This is going to be a blog where I share silliness, frustration, and all sorts of other things that go along with taking a break from graduate school to sit in my semi-estranged mother's house and take care of her while she dies.
In this first entry, I'll give you the story and catch you up on some weirdness up to now. I was in Germany working for a research institution and doing my next-to-last thing before I come back to grad school, write a dissertation, defend it and get a Ph.D.. I was in the US for about a week when my mom called me to tell me she was falling at work and that her cancer had probably come back. I set about getting my shit in order to go visit her, and then I started getting even more urgent texts from the family. So I hustled here to see her. She's now paralyzed on one side. That means that every 3 or four hours, someone has to drag her into the bathroom, plunk her down and let her pee, then move her back. That person is me.
My little brother was supposed to share in this responsibility so that I could go see the rest of my family. Here's how it went down: I showed up, and slept on the couch because my mother was complaining that he sleeps too hard so she's dying in the morning when she needs to pee and he won't get up. This, I imagine, is because he smokes pot all day, and gets drunk all night and then goes to bed at 3AM. But then I was here so I could deal with that 5AM peeing. Then I thought, "It's a couple of days before Christmas, and he has a 'girlfriend' in the next town over, so I'll let him have a day or two off to spend with her." I told him this, and he vanished for 5 days. He popped in for a couple of hours on Christmas day, but then, he just bailed on me again. Every once in a while he'd shoot me a text and say "oh, I'll be in tomorrow" and then he wouldn't. When he finally did come back, I took a night off to go to my aunt's place and visit the people I'm closest to. I didn't really get a night off though, because every time mom needed to pee, she had to text me to wake my brother. Then he bailed for NYE too, and came back long enough to pack to leave for good. Now he's whining from his job, "Oh I wish I could be there to help." It doesn't seem much different from my perspective.
Now I'll bitch about him a little more. He means well, but he does not fucking listen at all. If you say, "Could you pick me up cupcakes?" he'll forget. If you remind him, he'll bring back a cake. You have better odds of getting what you want if you don't say anything and hope he randomly brings it. The last thing was when he didn't want to eat anything in the fridge and called to order Mexican food. First of all, he forgot that he ordered it, so after about an hour I said, "Uh, aren't you going to pick up the food?" Then he came back with what he had ordered. I had asked for double beans and no rice. Of course, mine had double rice.
He does one thing that I thought he'd grow out of, but he never has. When you talk to him he tries to end all your sentences, even if that means he can only do the last syllable of the last word. It used to annoy me, but like with most things that annoy me, I try to figure out a game that can be played to make the annoyance fun. It turns out that if you end a sentence with an unexpected word that starts out like the obvious one, you can get some real enjoyment out of this. "I'm going to the grocery store to get some gro--tesque bakery cupcake."
I would bitch more about him, but I haven't seen him. Well there was the one night where I tried to bond with him and we ended up getting chased by the border patrol...
Now the following stuff is just bizarre. My mom is bed-ridden except when I haul her out. She's taken to eating a billion supplements of every kind. She has always been kind of nutty insofar as believing in ghosts, alien abductions, that she has psychic powers, and that she's seen heaven and whatnot, but I think I never got the full experience because I'm skeptical, and that causes her to hold back. Her brother, who is desperately trying to save her, is the same kind of nuts. When they get together, it's crazy town! They talk about guys they know who work for the government as psychics, alien craft that routinely fly over Mexico. Pretty much everything that you can find on Fringe or X-Files, they believe. It's not even like, "oh I think there may be aliens." It is that aliens exist, they're all over, everyone knows about them, and how can you be so dumb, Jeremy?
Here's a snippet of conversation verbatim:
Brother: You know they're finding giant skeletons all over now?
Mom: I heard that they were crossbreeding with angels.
Brother: Yeah. The Watchers.
The guy is super nice, but that's outrageous. He brings so many supplements and then has these wacky websites that tell him that she needs to eat 6000mg of lysene a day or something, and then the supplement come in 150mg tablets. So she's trying to scarf down fistfuls of crap that isn't doing anything except upsetting her stomach, making her smell terrible, and possibly harming her liver. I wanted to kill that sweet motherfucker when he came over and convinced her she needed me to start giving her coffee enemas. He bought expensive organic coffee for it too. I considered giving that to my brother, and just letting her shoot Folger's Crystals up her ass if she really insisted, but I don't drink coffee, so it doesn't really break my heart. We did one coffee enema, and it could've been worse. I squoze the bag, but I made her do everything else. She was sitting on the pot, so that wasn't so bad.
My mother has been driving me completely nuts, in other ways too. I can give you a long list of reasons why:
1) She is completely self absorbed. This is part of why we drifted apart. Well, we didn't drift so much as she threw me out of the house and I ran and didn't look back for 10 years or so. A bit of back story: My dad, to whom I was extremely close, just died in August and it was fairly sudden. She now constantly wants comfort and reassurance _from me_ about that, because it was so hard on her. Keep in mind that she divorced him when I was two, and talked shit about him until I was 37. She also gets me up at 4:30 to pee, which is totally fine, and then wants me to do chores right then. "Can you get that book from the top shelf?" "Will you wheel me over to that thing?" "Go find the red power drill that belongs to your uncle."
2) The last sentence brings me to the second thing: she's retardedly micromanaging her death and distribution of goods. Let me break something to you people out there: when you die, nobody wants 90% of your shit. Maybe a homeless person does, but no, I don't want those broken glasses you saved from when you were married to my dad. I think it's more of her self absorption. She wants to have all the glory from giving away nice things and wants to be able to see someone appreciating it right now. There are at least three problems with this. The first is that she gives people things they don't want, or tries to, and then gets totally hurt when they say "nah, it's okay" to the offer of a shitty watercolor painting she got at the flea market. On the other hand, I tried the tactic of saying, "oh yeah, that'd be great," and it failed too, because her response ends up being, "Well okay. Your brother really wanted that, but I'll tell him I'm giving it to you instead." Let me see...I was listing something. Oh yeah, the second problem with giving away all your crap before you're actually dead is one that made me giggle the other day, "Would you take this turquoise necklace that your dad gave me?" "Sure." Then her friend came to stay with my mother for a few days--she is a woman that I have absolutely zero complaints about--and my mother said, "Oh, uh, can I have that necklace back to give to her?" 'Indian giving' on your death bed was a new one for me. The third serious problem is that I'M NOW LIVING HERE! When you give away all your DVDs to people coming in, I'm just getting robbed of stuff I could do to pass the time. And yes, I know I should be writing my dissertation or novel or doing any number of things, but when you are totally sleep deprived it's hard to do anything productive. It's not all her either, sometimes I'll take her to pee, lay down for a nap, just drift off and someone bangs on the door...DESPITE A NOTE SAYING "NEED SLEEP, DO NOT DISTURB BEFORE 2PM"!!!! Argh! Oh and a side note, "I saved this hat pin that your uncle gave me. He said if anything happened to him I should give it to you. I think he might have known something would happen, because that's the trip he died. Would you give this to your aunt?"
3) She sends me for a photo album, then puts it back, then sends me again. I swear I get this stupid album about thrice-a-day for her to just make sure it's in the house. She also does stuff like telling me twice-a-day that I need to make sure Grandpa gets the digital converter for the television and I have to show him how to use it. Pointless repetition is driving me nuts.
4) She complains that she's bored, but when I try to help she outright insults me. She has this habit of hating anything you recommend, on general principle. She said something like, "Oh I'm so bored, there's nothing on TV" just as she flipped past that Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson movie, Mutiny on the Bounty right when it was beginning. It's not the most amazing movie, but I thought it was pretty good, and fantastic if we're talking about having a movie come on randomly on antenna-accessible channels. I told her she'd like it, so she begrudgingly watched for about thirty seconds. I think Anthony Hopkins was handing over his sword and almost nobody had even spoken a word (except to tell him to hand over his sword), and the she changed the channel to a Mexican station. She then proceeded to complain about how awful Mexican television is. I walked out. She did this more pointedly to me when I responded to her cry of "boredom!" by playing her an episode of Radiolab. It was called "Wild Talk" if you're interested. She got about 30 seconds into it, just past the intro, and yelled "Come turn this off, I don't give a shit about Diana Monkeys!" I had actually played it for her because I thought she'd like the bit about the monkeys, but knew she'd love it five minutes later when they started talking about prairie dogs. So I said, with a little bit of spite, "Okay, I just thought you'd have liked the bit about prairie dogs." Then I turned it off before she could give it a second chance. She has routinely done this stuff to me my whole life, though. I once tried to get her to buy Born to Run by Chris MacDougal and she wouldn't even acknowledge the book. It was like I handed her something and said, "here, put this back on the shelf without looking at it."
5) She thinks that she can get me to make all sorts of ridiculous deathbed promises. Seriously, people. You get one or two deathbed promises for things that are very important to you. If you have so many that they're on the order of, "Promise me you'll eat kale twice a week when I'm gone," then perhaps you should shut up about them.
6) She is completely logically inconsistent. "Just let it go when I'm gone, I don't want this to be a burden on you...also, sue the hell out of all the doctors that ever worked on me." "I'm ready to go, I just want it to be quick....now hand me 13 ester C pills and a fistful of barley grass."
7) She rewrites all memories to fit the narrative in her head where she's the protagonist and everyone else is insane. She then confronts people about the things that they've done that they may not have done. It's awkward and embarrassing, but at least now she has brain tumors that I can blame it on. When I was a kid I just thought she was a liar, and that made me lie a lot then too.
So, I'll bitch a little more about that I woke up today and the water pipes were frozen. She said, "Oh yeah that happened last year. It's the fault of everyone else, because there's supposed to be a strip along the bottom of the door to keep the cold air out. There's a lightbulb in there, so it should be warm enough." So I went out to inspect the place. Let me tell you, that in 24 degree weather (-4 C) that a lightbulb in a completely uninsulated building with a gigantic window will not do shit. I went back and said, "it's not the weather strip, it's that there's not a scrap of insulation anywhere, and that a normal lightbulb isn't going to change the temp by my than a degree or two."
I have more, but I'm running out of steam for this post, but I want to leave you with a quote from my mother just the other day with regard to someone who ran over a dog. Her narrative for the event for which she wasn't present was that the driver swerved specifically to hit the dog. Her brother denied that bit, and he was actually there. The quote was, "There's no reason to harm an animal for no reason."
In this first entry, I'll give you the story and catch you up on some weirdness up to now. I was in Germany working for a research institution and doing my next-to-last thing before I come back to grad school, write a dissertation, defend it and get a Ph.D.. I was in the US for about a week when my mom called me to tell me she was falling at work and that her cancer had probably come back. I set about getting my shit in order to go visit her, and then I started getting even more urgent texts from the family. So I hustled here to see her. She's now paralyzed on one side. That means that every 3 or four hours, someone has to drag her into the bathroom, plunk her down and let her pee, then move her back. That person is me.
My little brother was supposed to share in this responsibility so that I could go see the rest of my family. Here's how it went down: I showed up, and slept on the couch because my mother was complaining that he sleeps too hard so she's dying in the morning when she needs to pee and he won't get up. This, I imagine, is because he smokes pot all day, and gets drunk all night and then goes to bed at 3AM. But then I was here so I could deal with that 5AM peeing. Then I thought, "It's a couple of days before Christmas, and he has a 'girlfriend' in the next town over, so I'll let him have a day or two off to spend with her." I told him this, and he vanished for 5 days. He popped in for a couple of hours on Christmas day, but then, he just bailed on me again. Every once in a while he'd shoot me a text and say "oh, I'll be in tomorrow" and then he wouldn't. When he finally did come back, I took a night off to go to my aunt's place and visit the people I'm closest to. I didn't really get a night off though, because every time mom needed to pee, she had to text me to wake my brother. Then he bailed for NYE too, and came back long enough to pack to leave for good. Now he's whining from his job, "Oh I wish I could be there to help." It doesn't seem much different from my perspective.
Now I'll bitch about him a little more. He means well, but he does not fucking listen at all. If you say, "Could you pick me up cupcakes?" he'll forget. If you remind him, he'll bring back a cake. You have better odds of getting what you want if you don't say anything and hope he randomly brings it. The last thing was when he didn't want to eat anything in the fridge and called to order Mexican food. First of all, he forgot that he ordered it, so after about an hour I said, "Uh, aren't you going to pick up the food?" Then he came back with what he had ordered. I had asked for double beans and no rice. Of course, mine had double rice.
He does one thing that I thought he'd grow out of, but he never has. When you talk to him he tries to end all your sentences, even if that means he can only do the last syllable of the last word. It used to annoy me, but like with most things that annoy me, I try to figure out a game that can be played to make the annoyance fun. It turns out that if you end a sentence with an unexpected word that starts out like the obvious one, you can get some real enjoyment out of this. "I'm going to the grocery store to get some gro--tesque bakery cupcake."
I would bitch more about him, but I haven't seen him. Well there was the one night where I tried to bond with him and we ended up getting chased by the border patrol...
Now the following stuff is just bizarre. My mom is bed-ridden except when I haul her out. She's taken to eating a billion supplements of every kind. She has always been kind of nutty insofar as believing in ghosts, alien abductions, that she has psychic powers, and that she's seen heaven and whatnot, but I think I never got the full experience because I'm skeptical, and that causes her to hold back. Her brother, who is desperately trying to save her, is the same kind of nuts. When they get together, it's crazy town! They talk about guys they know who work for the government as psychics, alien craft that routinely fly over Mexico. Pretty much everything that you can find on Fringe or X-Files, they believe. It's not even like, "oh I think there may be aliens." It is that aliens exist, they're all over, everyone knows about them, and how can you be so dumb, Jeremy?
Here's a snippet of conversation verbatim:
Brother: You know they're finding giant skeletons all over now?
Mom: I heard that they were crossbreeding with angels.
Brother: Yeah. The Watchers.
The guy is super nice, but that's outrageous. He brings so many supplements and then has these wacky websites that tell him that she needs to eat 6000mg of lysene a day or something, and then the supplement come in 150mg tablets. So she's trying to scarf down fistfuls of crap that isn't doing anything except upsetting her stomach, making her smell terrible, and possibly harming her liver. I wanted to kill that sweet motherfucker when he came over and convinced her she needed me to start giving her coffee enemas. He bought expensive organic coffee for it too. I considered giving that to my brother, and just letting her shoot Folger's Crystals up her ass if she really insisted, but I don't drink coffee, so it doesn't really break my heart. We did one coffee enema, and it could've been worse. I squoze the bag, but I made her do everything else. She was sitting on the pot, so that wasn't so bad.
My mother has been driving me completely nuts, in other ways too. I can give you a long list of reasons why:
1) She is completely self absorbed. This is part of why we drifted apart. Well, we didn't drift so much as she threw me out of the house and I ran and didn't look back for 10 years or so. A bit of back story: My dad, to whom I was extremely close, just died in August and it was fairly sudden. She now constantly wants comfort and reassurance _from me_ about that, because it was so hard on her. Keep in mind that she divorced him when I was two, and talked shit about him until I was 37. She also gets me up at 4:30 to pee, which is totally fine, and then wants me to do chores right then. "Can you get that book from the top shelf?" "Will you wheel me over to that thing?" "Go find the red power drill that belongs to your uncle."
2) The last sentence brings me to the second thing: she's retardedly micromanaging her death and distribution of goods. Let me break something to you people out there: when you die, nobody wants 90% of your shit. Maybe a homeless person does, but no, I don't want those broken glasses you saved from when you were married to my dad. I think it's more of her self absorption. She wants to have all the glory from giving away nice things and wants to be able to see someone appreciating it right now. There are at least three problems with this. The first is that she gives people things they don't want, or tries to, and then gets totally hurt when they say "nah, it's okay" to the offer of a shitty watercolor painting she got at the flea market. On the other hand, I tried the tactic of saying, "oh yeah, that'd be great," and it failed too, because her response ends up being, "Well okay. Your brother really wanted that, but I'll tell him I'm giving it to you instead." Let me see...I was listing something. Oh yeah, the second problem with giving away all your crap before you're actually dead is one that made me giggle the other day, "Would you take this turquoise necklace that your dad gave me?" "Sure." Then her friend came to stay with my mother for a few days--she is a woman that I have absolutely zero complaints about--and my mother said, "Oh, uh, can I have that necklace back to give to her?" 'Indian giving' on your death bed was a new one for me. The third serious problem is that I'M NOW LIVING HERE! When you give away all your DVDs to people coming in, I'm just getting robbed of stuff I could do to pass the time. And yes, I know I should be writing my dissertation or novel or doing any number of things, but when you are totally sleep deprived it's hard to do anything productive. It's not all her either, sometimes I'll take her to pee, lay down for a nap, just drift off and someone bangs on the door...DESPITE A NOTE SAYING "NEED SLEEP, DO NOT DISTURB BEFORE 2PM"!!!! Argh! Oh and a side note, "I saved this hat pin that your uncle gave me. He said if anything happened to him I should give it to you. I think he might have known something would happen, because that's the trip he died. Would you give this to your aunt?"
3) She sends me for a photo album, then puts it back, then sends me again. I swear I get this stupid album about thrice-a-day for her to just make sure it's in the house. She also does stuff like telling me twice-a-day that I need to make sure Grandpa gets the digital converter for the television and I have to show him how to use it. Pointless repetition is driving me nuts.
4) She complains that she's bored, but when I try to help she outright insults me. She has this habit of hating anything you recommend, on general principle. She said something like, "Oh I'm so bored, there's nothing on TV" just as she flipped past that Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson movie, Mutiny on the Bounty right when it was beginning. It's not the most amazing movie, but I thought it was pretty good, and fantastic if we're talking about having a movie come on randomly on antenna-accessible channels. I told her she'd like it, so she begrudgingly watched for about thirty seconds. I think Anthony Hopkins was handing over his sword and almost nobody had even spoken a word (except to tell him to hand over his sword), and the she changed the channel to a Mexican station. She then proceeded to complain about how awful Mexican television is. I walked out. She did this more pointedly to me when I responded to her cry of "boredom!" by playing her an episode of Radiolab. It was called "Wild Talk" if you're interested. She got about 30 seconds into it, just past the intro, and yelled "Come turn this off, I don't give a shit about Diana Monkeys!" I had actually played it for her because I thought she'd like the bit about the monkeys, but knew she'd love it five minutes later when they started talking about prairie dogs. So I said, with a little bit of spite, "Okay, I just thought you'd have liked the bit about prairie dogs." Then I turned it off before she could give it a second chance. She has routinely done this stuff to me my whole life, though. I once tried to get her to buy Born to Run by Chris MacDougal and she wouldn't even acknowledge the book. It was like I handed her something and said, "here, put this back on the shelf without looking at it."
5) She thinks that she can get me to make all sorts of ridiculous deathbed promises. Seriously, people. You get one or two deathbed promises for things that are very important to you. If you have so many that they're on the order of, "Promise me you'll eat kale twice a week when I'm gone," then perhaps you should shut up about them.
6) She is completely logically inconsistent. "Just let it go when I'm gone, I don't want this to be a burden on you...also, sue the hell out of all the doctors that ever worked on me." "I'm ready to go, I just want it to be quick....now hand me 13 ester C pills and a fistful of barley grass."
7) She rewrites all memories to fit the narrative in her head where she's the protagonist and everyone else is insane. She then confronts people about the things that they've done that they may not have done. It's awkward and embarrassing, but at least now she has brain tumors that I can blame it on. When I was a kid I just thought she was a liar, and that made me lie a lot then too.
So, I'll bitch a little more about that I woke up today and the water pipes were frozen. She said, "Oh yeah that happened last year. It's the fault of everyone else, because there's supposed to be a strip along the bottom of the door to keep the cold air out. There's a lightbulb in there, so it should be warm enough." So I went out to inspect the place. Let me tell you, that in 24 degree weather (-4 C) that a lightbulb in a completely uninsulated building with a gigantic window will not do shit. I went back and said, "it's not the weather strip, it's that there's not a scrap of insulation anywhere, and that a normal lightbulb isn't going to change the temp by my than a degree or two."
I have more, but I'm running out of steam for this post, but I want to leave you with a quote from my mother just the other day with regard to someone who ran over a dog. Her narrative for the event for which she wasn't present was that the driver swerved specifically to hit the dog. Her brother denied that bit, and he was actually there. The quote was, "There's no reason to harm an animal for no reason."
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