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| April into May 2007 On my nighttime walks, the wildly sensual scent of this year's orange blossoms leaves me feeling blissfully drunk. I fall asleep to the chorus of the latest generation of young crickets and frogs. Each morning, there are more and more leaves on the persimmon tree and the huge bush-tree just outside my tent windows. The new growth came slowly at first and now the green eruption has accelerated amazingly. On the way toward the cottage, I see a bounty of frilly blossoms blanketing the two apple trees. On my patio, more shades and shapes of green are spilling over the edges of their pots while more of my roses are unfolding daily. It's spring all around me, I feel it rising in every cell of my being-a sense of awakening and light-heartedness: delicious. Just days after I wrote this in the first week of April, I left on a two week journey to help my parents empty and leave what had been their home in Florida for the past 34 years. My stepsister and I continued the work my amazing almost 89 year old stepmother had been doing for several weeks: closing many accounts, changing address information on endless others, sorting, pitching and arranging for charities to pick up furnishings and miscellaneous. By the end of our first week, the Salvation Army, the packers and the movers had come. I flew up to Maryland with my parents as my stepsister stayed behind one last night to close up after the movers left. We all stayed for the next week at my stepsister's while waiting both for the completion of the repainting and re-carpeting of their independent living apartment and for the movers to finally arrive. While my stepsister went back to her days of teaching school, I took my parents on small daily shopping jaunts to get several things they still needed for their new life. At the end of this second week, the movers arrived and we began unpacking and setting up home for them. My sister and several of our cousins (who also live in and around Maryland) came to help in this part of the process and, at long last, I left for home. It was an intense, fraught and challenging time for all of us. My dad's frustration at not being able to help in anyway was difficult to watch. So were his growing upset, confusion and despair at leaving the only life he'd known and loved for so many years. My sister and I were very concerned that the chaos and upheaval of the dismantling and relocating would push him precipitously further into the dementia that had been encroaching for the past year or so. Neither my stepmother nor my stepsister was in the least concerned about trying to maintain some familiar order as long as possible. It took a lot of emotional energy to cope with their dismissiveness, impatience and irritation around my efforts in that direction. Endless self-comforting inner-mommy monologues and frequent trips to another room where I'd mime both screaming and tearing my hair out helped me to handle my frustration. Ultimately, I learned to keep from making any suggestions at all. I'd surreptitiously do what little I could get away with when they were otherwise absorbed. It was so bizarre. In the end, rather than deteriorating further, my father seems to have been resurrected. At some point, just before we left the dismantled Florida house, he began teasing us all by asking, jokingly, the very same questions he'd before then been asking repeatedly from a place of disoriented confusion. “Where's the kitchen table, Pearl?” he'd ask for the hundredth time. She'd start to impatiently and seriously answer him yet again and he'd start laughing out loud! It was startling and amazing and it's continued ever since. He's more lucid than he'd been, more available, more playful and more open to actually talking with people than he's been for a long time. Clearly, much of the presenting dementia was related to depression. Depression that has been turned around by all the activity, stimulation and family contact: astonishing and miraculous. (Earlier attempts to get them to try anti-depressant meds came to naught when-despite our explanations that it might take a couple three weeks for effects to show-my stepmom decided to discontinued them after seeing no effects in four days.) They've both been amazingly resilient and incredibly courageous. Moving away (at almost and just beyond 90 years old) from everything and everyone they've known into a totally new world, albeit one that has them closer to almost all of their younger family members, is an enormous feat. They love their light, airy and comfortable new apartment, surrounded by some of their familiar things in every room. Having their main meal in a restaurant setting sitting with new people each night is a blessed change from their daily isolation and my stepmom's having either to deal with cooking every day or having to drive to lonely dinners at local restaurants. There are several events and activities each day from which they can (and do) choose. There's a lovely public atrium where, for the first time in 34 years, they can actually sit outdoors for some part of each day, chatting with people. The medical facilities available on site have been, so far, excellent. Their apartment is cleaned weekly and all but their personal laundry seen to so there's a lot less my stepmom has to handle on her own. My stepsister, a great support and comfort to our parents, lives just 10 minutes away and is delighted to be checking in with them almost daily in these early days of their adjustment. The first two weeks were a honeymoon phase of feeling filled with relief that the move was, at last, behind them. Now the hard realities, challenges and disappointments are surfacing. Their new circumstances could not, after all, provide a cure for the unhappiness, boredom and frustration my stepmom has been feeling for all the years I've known her. And, of course, the level of ongoing care she provides for my physically disabled dad is unchanged even as there is more support available in emergencies. It's hard to make new friends at this stage of life; hard to find kindred souls or even common ground with all the strangers they're meeting. It's hard to adjust to not having their favorite TV stations, to being without a car (even though she no longer felt safe to drive one), to having to go down a long hallway to get to washers and dryers shared with several other residents. Yet, they're soldiering on and finding their way through each of the new struggles. I muddle about in such a complex jumble of feelings about and for my stepmom. She's smart, competent and amazingly with it at almost 90. She takes extraordinarily good care of my dad-without her dedication to that care we clearly wouldn't still have him alive. She's gutsy, brave and often hilariously funny. Over the 36 years she's been in our lives, she's been more of a mother to my sister and me than our own mother ever was. And, she's also bitchy and critical and bitter and blaming and nasty toward my dad and about other people on our side of the family. She has an enormous chip on her shoulder, seems almost always filled with angry and resentful energy. I love and hate her in equal measure. I feel enormous compassion and sadness for what her life is like with my dad, how much work it is for her 24/7 and how little she gets back from him these days, how miserable she feels. Then, too, I want to scream at her, to smack her upside the head when she says things to humiliate him in front of us and other people, when she talks so disparagingly about him to people who love him. It's hard to be around her for more than two and a half or three days at a time and here, for the first time ever, I was around her agitating energy for 13 whole days. I came back to my own life exhausted and feeling abraded from being so long in the middle of their, to me, incredibly distressing relationship. The repeating streams of critical and humiliating remarks my stepmom directed toward my dad stirred pain and despair familiar from my childhood. In those years, it came from witnessing my biological mother and my dad in the very same disturbed integration, she spewing nastiness and he passively absorbing it all. I felt raw from the angry undertone that colors almost every word my stepmom speaks. I felt ground down by having been constantly interrupted with argumentativeness before I'd complete any sentence. I was wiped out from having always to hold my tongue and stay out of everything lest my input trigger contrary actions or agitated arguments that would continue long after I'd openly withdraw whatever suggestion I'd been foolish enough to raise. I could understand-from the inside of my own experiences at edge-walking times-that supposedly helpful suggestions can feel like intrusive, undermining implied criticism. Nonetheless, it was frustrating to be so in the middle of all their stuff and yet have no leeway to safely express any opinion. As the days went by I did get better at keeping my opinions to myself. I'd arranged my schedule (before I'd left home) so that I'd be available to work with almost all my clients by phone from the late afternoons through the evening hours on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of the second week with my folks. This turned out to have been a stroke of genius. Dipping into my own reality for those few hours each of those days saved my sanity. It restored both my patience and my equanimity. What a treat it was to be able to finish a sentence, to feel that someone might be interested to hear something I might say. It was so good just to be so truly away from their reality for those few hours. The daily late night hours I'd had before then to be with just my own energy had helped bring some balance but never provided enough respite form the fray. On my regular three-day visits, when we're all not coping with such enormously stressful changes, much of the dynamics remain the same. What's different is that I come fresh and filled with the peace of my own life and that peace lasts inside me till I leave midway through the third day. It's so much harder to hold inner balance across a 13-day immersion, even while I continue some version of my self-care routines each day. Coming back into my own life was such a profound comfort, even with all the mail, bills, gardening and chores needing my attention. In some ways the transition was seamless, calming and cleansing. Yet, it took me several days to stop waking up to ruminations about things/strategies that might help them with their adjustment, things I knew I couldn't and shouldn't raise with them. The need to keep embracing my helplessness in the face of their needs for self-determination is relentless and often exhausting. (It's much easier to do from the distance of almost 3000 miles.) For the same first several days I lived surrounded with the miasma of sadness and despair that experiencing their lives/relationship stirred in me. Then, the riotous blossoming of spring all around me broke through the fug, filling me up and rekindling the simple joyousness that is my life here in Ojai. The lushness of all the green that burgeoned during my two weeks away; the bounty of roses and strawberries and blossoms on the late blooming orange tree over my hammock; the cricket-y, frog-y country stillness; the cuddles and play with my aging kitty (who'd had health issues while I was gone); floating under the stars in my hot tub; puttering in my garden; being with just my own self with no people-contact for a whole week-all of it was such healing balm for my raggedy, worn out self. Now, yet another week later I'm fully in my own life and able to listen to my stepmom's tales from a more comfortable distance (making no suggestions and not having to struggle about that). Being at the far side of this long anticipated (and dreaded) major venture with my parents has freed up a good bit of energy in me that's focused itself on my book. After two years of moving at the pace of glaciers as the project kept slipping to the bottom of my sweet agent's queue, it's suddenly become clear that it's time for me to move forward. It may well be that this means doing so without Debra. I've just today sent her an email exploring the possibility that I release her from a contract that I've begun to imagine may have become a burden to her. (From the first she's loved the manuscript as a reader but had questions as an agent about its viability in today's market.) Although it's been frustrating and enthusiasm dampening to wait so long for any responses from her over these two years, I haven't until now felt Spirit/the Grandmothers urging me to take a next step. Self publishing/publishing-on-demand feels an acceptable option if it comes to that. To visit the Bulletin Board Archive Table of Contents Site Directory (for non-frames viewing)
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