Here's Mommy!

I came down the stairs and surprised my mother with her pants down in front of the refrigerator, rummaging around for the plain yogurt. She has a yeast infection and the yoghurt helps. I definitely have to get a curtain on the front door, which is comprised almost entirely of clear beveled glass, and is on a direct line with the refrigerator, and also the window in the kitchen, which faces my neighbor Jim’s house. He’s 89 and I figure one more big shock could kill him.

I took her to the doctor’s yesterday. This is a new doctor and so far, and probably because he hasn’t made a move on her medications, she likes him. I filled out forms for her and listened to her misremember to him how long she’d been on certain pills and why. It was interesting, sort of, and alarming, more of. She sounds so completely normal, but the dates are all wrong in her head. She is starting to confuse events in her more recent past. When Dad died, when she moved in with my brother and his wife, when she moved out again. She referred to my Dad’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s on two different occasions, labelling it the starting point of all her own troubles. The depression started then, and the sleeplessness, and the worrying.

Now it seems like everything oversets her. Talking to the doctor she confessed that she’s taking more Ativan since she came to stay with me. She says that it’s from living with two little boys. This from the woman who raised 10 boys and two girls without benefit of any mood altering drugs. I have a hard time believing that noisy kids can be responsible for her anxiety attacks, but how the hell would I know? I didn’t have to listen to the confusion from five times as many children for thirty years. Maybe the effects are cumulative. I could blame it on the generation in front of this one, my generation, my siblings. If we’d been quieter growing up maybe she’d be in better shape now. It’s all your fault, you noisy gobs!

I haven’t announced her move to my brothers yet.

For one, I don’t believe it’s permanent, just because she’s done a runner on other members of the family before me. There’s no sense in counting on her to stay here and be happy. She doesn’t ever stay happy for long.

There was an article I read last week that talked about this pissed off gene that all human beings have that keeps them from being happy with their situation, no matter how perfect that situation might be. The author, Hugh McCleod, claimed that it was the pissed off gene that got you out of the cave to hunt wooly mammoth in the first place. My mother seems to have this gene in spades, except it hasn’t gotten her out of her cave to hunt, unless it was to hunt out another cave to hide in. One with a main floor laundry, for preference.

She’s so antsy. I keep expecting her to settle in and purr comfortably but she doesn’t do that. I don’t know what a grandmother is supposed to act like. Mine all died before I was born. I only know that this one is difficult to get used to.

The other day at dinner, she offered grace at the table and then made a remark to the boys that she knew they didn’t believe in God. They both jumped on that. Sam: “I believe in God. My god is just smaller than your god. There’s only me to believe in him.” Nick: “And I have two angels.”

I don’t know what she thought about that. Maybe that’s why she feels a need for more tranquilizers.

Steve says she baits me. I know this, but I think it’s more to establish herself in the hierarchy than from any sense of maliciousness, although the meanness is something I remember growing up.

She says being mean was the only way of exerting control over a herd of children. Things went by pretty strict routine around the house. Mom ran it and Dad enforced it. Sometimes, I envy the older boys, the ones that came first, because they must have experienced Mom and Dad before they became completely overwhelmed by the numbers of us.

It wasn’t like we lived on a farm or anything where you could get lost in the chores outside or where there were wide open spaces between you and the next person. We were all huddled together in our cave, stepping on each other’s toes, using up all the hot water, sleeping in the same rooms, breathing each other’s breath. It was a crowded, stuffy, moist cave, for the most part. We all developed a mean sense of humor.

She’s on the couch now, listening to her favorite television channel, All Catholic All The Time.

When I saw her this morning she had her pants down and was clutching her blue rosary, her travelling rosary she calls it, like a raggedy security blanket. She’d slept well and waked up to pee and get something to eat. Her hair was sticking up in the back and her eyes were hooded and tiny in her puffy face. She said she’d dreamed about indians and then again about an old neighbor couple of ours from a long time ago, Blanche and Henry Martin, both dead now. “Was Henry talking?” I asked her, because Henry had died after contracting Alzheimer’s disease. And she nodded. I gave her a hug and she shuffled back upstairs to wait until the boys left for school. She says it’s to stay out of my way, but I think it’s too busy for her and reminds her of school mornings from thirty years ago.

In those days we ate a lot of oatmeal. Mom was like a huge organizing spider in the kitchen, making lunches, serving breakfast, directing traffic. She’d buy white bread loaves 30 at a time and put them in the big freezer in the utility room. Then she’d take the bread out and lay it in single slices all over the counter in the kitchen, trying to thaw it out enough to spread something on it, peanut butter and jelly or the dreaded ham spread, making sandwiches and packing cookies and apples and oranges. Never chips, because those were expensive. All our cookies were homemade because that was cheaper. We were stupid and envied our friends who brought packaged treats from home.