Coping.

Y’all… this is gonna be a ride, and I don’t blame you if you decide to give this one a skip. Before you go though, I’m going to give you the punchline right up front… then you can say, yup, that’s great, thanks so much and close on out when it gets too heavy.

The secret to being making the most out of this trip around the wild, wacky carnival called life is to be flexible and open to what each day brings.

That’s it. You can go now.

For those that want to walk a little further with me, have a drink. Or strap in, metaphorically. Do whatever it is you do to prepare for shit getting real. Cause it’s very real in here just now.

When last year started winding down, sucking the way it did for pretty much everyone, I got one of my brilliant ideas. I got myself a Hero’s Journal and set out on a quest- with the eventual goal of being a better person. Don’t misunderstand, I’ve come a long way over the years, to the point that I admit I can have a good moment now and again, and I’m not a complete shitheel. That seemed like a good starting point… but I wanted to be kinder to myself and those closest to my heart, and I wanted to share more of those good moments with a broader scope of the world. Random acts of kindness ramped up to where I could make them happen with greater regularity and put a little spark of my own magic out into the world more often.

And Eris laughed… as I think she frequently does when I do things like ‘make plans’. (This really isn’t germane to the rest of this conversation, but might fill in some blanks for folk… while I am religious and spiritual, I am not a Christian. In the simplest terms so I can get back to what I was talking about, my beliefs are tied into the divinity of creativity.)

Keep that mental image for the moment, a person who crawled through the muck of 2020, but somehow beat off the beasties and shoved them behind the door, hosed off, and looking towards a mental fresh start with a deep breath and a raised chin.

Now let’s talk about my mother.

Oh the field day Freud would have here.

I want to start by saying this- I don’t think my mother is a bad person. I think she is good to closing her eyes and turning her face away from the things that displease her or generally don’t fit into her carefully curated world. Color, her artistic pursuits, coffee, sometimes a book or tv show (the few that meet her exacting, ever morphing criteria), and a video game or two (again with the criteria) make up that world. It’s a quiet one, and things that are emotional or messy don’t have a place there. She’s adamant that she doesn’t care for people, doesn’t want to deal with them or any system of bureaucracy as though she’s a veteran of a war of red tape shenanigans.

Nothing could be further from the truth- my mother gave up working (in a library, where the books kept watch over the silence) when she moved across the country to be with my stepfather, and seldom left their apartment at all. From the time I had my license, I did the grocery shopping until I left home at twenty. What she did in those in between years, I can’t imagine- though I do know that without the soothing buffer of my presence while I slept (because heavens knows I was home as little as I could manage it the rest of the time) she and my father managed to drive each other up the walls and to the lawyer’s office for a divorce.

Off she went across the country to my stepfather, where she cloistered herself accordingly. Phone calls were accepted when she felt like it- mine less and less frequently as I encouraged her to get a job, make some friends, all those pieces that most people think of when it comes to making a life in a new place. Relocated a thousand miles from home and recently divorced myself, it was advice I was steadfastly putting into practice and reaping the uneven rewards. She refused, and also refused to visit- I think I went for two to three years without a phone call, and five or six years without seeing her at all.

Eventually, she and my stepfather moved to my city, because they needed more of a support structure, the low cost of living, and family. My stepfather and I were fairly close (trust me, that’s another story for another day, just take it on faith for the moment), and it wasn’t long before we started talking in a strange shorthand about what to do with mom. She was clearly unhappy, and I was told that this is basically what life was these days- good days and bad days, with long periods of sullen silence for no known reason.

Jobs were out. People were out. Since she quit driving, her going anywhere on her own was out. From time to time, I’d pick her up and take her shopping, and she’d act like she was released from a prison. The apartment was too small, too dark, too cluttered. My stepfather didn’t understand that she just couldn’t deal with those people from his dialysis clinic or the Social Security office.

And somehow, Fox News had made it into the meagre repertoire of viewing options. That and Oak Island- while I objected to hearing the current news flash from either source, it was incredibly disconcerting to hear Tucker Carlson’s opinions fueling my mother’s general disdain for humanity at ever increasing rates of speed. It went from people being obnoxious overall to brown people, gay people, and anyone who thought brown or gay people may have a point.

It may seem like I’m taking a lot of time and words to lay this out, but I want to be sure we both understand the way the scene was set. Maybe, in our own way, you and I are engaged on investigating the motives behind a crime. I don’t want you to think there was some massive overnight change that occurred only when my stepfather passed. I’ve heard too many well meaning people make the ‘ahhh’ sound of understanding when they know that’s a factor in the current situation, and it makes me grind my teeth in frustration.

Moving along then… yes, we lost my stepfather, undoubtedly the most patient and kind man I’ve yet met, back in June. It was surprising and yet not- for a long time, his health situation could best be summed up in non clinical terms by the Facebook relationship status, ‘It’s complicated’. At the very end though, he made the choice to discontinue life saving treatment after it was clear that his quality of life had seen a marked negative change that was unlikely to improve.

All of us that loved him accepted and understood this. None of us spoke against his decision in any way, and one of the things I’m most grateful for in this life was the chance to say the things that needed to be said and to hear his truth.

And that’s when my watch over my mother began, which I was fine with, honestly. Finding her a new place to live, making sure finances were taken care of, keeping the fridge stocked, all fine, no problem.

So where did the problem start? Well, that would be when I started pushing harder on the ‘you need an income’ issue. Even though she was well past filing age for Social Security and Medicare, she absolutely point blank refused to finish the process of having it set up. Without having an income, we couldn’t really get far with getting her an apartment. In the boundless optimism and energy of the Before Times, we moved her into our spare bedroom while we got it sorted out.

And then, friends and neighbors, it’s 2020, and without medical insurance, what do you think happened?

Mom got sick. Well, let me be plainer about it. Mom was already sick, she’d just ignored the symptoms for like.. you know.. a year. But living in the house with us was not really conducive to hiding a major illness.

Remember what I said about dealing with red tape being a massive No? Well, that list was hardly exhaustive… my mother also refused to deal with any but the most cursory doctor’s visits or needles or regular medication refills for minor things like depression and diabetes. My suggesting a quick run to the urgent care clinic to have the situation checked out met with a tantrum and the silent treatment. I suddenly fully understood conversations with my stepfather about what he’d been living with all these years.

I swear, if it wasn’t for that flash of insight and everything that happened next, it’d almost be funny to think about my sixty seven year old mother giving me the silent treatment, bottom lip outthrust like any thwarted toddler.

Matters came to a head one morning when I found her laying unresponsive in the spare room and I called the ambulance.

I think that’s when I became The Enemy.

We went through a couple of months with mom in and out of the hospital, always resentful and angry, sometimes actually abusive. There were pointed questions from the hospital staff for me regarding my mother’s general care and financial situation- in other words, was I responsible for my mother’s neglect of her health and was I shaking money out of her piggy bank. (The answer is emphatically no- my only crime was letting her do as she had always done and not stepping in until she couldn’t make decisions for herself anymore, then stepping right back out again.) For my part, there were a lot of deep breaths and talk about how all this was temporary, just a thing happening at this moment in time, and life would go on. I talked about in law quarter add ons, vegetable garden beds we were building at waist height, improvements to the courtyard to make it more comfortable and enjoyable.

I am SUCH an optimist.

Without getting into the gory medical bits, mom’s situation demanded that she care for herself differently, and she very much would not be able to ignore or neglect herself. She refused and begged me to do it- not because she was incapable, but because she didn’t want to face that thing.

And that’s when I refused. I could give you a thousand reasons and excuses, but I’m not going to do that. I refused because if I said yes, again, there’d never be a line again.

So mom entered a rehab facility- just until she got the hang of caring for herself. Covid restrictions being what they are, no visits allowed. She had her cell phone and her kindle and any want or need under the sun delivered as fast as it could be managed.

Then she fell and broke her hip. The hospital was in touch to let me know there were signs of severe neglect. I reported it, and tried to get her transferred elsewhere. As soon as she was oriented, she had the complaint dismissed and insisted on going back to the same rehab center.

And stopped talking to me. And then she stopped talking to everyone else, too.

Now the rehab center has called to tell me she’s refusing medication and therapy and has requested to go to hospice.

Well.. we’ve come a long way, and I’m going to get to the point. Points… there are really two of them to knit together here. My mother isn’t a bad person, she never kicked puppies or went out of her way to hurt anyone. But unless she has some kind of epiphany fairly soon and decides she wants to live like Burt Reynolds swimming out to sea (it’s a movie called The End.. wasn’t very popular, but it was interesting), my mother is going to die because she doesn’t want a life in which she will have to change and deal with people and situations that aren’t to her liking. She doesn’t want to be open to the possibility of a life with other people in it. I’m willing to bet that if she hadn’t gotten sick, if we’d put her in law quarters in or found an apartment where everything could be delivered to her door without interaction, she would keep on going for another ten, twenty years. Complaining bitterly about how dark, cramped, and awful her situation was, when fact is, she chose it.

This isn’t anything new under the sun- this is just where the road leads when you keep saying no and slamming the door on things you don’t want to see. And it’s heartbreaking and hard and cold and horrible. But it’s clearly what she wants, and fighting her feels really pointless.

As for me? Well. I’d like to pretend that I’m all evolved and ethereal and say that I honor her choice. But I’m not. Sometimes I’m angry and sometimes I feel worthless. Sometimes I wish I could do it all over, but honestly, when I look down that path, I know there’s no different choices to make that I could live with. When I think about how hard I’ve struggled with depression and suicidal impulses, particularly when I was getting to grow up feeling so different and utterly alone, and how I always told myself to give it another day, give life a chance… and then I sit in the middle of this tangle… well, it doesn’t make it any easier that I identify with my mom. And I’m not blind- I’m aware that nature and nurture are what helped create those feelings of isolation. I’m also aware that I have Rick and an amazing family of choice that has been checking in on me, letting me know how loved, valued, and wanted I am. I have stories to hear and to tell, and Rick and I have created ourselves a warm, beautiful, comfortable home to enjoy together. As heartsore and angry as I can be over the way my mother wants her story to go, as disappointed as I am, I’m not at all prepared to say no to all the wonder life has to offer if I just keep an open mind.

How am I doing with all this, you ask? Coping.