We spent Christmas Eve at my parents\u2019 house.\u00a0 Both my sisters, their spouses, and all children.\u00a0 100% attendance by the DePlume family.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the first holiday in memory my mother has commanded our presence rather than request it.\u00a0 \u201cThis will probably be the last Christmas,\u201d she added, trailing off.\u00a0 Last Christmas before what?<\/i> I did not ask.\u00a0 At least not to her face.<\/p>\n
But my Internal Narrator asked me, over and over.\u00a0 Fucking annoying. During a dark, half-asleep trip to the potty; while cutting carrots for dinner; every step of my afternoon walk. \u00a0\u00a0Before WHAT?<\/p>\n
I was pretty tense on the drive up there.\u00a0 My mom never calls me anymore.\u00a0 When I call her, she has high pressured speech \u2013 talking hard and fast about whatever it is that\u2019s on her mind, usually something that\u2019s made her sad or angry.\u00a0 \u00a0Eventually, she\u2019ll say, \u201cHow are you doing?\u201d or worse, \u201cYou keep me so distant\u00a0 \u2013 you never tell me what\u2019s going on in your life anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
My heart never fails to lurch at those words.\u00a0 I’ll start to talk, but within a sentence and a half, she\u2019ll interrupt: \u201cI hate to do this, but I\u2019ve been talking too long and nature calls,\u201d she said the first time before hanging up.\u00a0 \u201cOops, here comes your Dad, I have to help him,\u201d she said the second.\u00a0 And I\u2019m not even joking, the third time, she fell asleep and started snoring<\/i>.<\/p>\n
I know she can\u2019t take on one single thing more.\u00a0 She can\u2019t take care of me, not even at the level of hearing about my day.\u00a0 I know the energy needs to flow to her \u2013 our relationship is not a give and take anymore.<\/p>\n
Knowing didn\u2019t prepare me for seeing her.\u00a0 She is haggard, dead-eyed, with few facial expressions.\u00a0 She makes minimal eye contact.\u00a0 Her skin is terrible.<\/p>\n
All this time I have been worrying about losing my father, but I understand now I will lose them both.\u00a0 She is dying as quickly as he is.<\/p>\n
What was only a theoretical choice a few months ago is visceral now.\u00a0 My dad was always going to die.\u00a0 That was in the cards.\u00a0\u00a0 She could\u2019ve stayed with us, but she chose to go with him.\u00a0 All this time, I\u2019ve been hoping she could pull this choice off, be some WonderWoman who cared for my dad until the end, then came back to us.<\/p>\n
Now I understand the last true words my mother spoke to me were, \u201cYou are already an orphan.\u201d\u00a0 Looking back, she must\u2019ve known we had to cut the tie between us, maybe so it wouldn\u2019t drag me into the darkness with her.<\/p>\n
She has taken to sleeping alone in her guest bedroom now.\u00a0 My dad hardly sleeps at night, and she needs the downtime.<\/p>\n
When we arrived at her house, she asked me to put fresh sheets on the bed so my husband and I could use it.\u00a0 The request unsettled me only because my mother is from the South.\u00a0 Being unprepared for guests is against their religion \u2013 I\u2019d never made my own guest bed in her house my whole life.<\/p>\n
I hauled a bundle of sheets to the back bedroom and got busy.\u00a0 When I found her uncovered pillows, I was surprised to see they were nasty, yellowed, stained things, the feathered ones half-empty and clotted.\u00a0 Ugh, Mom is really slipping<\/i>, I thought.\u00a0 It crossed my mind to wonder why all of them were so god-awful, but mostly I was irritated — my husband is finicky and I didn\u2019t know if he would tolerate this level of grossness.\u00a0 Even I was hesitant about sleeping on them, and I’m none too finicky.<\/p>\n
Despite my repulsion, when it came to putting pillow cases on, I fell back into old habits and bit the end of the pillow between my teeth to help shake it into its case.\u00a0 Ew, I know.\u00a0 But 1) I don\u2019t know how to put a pillow case on any other way, and 2) she\u2019s my mom, what worse cooties could she have than the ones I got living inside her, right?<\/p>\n
The pillows were salty<\/i>.\u00a0 Yeah, I probably got what I had coming to me for putting one in my mouth, but I seriously stood there wondering WTFuckingF was SALTY?\u00a0 After a moment of barfy confusion, I put the rest of the bed together and left.<\/p>\n
After I\u2019d been at her house two days, I knew.\u00a0 Those pillows are lumpy, destroyed messes because they have been soaked in tears.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We spent Christmas Eve at my parents\u2019 house.\u00a0 Both my sisters, their spouses, and all children.\u00a0 100% attendance by the DePlume family. It\u2019s the first holiday in memory my mother has commanded our presence rather than request it.\u00a0 \u201cThis will probably be the last Christmas,\u201d she added, trailing off.\u00a0 Last Christmas before what? I did …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,6,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dad","category-family","category-mission-impostible"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5632"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5659,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5632\/revisions\/5659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}