. The place where the rubber hooks to the top is poky and has worn a sore into my upper lip. Maybe that will get better when I change them out on Thursday for the next round of teeth covers. Invisalign is basically like making a claymation movie, except instead molding clay, you’re moving teeth. And they’re probably not really called ‘teeth covers’. This is what I have decided to call them because they feel very much like the plastic couch covers of the 70s and 80s.

I hate them.

I keep telling myself that all of this is for the greater good and the health of my mouth. None of this is cosmetic. It’s all about securely setting roots into the jaw bone and maintaining a healthy jaw so that I won’t have to pull all my teeth and get dentures when I’m 80. This is a good and important thing I am doing for my teeth. So many people have told me that I will get used to the teeth covers. They have told me that I will become so well practiced in prying them off my teeth and popping them back on that I won’t need the special hook tool the orthodontist gave me to pry them out. This skill is important because I can’t eat with them in my mouth. There’s no such thing as a spontaneous snack for me anymore. It’s not that I usually snack between meals, but sometimes candy and other goodies are brought into the office. Halloween means that our break room will be filling up with mini-candy bars and skittles. I’m going to have to really want it. Since Michael and I have both been sick, I have not tested out what it’s like to kiss with teeth covers. The orthodontist said to not eat with them in, but did not say anything about leaving them in during sex. It’s either going to be real weird or someone’s new kink. I mean, I’m sure I would not have to search hard to find that porn. I am not going to do that search. This is just where my brain went.

I am growing weary and frustrated with the maintenance of this body. I spent about an hour on hold Monday morning just to leave a message with my intern doctor that I’d like talk about the blood test results from the blood work she ordered two weeks ago. Tuesday, my plan is to make an appointment with my gyno to talk about my ten day periods and the extra one I’m having right now. Maybe it’s just because it’s the week of Halloween, a week of all things gory and spooky. My body wants our costume to be a crime scene or a mash up between Carrie and Slimer (from all the snot coming out of my nose). I know by body is aging, but right now with the teeth covers and the erratic periods, I feel very much like a thirteen year old again.

Aging is living.

WHAT I BROUGHT BACK

Michael and I drove down to my mom’s Thursday evening, arriving just in time for us all to go to bed. The two of us and Josephine slept on mattresses that had been plopped down in Mom’s living room. I woke up early Friday morning, achy and frozen. We dressed and took Mom out for breakfast. The whole time, Michael and I steered the conversation to the positive and hyping up her big move. Then we went back to her house to load up the vehicles with the things for her new space. This did not take long. Her new space is basically a studio apartment with a tiny living area, a bedroom and bath and a small kitchenette with a small fridge, microwave and sink. We arranged furniture and that was that. Mom is now in her new home.

There were some moments of struggle, things she wanted to take but does not need like her microwave. For the most part, the transition was easy. It did not keep me from worrying about her for the rest of the evening. Michael, my brother and sister-in-law and I went back to my mom’s house to chat and plan the next course of action. I did manage to fill two garbage bags with trash just from clearing and cleaning the kitchen counter, but I quickly ran out of steam. There’s a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff that could be useful to someone. There’s furniture and dishes and pots and pans. I picked up at least five can openers while clearing the counter. There is not a table top surface that is visible from all the piles of knick-knacks and trinkets and just junk. The three of us, me and my siblings, all agree that we need time and space before tackling all of it. This will be how we spend Michael’s Spring Break.

I struggled to sleep that night. Partly because of comfort. Partly because I was so itchy. At some point on Friday, I broke out in hives and have scratched for two days. A big part of my struggle to sleep though was how I couldn’t stop thinking of Mom sleeping in her new space for the first time. Would she feel safe and secure or would she panic and have a restless night, jumping at every new tick or tock sound? The next morning, Michael and I got up early to head back home. I took my mom’s car and a small toy caboose with The Peanut Man emblazoned on the side. I also came home with a mild cough and lots of sinus drainage, which is not an unusual state for me when in Oklahoma, particularly in the Fall. I brought along a slight sense of dread and worry for my mother’s future.

I knew the hoarding situation was bad. I did not realize just how much my mother has declined mentally. I had been told and I had witnessed some of her fogginess, but it didn’t really register. It’s sort of like when the doctors told Chris and I that they found a tumor on his liver. We joked and called it a tortilla chip. It was cancer. Yet to this day, I can’t say that Chris died from cancer. The tortilla chip killed him. I was only seeing my mother’s decline in the times I could get down to visit, which filtered the severity. My sister was seeing and dealing with it daily. I talked to my sister right before we left Mom’s to head back home and she had finally gotten a good night’s sleep. I called my mother on Sunday to check in and she sounded almost like an earlier version of herself. She sounded strong and pleased. She said she had slept through two nights in a row. She’s making friends and I got a picture today of her participating in the day’s group painting project.

I’ve dropped the worry and dread.

I’m keeping the car and the toy caboose.

For now, we are all okay.

A CHANGE IN THE TIMELINE

The timeline for moving my mother to assisted living has been moved up. My sister is desperate to put my mom someplace where she’ll be too distracted with elderly activities to do dangerous activities. I guess there was an incident a week or so ago where my sister caught our mother standing on the kitchen cabinets, vacuuming the top cabinets. This gives me a real glimpse at my own future and the old lady that I will be because my first instinct was to shrug and say “good for her!” I had to pause and think about why this might actually be a bad or dangerous activity for my eighty three year old mother who has been prone to falls. My mom is bored. She needs stuff to do, preferably stuff that doesn’t involve electric hedge trimmers or climbing the walls.

I have to admit that I straight up panicked when my sister sent me the text that she was trying to get Mom moved by the end of October. Between work and Michael’s school schedule, October is FULL and I don’t know how I’m going to get down there to help out. My sister is all ‘you don’t need to help unless you want to help’ and I of course don’t want to help but I don’t want her to have to do this alone. I am also struggling to find an estate liquidation company that a. works in the area b. will handle smaller houses and c. call me the fuck back! I do not want to be cleaning out the same stuff I’ve already cleaned out once in the middle of winter. Or any time really. To make matters worse, any time anyone asks me how I feel about moving my mom into assisted living, I start crying. I can’t talk about it. Thursday, after my sister’s text, I got on my yoga mat and started sobbing in child’s pose. No one had asked me anything. I was just doing my practice while sobbing uncontrollably.

Nothing to see here.

I think the reason I can’t talk about my feelings on this subject is because they’re so complicated. I truly believe that the assisted living home is going to be wonderful for my mother. She will have people her own age to talk with (or at), tons of activities available to her and outside gardens to wander. She will have a community, something she hasn’t had since leaving Collinsville. On the other hand, I am worried that my mother will isolate herself and find excuses and or complaints for not joining in with her new community. I can only imagine that the feelings are similar when sending a child to their first day of school. Will they make friends? Will they be liked by others? Will they be sad the whole time? These are all the things I worry about with my mother.

Then there’s anger.

Honestly, I’ve been angry with my mother since 2013 for a number of reasons, one of them being not listening to some sound wisdom from her children to not rush to sell the old house. But she refused, was adamant that this had to happen RIGHT NOW! At the end of the day, she did what she wanted without considering the consequences or her own future. She purposefully isolated herself and she didn’t take care of her body. It’s like she gave up on life without having the gumption or follow through to truly give up on her life. Instead she takes out her frustrations of still being around on her children. We are the ones that have to sit and listen to all the ways she is unhappy, disappointed and unsatisfied. We are well aware that her unhappiness, disappointments and unsatisfaction began well before any of us were born, that we are just part of the long line of it since her birth. Knowing this does not make listening to it all any easier.

I let go of the idea and feelings that I am part of my mother’s long list of disappointments some time ago, mostly because I have no control over it. I’m not angry at being one of her many sources of unhappiness. I am angry that she never took responsibility for her own happiness. I am angry at her choice to take her life lemons and turn them into just straight up lemon juice, refusing to add sugar for a nice refreshing drink. Instead she has just marinated herself in that bitter lemon juice and I am angry at her refusal to take responsibility for her own actions and choices. And this lemon juiced soaked woman is who we are moving to assisted living. My sister confessed that she’s been having nightmares about our mother getting kicked out of the facility and I couldn’t assuage her concerns.

That’s a valid nightmare.

I suppose my tears come from worry that my mother will not be able to take advantage of her new home and will not find joy in the company of new friends. I worry that she will park herself in a chair in her room and never venture out of her room, not even trying. This thought along with no longer having a home to go back to in Oklahoma are the things that send me over the edge. My touch stone is broken and unrepairable and my mother is sitting in a room choosing misery. And the estate liquidation company will not call me back which means that we will have to deal with the contents of our mother’s house on our own.

For most of my life I have felt unprepared or trained for the task of adulting. I didn’t know how to go about buying a house or even saving money properly. There are adult things I purposefully avoided because I knew I was ill-equipped, like motherhood. I just straight up avoided the things I knew for sure no one had even bothered to mention to me, let alone teach me how to deal with. All right, there were some tasks I had to deal with because they were unavoidable. Bodies don’t cremate themselves. While I was making it up as I go, I did manage to do those very hard adult tasks. I didn’t say I was not capable. I am untrained to deal with the aging parent side of adulting.

But I’m dealing.

ROASTED VEGETABLES

This isn't a recipe post. I just didn’t really know how to title this one. Depending on your general philosophy, the title can express negative and positive feelings. Are you a glass half full kind of person? Then you might find this post to be mildly pleasant. Who knows? And since I will not be advertising this one in my Facebook timeline, very few of you will end up reading any of it any way. I guess I could have titled this “The Things I’m Not Prepared For” but that’s such a big list of things. Or it’s a short list.

Things I’m not prepared for: everything.

We are preparing for my mother to go to assisted living. Now, I have been a huge advocate for assisted living. In fact, I urged my mother to consider moving into a retirement village when she sold the old house. Unfortunately, retirement communities had already taken up negative mental space in my mother’s brain and she flat out refused. Instead she bought the house next door to my sister, which further isolated her from her usual activities. Bit by bit, since moving into that space, my mother has become less active. We are now at the point where she doesn’t leave her house unless my sister takes her somewhere and the toll it is taking on her mental and physical well being is very obvious. Her doctor recommends we make the move by December.

I want to believe that my mother’s mental health is going to drastically improve once she is in her new little studio apartment. It is the time between now and when she is actually settled is the part that is making my stomach hurt. My mother took almost everything from the old house. Boxes of things I know I personally put into the dumpster while cleaning out the old home will randomly appear when I arrive for a visit. “Oh I found this stuff of yours. Do you want it?” I have stopped arguing or trying to make sense of it. Instead I enthusiastically say “yes!” while putting the box in my car. Then I drive it away and dispose of it properly, saying goodbye once again to things from my past. And I honestly do not think I have the energy to do this for a whole house again.

Every time I have visited my mother this year, she has been almost frantic with what she was going to do with all of these things. My sister and I have both told her that she only needs to think about the stuff she’s taking to the new place. A love seat. A full size bed. A dresser and nightstand. Clothes. She won’t need fifty bath towels or twenty sheet sets. She won’t need her pots and pans even. My sister and I both have told her this and that we will find someone to help us take care of the contents of what’s left. I have a number for an estate sale company, but these are all things we can not do until my mother is settled in her new space. We are at this uncomfortable holding pattern.

I was not prepared my mother to age so quickly. I was not prepared for her confusion or how soft her body feels now. I was not prepared for the boulder of guilt that I am now carrying around with me because I feel like I am not doing enough or I’m using my distance as an excuse to not do more. Some of that guilt boulder is made from apathy. I just don’t care about all of the stuff in my mother’s house. I don’t value it the way she does. I have never valued the things as much she does. This has always led to contention. She sees it all as her memories and I am inconsiderate for not placing the same values on these memories as she does. I will be taking her car and I feel guilty for that even though I have the blessing from both siblings. I don’t like asking for things, even when it will make my life easier.

Today, while trying to figure out a visit for Thanksgiving, I was looking at Airbnbs and it just felt so expensive. This is when it hit me. I no longer have a home in Tulsa, at least not one that accommodates all of us, Michael, the Cabbage and Josephine. I know I am always welcome at my brother’s. They have a spare bedroom or at least I think they do. But all four of us visiting is cramped and I hate doing that my brother. And all of these feelings and anxieties have been festering inside of me for weeks now. I don’t dare write about it all because my mother doesn’t react well to anything I’ve written about her in this space. I’ve been considerate of her feelings for oh so long, but I’m filled up to the max. I’m not sharing this to Facebook with the idea that this is the only way she knows how to get here.

The things I wasn’t prepared for was the hard stuff. Yet every time I am presented with the impossible, I have moved forward in some way….hopefully healthy. I may not be prepared for it, but I seem to be pretty good at improvising. Macguyvering my way through life, one sheet pan full of roasted veggies at a time.

EVENTS

It started with a series of events. First, my dad’s sister passed away. Then my dad’s dog, Annie passed away and when that happened, Dad’s health took a fast and sloping decline. For years, Dad had been telling us the same old stories over and over. That was Dad. There was nothing that didn’t feel normal about this. But when Annie died, Dad lost his sense of direction. That was not normal and things progressed very quickly after that. Sudden. My dad’s death drug out over a year, but still felt sudden at the ending of it all. I knew it was coming and told myself I was prepared for it.

I’m a terrible liar.

I awoke to a text from my sister: “Button passed away in the night.” Button is my mother’s cat. Mom has always been a cat person. She’s the reason we always had at least one cat roaming around the house. I think about this now and realize my parents had their own familiars, Dad with his dog and Mom with her cat. Button has been around since before we moved Mom into the house she lives in now. When I called Mom with my condolences, my mother broke down into tears and said “She was my constant and only companion.” It was, and now is, my turn to be the comforter. While my mother has comforted me often, most of my tears were from scraped knees and broken bones. Mom being (hopefully) past those stages of scraped knees, I am left to comfort broken hearts.

Her job was easier.

Sometime last year, my mom started telling me “This or next year is probably my last.” She’d say these things whenever I called her to check in. I have never protested her declaration, but instead replying with a simple “Well…okay.” I have learned in the years since my dad passed to not object or try to correct my mother in the things she says. I’ve gotten good at redirecting her stories of ‘whoa is me’ to something from happier times. I’ve slipped up once and lost my patience with her and that was when she said no one would miss her when she’s gone. I realize now that it was a bait, one I fell for. I’ve been asked “Doesn’t it bother you or make you mad when she says she only has a couple of years left?” That doesn’t bother me. We should all get to chose our time, but the idea of not missing her….that was a terrible and hateful thing for her to say. I miss her while she is still living. I miss the mother she was in my toddler memories and in all the times it was just her and me. I miss the mother she was before J died. I miss the mother I took to Ireland and pointed at a large penis someone had drawn into the sand on the beach and asked if it was a picture of a cow.

And when I redirect her from her stories that come from someplace negative, that version of her is still there, but barely.

My mother’s brother passed away a couple of years ago and now her cat. I can’t help but think about Dad and the events leading to his decline. I’m worried that I will disappoint my mother and not spend enough time with her. I’m worried about the mistakes I will inevitably make. I’ve notice that I have a tendency to shut off emotions during a given time frame and proceed as if everything is okay. I wait until I’m completely alone to break down and let the masks fall. I am well aware that from the outside it will look like I’m not even sad for her to go. Even though I have been warned, I will still be surprised by the suddenness of her departure. I’ve heard people say that part of the joys of parenthood is watching your children age into grownups, but not much is said about grownups watching their parents age into decline.

Frankly, it is not a joy for me to witness but it is turning into lessons on patience and kindness, lessons on caring for my own body and how to prepare for my own age into decline.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Karen Walrond’s soon to be released Radiant Rebellion has got me thinking about the language we use in regards to aging and I haven’t even read it yet. She’s been promoting the book for a while now on social media and put out a call recently to sign up to be a part of her launch team, but even though I will drink whatever kool aid Karen is serving, I did not sign up. I have too much going on right now to give it the proper attention it deserves. Today is my exception because all the little quotes and podcast clips she has been posting recently feels like something to be shared in a gratitude posting.

One of the topics that Karen has addressed in a recent podcast is the business of anti-aging. The anti-aging market is estimated to be an over 200 million dollar industry with a target group of women in their twenties and thirties. That target age group is really interesting if you consider that the average life expectancy of ancient Greeks was 20-35 years. Of course now, people live well past twice that age. (Insert spooky ghost voice) Beware…you are going to live past the age of 35….You don’t want to look as if you have. The industry is conditioning us early to maximize the number of years you’re going to throw money in their direction. Every single time I open Instagram or Facebook, I will see as many ads for ‘looking younger’ or ‘losing weight’ as I do of the content that I intentionally follow. Face exercises. Miracle weight loss supplements. Diet plans. Wrinkle serums. Anything that will “make you feel and look years younger.” This industry has done a stand-up job of turning the word ‘old’ into something to be feared and despised. The very act of aging is generally frowned upon and has turned ‘old’ into a negative descriptor.

This has really shined a spotlight on my own language around using the word ‘old’.

I’ve always been a believer that age is relative, but like a sponge I had started adopting old to describe how I am feeling both physically and mentally. In the last few weeks, I have made a conscious effort to change that. Instead of whining that I feel old, I say that I feel tired or my knee aches. Instead of lamenting that I look old, I say my face looks puffy. What I have discovered by changing my language around old is that it is making me honest. I’m just telling the truth and in telling that truth, I am presenting a problem that I can then find a solution to. Make time for rest. Take an aspirin for my achy knee. Use my neti pot and take some allergy medicine for my puffy face.

I don’t know how many times I have seen or heard a story of someone reaching the age of 100, recounting the things they have witnessed and the joy they feel to be alive. Each time I am awed by their tales and can only imagine what a spectacular life they have lived. Am I so different at the age of forty seven? Maybe it hasn’t been spectacular by some standards, but oh, the things I have been a witness too. Sure, I’ve witnessed some tragedies. I’ve seen two space shuttle explosions, the Murrah bombing, 9-11, not to mention personal tragedies. But I have also been a witness to some pretty great things in history like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the start of the Internet, amazing breakthroughs in science that have led to better and more effective treatment for diseases like cancer and HIV. This list could go on and on. I mean, electric cars and robot vacuums?!? We’re practically living a cartoon life. And I’m only forty seven! There is so much more to come.

Old is something to be celebrated.

I know this gratitude post kind of sounds like a birthday posting, but maybe everyday we get out of bed and live our lives is worth celebrating like a birthday. I can’t wait to read Karen’s new book and to be inspired in finding the various ways to celebrate aging. If you haven’t pre-ordered the book and would like to be part of the rebellion, just click on the words Radiant Rebellion in the first paragraph. This will take you straight to Karen Walrond’s book page.

EYE SEE YOU

The eyes have it

4 Likes, 2 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "The eyes have it"

Last week, I finally went to the eye doctor to see about getting a pair of glasses that I would actually wear on my face. I only put on the pair I own now when I am going to seminar and I need to see the screen. I forget to take them with me when we travel and the results are that I am the last person to see a license plate or a street sign. This is bad because we always try to collect all fifty states when traveling and I am also the navigator. Looking down at something up close through my current lenses makes me want to throw up. I'd probably wear them more maybe if I wore them on a fancy chain around my neck, yet more proof that I am eighty, but I don't.  So I went to the eye doctor and told her that I wanted bifocals and the biggest frames they had. 

I figured that if I had giant frames, I wouldn't notice that I'm wearing glasses all the time. Then I discovered that I could get trifocals which would allow for an intermediate focus between up close and far away and I fist pumped the air. Golden Girls, here I come! I also found out that I have a scar inside my left eyeball (probably from changing and aligning a mercury bulb on a microscope). The scar is not a problem because it's outside of my field of view. Some times, science is dangerous. Did you know that Marie Curie's notebooks and diaries are still radioactive and that you have to wear a protective suit and gloves to read her stuff? Dangerous. 

The woman helping me pick out frames was very patient as I tried on practically every single frame in the office. She showed me one brand that allows you to pop off the sides and swap them out. I said "Oh! They're like the Swatch of glasses!" and then she looked at me funny. I asked "Did I just make a reference to something not many people get?" She said "No, I get it. It's just that you're not old enough to get it." Then we had an argument about how old I was and I was like "LOOK WOMAN! I am here for TRIFOCALS!" She looked at my chart and then at me and said "I never would have guessed that!" I told her she was very sweet, but the birth date on my chart is, indeed, correct. Then we had a nice chat on growing older because she's several years older than I am.

I decided to go with the very first frames that I had tried on. They're big and kind of clear with a slight cat eye shape. Hopefully by this time next week, I'll be sporting a new pair of glasses that makes me look like my Mom circa 1978. Too bad I won't be as skinny as she was then. 

THE UNSINKABLE MOLLY BROWN

Instagram photo by Cindy Maddera * Jan 9, 2016 at 1:46am UTC

See this Instagram photo by @elephant_soap * 7 likes

Forty is just around the corner. A week and some days away. I want to tell you that I am still super excited about forty. I want to tell you that I relish in the idea of growing older. I can't wait to live in one of those retirement villages with shuffle board and canasta and shuttle rides to the grocery store. (There's a weekday here where a shuttle bus drops off a bunch of elderly people to do their grocery shopping at Trader Joe's. I will be part of their community one day!) Woo-Hoo! Forty is going to be SO.DANG.AWESOME! These are all things I feel in my heart and soul. These are all things my body is not feeling right at this moment.

Saturday, Michael, the Cabbage and I all attended a family yoga class. We had fun jumping around pretending to be animals. Then I bent over to put my shoes on and I couldn't get back up. It was like someone had stabbed an oyster knife into my sacroiliac joint and was twisting. Et tu Brutu! I sort of wrenched myself up through the pain and mumbled something about my back hurting. Then we all got in the car and headed to IKEA and I just pretended that there wasn't an oyster knife sticking out of my back. When we got home, I was sitting on the couch and Michael looked at me and asked "Are you OK? You look like you're about to cry." It's hard to be OK when someone has obviously mistaken your SI joint for an oyster.

I pulled all of my yoga tricks out of the bag and nothing worked. This is how I found myself sitting in a chiropractor's office yesterday, having my spine photographed. I had maybe three vertebrae that where not in some state of impingement. My back resembles a deflated accordion. Many pops and some shock therapy later, the oyster knife was removed leaving behind just a dull ache. I go back on Thursday for more adjustment and to get a "wellness plan" for a happy spine. Thursday will be followed up with several more visits to get me back into a less sad accordion shape and into a happy, dancing accordion shape. Hoopa! I'm sore but standing up straight no longer makes me teary. 

The receptionist at the Chiropractor's office was entering my information into the computer when she realized we had the exact same birthday. She said that this is the first birthday she was ever hesitant about. She asked me how I felt about this one with it being sort of a big birthday. I replied "I think turning forty is going to be GREAT!" and as I leaned forward saying this, I winced in pain. I remember my friend John telling me about how his body completely fell apart when he turned forty. He said that all he could do was live on his couch for a year, but he feels great now and he's in his fifties. I guess I just assumed that all my years of yoga would protect my body from wear and tear. In some ways it has. I'm super flexible! I know how to get myself off the floor without causing more damage. I walk all the time. Actually, I'm in better shape now than I was in high school. I'm skinnier, my diet is better and I'm more active. 

So fine. I have a few more gray hairs and some of those have shown up in my nose and eyebrows. I've been experiencing pre-menopausal symptoms since August and my back (violently) went on strike for a few days. I got on my mat today and it was glorious. OK maybe not glorious. But it was pretty great. I know forty is going to fantastic. I still stand by my belief that forty is the year I pass over into the spectacular years. I will not be swayed. Forty is going to be amazeballs. 

I just have to convince my body of this. 

BECAUSE YOU ARE OF THAT AGE

Every time I put on one of these gowns I think of Mary Jo from Designing Women. #womenshealth

"Every time I put on one of these gowns I think of Mary Jo from Designing Women. #womenshealth"

I'm not even sure where to begin with this post. I had my yearly women's health exam and before every one gasps out an "are you OK?!?!?!" I will say that I am doing just fine. My doctor is nice and funny and easy to be around which is important when you're trusting someone to touch you uncomfortably. She is also my age. Now usually, I would be pleased about having a doctor who knows about this age of a body. She gets it. She understands what's happening to a female body as she reaches the just about forty age of her life. Except this time around she kept saying things like "we should do some blood work. Cholesterol, sugar, thyroid. Because you are of that age." When I grumbled something about my weight, she just waived it off and said "that's just part of being this age." She didn't seem all that concerned about the four pounds I'd gained since the last visit because I was still exercising  and getting on my mat regularly. Then, even though I am not required to get a mammogram until I'm forty, but because I had "issues" two years ago, she sent me down for a mammogram. Because I am of that age.

Before I go into my rant about "being that age", I have to go on a tangent about mammograms. It's been two years since my last mammogram and the place I go to now has the regular 2D one and a 3D one. The 3D mammogram costs $30 out of pocket because most insurance doesn't cover it. This makes me angry for a number of reasons. First of all the 3D option has shown to be more accurate in detecting cancerous areas than 2D. Though it still requires smashing your boob, it does not require that your boob is smashed as flat as a pancake. The 3D option has reduced the number of call backs and biopsies due to an unsure result of the 2D mammogram. You know that time I had to go in and have two cysts removed because they didn't know if they were cysts or cancer? It's quite possible that would have never happened with if I'd had the 3D mammogram. If I were an insurance company, I'd much rather pay the extra $30 a year for this test than pay for the huge expense of breast cancer treatment, let alone the cost of an unnecessary procedure from an unclear test. But again, that's a completely other tangent and not where I had intended this entry to go.

Any way...my doctor..."being that age"....Every time she said it, I could hear it in her voice that she was saying we were old. At one point I wanted to shake her and tell her to just stop. "We are still young! We are so freaking young! Thirty nine is not old. Forty is not old. We are not old!" I wanted to shout all of this out to her. Yes, it's true that I've put on a few pounds that my usual daily walking and yoga routine is doing nothing to combat. Yes, I recently threw my back out while painting the chicken coop. Every day I notice a new section of my hair going white. I don't mind that really. What I do mind is this idea that cholesterol checks and mammograms are things that we must do because we have gotten older. I do mind the implication that my age has everything to do with my inability to lose a few pounds. I also mind the idea that going to the doctor for a check up is something you do because you are getting older. We take babies to the doctor all the time for check ups. Those old geezer babies with their constant need for doctor visits!  But it's true. I am physically of a certain age. This means I just need to be more mindful to eat more greens and move my body more so that my joints don't settle into one spot. It means that I need to be aware of my cholesterol levels and my glucose levels because, as my doctor said, I cannot change my genetics. Heart disease and diabetes are a thing in my family. She also said that she was sure my HDL levels will be proof of my healthiness. 

Mentally I'm twelve because I still think farts are funny.