It’s getting harder and harder to write all this down. Mostly because there’s so much happening so fast, I know I’m not processing too well. I’m scared I’ll never make sense of it if I don’t have some way to remember it. But even the act of writing it down is self destructive.
My mom also forgot my daughter’s birthday earlier this month. As Jill pointed out in comments last time, forgetting is a human thing. I had to ask myself if I was willing to hold myself to the standard I was holding my mother: am I the kind of person who would never forget a birthday? Hell no. Sometimes I get stressed and call my kids by the wrong name. So why was I giving my mother such a hard time?
Of course, the only response from my insides was this furious two-year-old temper tantrum, how if I were in my mother’s shoes I would be doing things SO MUCH BETTER.
I sat down and waited for the indignant screaming to exhausted itself. When it had, I said, “OK. Outline for me how to do this better. Tell me exactly what better looks like in this scenario.” I had no answer, even though I tried really hard to come up with one, and of course despite the fact I’d felt quite self-righteously confident the answer was not only obvious but simple.
Then I had to accept not only that my mom was doing the best she could, but that there was no better way to get through this. I had really been holding onto the idea that somehow this horrible situation was ultimately fixable if only my stupid mother would act right.
And then I cried a lot. The end.
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My dad said an interesting thing when I saw him over Christmas. During our visits this summer and fall, he’d taken me aside when my mother was busy to tell me about “the woman” who had ganged up with the doctors to strip him of his driver’s license. The woman, of course, being my mother. He would cut his eyes toward her when he spoke, suspicion and anger in his tone.
According to my mom, my father has lost all memory of her as his wife. No memories of when they were young and carefree and beautiful, or her as the mother to his small children. He doesn’t remember the trust they built up in 40+ years of marriage. To him, she is simply the white-haired, pear shaped, wrinkly granny who tells him what to do all day, presumably lording her normal intelligence (and of course her ability to drive anywhere at any time!) over his failing skills. Can you imagine the animosity? Or on her end, front row seats to watch the man she loves and must care for learn to resent everything about her?
So when my dad pulled me aside to talk about Mom as she cleaned the kitchen this holiday, I was resigned to however worse it was going to be. Sure enough, he started in with “that woman” and cut his eyes over at her. But then, instead of listing all the ways in which he was annoyed by her, he said, “She really takes care of me” and “If I do what she says, things turn out OK.” He smiled, “It’s OK to trust her.”
He told me how something had broken them apart in the past, and he didn’t know her for a while (I think this is his recollection of the beginning of not knowing her) but that, “I… well, I love her.” He told me like I would be as surprised by this news as he was, like the shy introduction of a new stepmother. Looking back, I think he was trying to convince me (as his daughter and therefore respecting his opinion) that Mom was a good person.
My father fucking fell back in love with my mom.
After a lifetime of being exposed to articles about how You Are More Likely to Get Hit By Lightning Than Remarried After 40 (thanks Cosmo) and those horrible graphs about how all men are basically only attracted to 22 year olds (Thanks OKCupid) and basically a societal acceptance of the idea that as women age they become unworthy of male gaze, I am completely undone but this development. I had zero hope my dad would ever be anything but progressively worse, unkind and suspicious. Moreover, I guess it is one data point in the universe telling me that as I get old and wrinkled, there is hope that someone would love me for more than just the memory of who I used to be.
#
Finally, Little and I got tipsy following dinner at my parents and talked a bit about being angry with God (me) versus the more deflated God is Real, but He Doesn’t Care About You (Little). We stumbled over to Middle’s (who lives a few blocks from our parents) saying increasingly irreverent things and occasionally peering at the black Christmas sky in search of lightning inevitably coming to strike us down. By the time we got to Middle’s we were rage-laughing, and when Middle opened the door and asked us what on earth we were talking about, I shouted, “Divorcing God!”
Being quite a bit more God-fearing, black-n-white-thinking, never-drinking, Middle has been treating us with the social equivalent of staring bug eyed (and praying under her breath on our behalf) ever since. Little isn’t doing so great. I guess on top of everything else, feeling as though she’s gotten the “It’s not me, it’s you” breakup line from her deity of choice has not been much comfort in her grief.
Little has been in my thoughts.
I was utterly charmed by this story of your dad. And then also heartbroken. It’s just so god damned sad.
Echoing the above sentiment, I have the utmost respect for the fact that your sister is still standing. I hope she finds some peace.
That story about your dad is just heart stopping. As a child of divorce who was constantly assured that there are no soul mates and it’s all a matter of hard work and communication and a load of unromantic slogging, which it sounds like your mother has been doing these days, what a breathe of hope to see that maybe there is some greater connection.
Oh my. I had my heart all braced for your mother and what she must carry through this dark part…I never saw that sweetness coming. And there’s a dear thing too in your daddy, who knows that he’s not at his best, telling his little girl that she can trust that woman. It’s still fucking AWFUL, but there is some sweetness to hold on to. It’s like being handed a shit pie to eat but then realizing at least you get a spoon.
I do not think writing it down is self-destructive. If nothing else, it will allow you to look back on this in a few years and marvel at how strong you were – because you are being amazingly wonderfully strong in the face of a whirlwind of awfulness, and you and your family are clinging together as best you know how. It is awful, no question, but you are in fact doing well.
I hope that’s comforting; I intend it to be, at least.
As for the inner temper tantrum, it seems like an understandable reaction to losing both your mother and your father to the vortex of this illness. I’m sorry.
Keep writing.
I think it is very human for your mom to mess up a birthday or two.
I also think it is very human for you to react like this to it. I know when things are going tits up in my life, I badly want there to be some THING I can blame. Something that, if it happened, would magically make everything so much better.
Your mother messing up is perfectly logical and a small, forgivable thing given how much she’s dealing with right now. It is *simultaneously* a harbinger of the end times and shows just how everything in your lives has cracked and fallen apart and yet you all have to continue, and so on.
(I.e. I understand feeling both ways at once. It’s okay to feel both ways at once. It sucks! But it’s okay.)
I do not mean this to sound condescending and I hope it doesn’t: I respect your strength and willingness to look at your own uncomfortable thought processes. That shit isn’t easy.
……..wow, what a bittersweet thing from your dad. Oh, love. I’m so happy and so sad for you all at once.
I feel for Little. Gah, that’s awful.
I’m very glad you’re still writing. Selfishly, because I care about you (and yes, I realise I only know what you choose to share with us here, and that doesn’t mean I know the entirety of you as a person, and I’m not some kind of creepy stalker).
(Well, I’m not a full-time stalker, anyway.)
And unselfishly, because I think it is probably good for you, sometimes, to write.
I don’t mean that you should write all the time, and write every single feeling, and update us daily on how you’re doing, of course. Sometimes the worst thing one can do is examine one’s emotions and share them. You have to do what’s right for you. But when it IS right for you, I’m glad that you write here. Because it can be a reasonably cathartic thing.
(check back with me later for more “Meg Tells Anne All About Things She Already Knows In 500 Words Where 50 Woulda Done” XD)
And now I am in love with your dad.
Wow. I was so touched when you shared how your Dad wanted to learn Spanish. But his falling in love with your Mom again is one of the most touching things I’ve ever read. Something so beautiful in all this. I’m not sure how I feel about God these days but if he’s there, I hope he sends good things to you and your family.
I guess it is one of the wonders of life that in the midst of such great pain there are slivers of brilliant light.
I wish I knew something useful to say for your sister. Grief, in general, and the loss of a child, in particular, are so painful. As I continue to struggle with grieving, I have come to recognize two truths: 1) the only thing you can do is go through it, and 2) it doesn’t actually get easier, like a bruise it may get less sensitive, but even that slacking of the pain can in turn be excruciating.
Wishing all as much love and light as is possible!
You just have the best people on here. They have already said “the things,” and I don’t have anything, really, that would add or comfort. But Imma add anyway so you know that I love you. Even if I fail, and all the posts zipping around the internets with titles like, “Holy-hell 10 Things You Should Never Say to Someone Who Is Grieving,” or “The Top Eight Things That Only Assholes Type In Blogpost Comments,” tell me I am probably failing in one way or another. Cuz, ya know… you can always tell the folks who are doing stuff. They are failing all the time. So I’m letting you know I am thinking about you, and praying too.
I have nothing, I just, I just love that your father fell in love with your mother again. And told you.
I am learning that sometimes life just keeps giving out pain, and there’s no neat ending to it. It sounds utterly ridiculous and frankly absurd even to me now that I write it, but some part of me did sort of hope that it was just that 2015 was a staggeringly shitty year, and that once into 2016 things would start looking up. They did not. And I opened my eyes to the stuff I already knew – my SIL with her beloved developmentally compromised son; you with your parents; my friend with the ‘it’ll be a miracle if it’s not terminal’ illness and two young boys; oh and pretty much everyone in Syria.
And I dunno, maybe the God whose existence I debate with myself almost daily, is not an entity but a way of being, an embracing of the pain and a celebration of the joy when it comes, because there such as hell doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to anything.
Keep writing.