The supernatural is seeping in. Which realistically, is probably more related to life stress causing my perceptions to go wonky than a reflection of actual events in the known world. I don’t mind it once in a while, if I’m honest. Ah, refreshing break from the mundane!

The first weirdness

Lately, when Something Bad happens and I can’t blog about it, my Statcounter* starts rising up. It’s as if we are psychically connected somehow, and when some shit hits the fan over here, you wander over to my blog and start refreshing, waiting for the post to come up about it.

For example (and omigod, what a read-between-the-lines vague-blogging example) since my mother has decided to martyr herself for Dad’s care, I have been noticing real-time ripples of this value system in other family members. In some pretty clear cut instances, the value of our family seems to have become that you will physically let yourself suffer so as to not disrupt a husband’s life,.

Seeing this happen makes me exactly as calm, rational, and non-judgmental as you might imagine. And because the specifics completely involve other people’s actions and not my own, I have gone to bed every night seething but also knowing I can’t really blog about it because it’s not my story to tell.

But when I wake up, there’s this little bump in my stats, where before there is the flat-line of how many people generally stop by when I haven’t posted for a while. For all the nights I’m pissed, a slightly bigger bump the next morning, like you are all, “Come on. I know some shit went down. Let’s have it.” And in the same way, as I eventually find new things to occupy my mind, the stats flatten back out and we all go about our business.

The second weirdness

The phone connection problem with my mom is back. I blogged about it in the last section of this post. It had gone away almost entirely, so much that I was surprised to re-read that earlier post and remember how bad it once had been.

Another piece I’ve alluded to but not really talked about is that I think my Mom is taking a turn for the worse. I just found out she’s been sending six months of emails not to me, but to my kids. My oldest finally realized I wasn’t on the address list and forwarded me some banking information that needed my signature.

We all make this kind of mistake every once in a while, but the stuff she’d sent had some errors as well. Again, understandable, considering the stress my mother is under. Certainly not anything firm enough to require some sort of action. But enough for me to start keeping a list so when I call Middle, we can say to each other, “What should we do?” and eventually come up with the helpless decision that there’s nothing to be done. And I guess if something bad happens, we can be guilty forever that we didn’t do something. OR, if nothing bad happens, we don’t have to worry about it.

When I was bemoaning all this to my husband, he said, “Haven’t you been saying this for the past… five years?”

Which is probably true, and to me, a testament to how horrible this process is – that every time, there is something new that makes me feel as if we are teetering on the edge of An Incident, and the only thing that stays constant is my inability to accept that I have no control over the situation. I keep thinking things will get bad enough I will get some control by…. what? Throwing them both into a senior care center? I think that will only change how things are horrible and I have no control.

Anyway, all this to say I had to call my mother back three times in a row yesterday because the phone line garbled. I had assumed it was the same problem it’s always been, but as I mentioned, reviewing earlier bitching on this issue reveals this is actually a different kind of phone problem. Now, my mom’s voice gets scratchier and scratchier, like it’s being erased with a Brillo pad, until there is only a vowel or consonant that makes it through. Then silence. Until finally I hang up and redial, wondering if she’s still oblivious, talking on the other side.

In a strange way, it compliments her distress during the conversation, which is all about having communication problems with other people around her – the gardener said he would come of Fridays, but he only comes 3 times out of the month. For the price he’s charging, did he think the agreement was he’d garden on Fridays, or every Friday? Or how the woman hired to sit with my dad asked if she could step out to buy a sandwich for lunch, but my mom thinks she probably just left my Dad unattended for some chunk of time. Since my mom doesn’t know for sure, she will neither use the woman again, nor report the caregiver to the agency that sent her.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on. It just struck me last night as I was hitting redial that I always thought the phone problem was something my mother and I generated together, but now I’m thinking maybe it’s all her, an electronic expression of her stress. Which I guess is how kids always end up thinking – moms are always full of great and terrible magic.

*counts visits to my blog.