I spoke to my dad by phone the other day. “Hi Natalie!”  was the only coherent thing he said, but he was so happy!

He kept telling me there was something funny about my name, and laughing in this delighted manner. My best guess: he saw my name come up on the phone, and maybe it amused him it’s my married name? He kept saying something that sounded kind of like my married surname twice, laughing in wonder and amusement both times.

As more of a mental note for me , so as to remember this point when I weigh everything that’s happened, I should point out Dad seems to have gone back to his factory settings for general amount of happiness.

For a while, of course, that wasn’t true. Realizing you are losing your capabilities is depressing as shit, and there was more than a year following his diagnosis when I hardly saw him smile. I imagined his sadness would continue on it’s downward trajectory, deteriorating along with his function, until there was only blackness.

But I would say the past year, he has gone back to his old levels of happiness. I’m not sure what this means for my evaluation of whether I’d stick around following my own dementia diagnosis or take the fast exit, but it is interesting that my dad can be wandering in world in which he is doesn’t know who he is or how to open a door with the deadbolt set, but he can still find his own thoughts amusing. And somewhat interesting that his happiness still makes me happy, even with all the other factors of his dementia.

I also spoke to my mom for a while on the phone, although it may have been at another time. I can’t remember.

FWIW, her sadness still seems in downward trajectory mode. But maybe her baseline of happiness is masked by the complications of knowing what’s going on. Or maybe circumstances don’t allow her to get so low as she might, so getting back to basic happiness will take longer for her. Anyway, it’s been about eight years since my Dad was sure something was wrong (and maybe two years before where we lived in the land of knowing something seemed off, but not that it was wrong) and that is a long time to be sad.

On this particular phone call, Mom seemed particularly moped, so I told her about an interaction I’d had with my oldest kid. Mom and I used to talk this way all the time, but rarely do now, both because of her situation and our falling out.

The story: My oldest casually mentioned she’d be taking drivers ed in a few months, and driving in less than a year! Whoo-hoo! she proclaimed to the envious sighs of her younger sisters.

Somehow, this caught me completely off guard.

Like, driving is some life-or-death stuff, right? Driving my kid to the high school this year, I’ve been painfully sensitized to teenage drivers, gunning their engines to escape at 3 o’clock and practically parking in the middle of the street in the AM with their atrocious spatial skills.

PLUS, there are also a sea of teenagers walking/jaywalking/looking neither left nor right before darting into the street. I’ve been a licensed automobile operator upwards of a quarter century and it still makes me nervous to drive to the high school.  In fact, a kid on a bike got hit by a car just a few weeks ago! And of course since we were all queued up to get to the high school, we rolled by the laid out teen surrounded by paramedics.

So my knee-jerk response to my daughter’s crowing was, “No way!” and “You can take the bus until you’re 18,” and “just because you can get a license at 16 doesn’t mean you should… or that we’ll let you,” until all my children and my husband were looking at me like I’d farted in church.

Daughter, no-doubt thinking she was making a convincing argument for her case said, “I can drive my sisters around, you won’t have to take us anywhere!”

And dear God, the idea of all my sweet eggs in one fragile basket, careening down a California freeway with all the drunks and texters and idiots!  I really thought I might cry, or attempt to stop time in some manner.

What I told my own mother, over the phone a few days after the argument, was how my daughter said, “You’re being a hypocrite! You always say how great it is that we grow and change. Sixteen-year-olds learn to drive.”

I’m not exactly sure why I told my mom this, except to share this unspoken feeling that came over me  – like if anyone else in the world had called me a hypocrite, especially in regard to my parenting skills, it would’ve been scorched earth time. Being a good parent isn’t my whole identity, but it’s a pretty sizable chunk, and I’ve taken total strangers to the mat for less.

And how strange the parent-child relationship is, that my daughter would throw that accusation in my face with a total lack of fear. Did she not realize what she was saying?!

And even as her words breezed by me, and part of me was like, “Hey shouldn’t I be going nuclear right now?” most of me just felt this peace and sadness. Because she was right. My job as a parent is to help her become, not hinder her to protect my own heart.  Plus, this awe I’d created a person who wasn’t afraid to tell me I was wrong.

Anyway, what I ended up telling my mom was more along the lines of, “Kids do NOT pull any punches when you make a mistake.”

I meant it as a small peace offering, letting my mother back into my world a little.  But as soon as I said it, I could only think of the falling out between me and her, and how she’d failed me, but also made me into the kind of person strong enough to break away from what was wrong.

She sighed one of those big sighs, that are full or recognition and maybe sadness.  The kind of sigh I probably made when my kid called me a hypocrite.  But I could hear the smile in my mom’s voice when she said, “They sure don’t.”

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