My Mom - The Terror of A-Wing

I am sounding out titles for my memoir in the wake of a phone call reporting that my 91 year old mom is misbehaving BIG TIME in her new "Level 2 Nursing Facility," aka a nursing home. Two weeks ago and more this would have thrown me into a tailspin of problem-solving and responsibility-assuming, which has been my life in relation to my mom for 69 years.

But recently I made a breakthrough in trying to sort out this most complex of relationships any of us ever has, the one with Mom. I let go of trying to make things better and to change my mom's very stubbornly planted bitter perspective on you-name-it. Since, I have noticed some curious changes in me. I no longer see the bus in downtown Montpelier with "Montreal" on the destination screen as a possible escape route and imagine just getting on and going wherever it goes. I no longer wake to an immediate dread about how my mom is that moment or what demands will come my way that day. I actually feel that I am the mistress of my time, my day, that I don't have to justify my choices. Today I stayed in my bathrobe until 11:30 and still had one of my most fun days ever just putzing around, finishing a Penelope Lively novel, weeding my birch island, having lunch with a dear friend.

Amazing. Everything has changed and yet it seems nothing has changed. I don't have to run away with the circus anymore, just as Circus Smirkus comes to town. I am making plans to go on a retreat in Ireland this fall, as a matter of choice rather than a desperate attempt to survive.  Mom is still in a nursing home and miserable. I still go to see her once or twice a week, down from five or six. But wait...I do have a more peaceful heart.

Don't get me wrong. I love my mom. She is a Force of Nature and she has been tireless in trying to be a good mother. Considering where she came from, she has overcome so much. Her indomitable will, often the bane of my existence, saw that my siblings and I went to college, an advantage she did not have. When we were young she taught us to present ourselves to the world in ways that helped to assure our success. She introduced us to the public library as soon as we could read. She spent Monday nights and Tuesdays during my early years ironing baskets -- plural -- of little dresses and blouses and shirts, putting my sister's and my hair in bobby pins nightly, and teaching us endless survival skills like ironing, sewing on buttons, and measuring solid shortening, that my own otherwise very accomplished daughter does not have.

She brought us up with a sense of service and community, something that influenced our choices of careers, which she did not have. She volunteered at school and especially at church, a tireless campaigner for people less fortunate. As a good friend has said, "She probably should have run a small country." Indeed, there are a few countries in this world that could have used her, still can.

She brought us up in the church, which we all eventually rejected, at least for some time. Our growing up years as the third generation in our family at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church meant among other things that we knew who we were, who we belonged to...and so did everyone else. That meant she would find out if we ever got out of line, which was never, with the possible exception of my little brother.

My mom gave me a sense of color, of organization. She passed on her values of honesty and loyalty and equity. She did not play with us much but we all remember the summer we were consumed by pinochle and euchre and she was our fourth at the table, between vacuuming and getting dinner ready, before Dad came home. And at one time you could really card around with her. She had a sense of humor that ran to slightly off-color jokes and when she was sour my dad could love her out of it with his. She hugged us and kissed us and I never doubted I was wanted and loved.

Now she is angry and bitter. She is blind from macular dengeneration and virtually deaf due to a series of insults going back to childhood and a mother who was doing the best she knew how to do too. She can't walk. She is grieving the loss of the love of her life, an earnest, playful, loving man she had for over 76 years, someone who asked her to marry him on their first date at age 15. She just wants to be loved and accepted...and young and physically able.

I can't do much about her age or her abilities except promise her I will make sure she gets the care she needs. And that is no small promise. But I can accept her in all her unhappiness and anger and fear and sadness. Just accept her with love, without judgment. Take her Hershey's kisses, rub hand cream into her hands, hug her and kiss her, brush her beautiful silver hair, and when I need to leave, say the Lord's Prayer out loud with her. Finally, it seems like enough to me. I am so grateful she lived long enough for me to learn this lesson.

Memorial Day Weekend 2013

Ever notice how even the teensiest thing can throw you off your game? Yesterday when it was cold and raining and not at all the kind of Memorial Day weekend I have come to expect, I wasn't a happy camper. It just wasn't right that this weekend, always important to me, was shaping up to be a colossal disappointment filled with wind and rain.

I couldn't find anything I was looking for. And when I did get information I sought, it was not what I wanted to hear. I knew I had packed my jewelry. I remember standing in my bedroom spending way too much time pondering which necklace to wear to a picnic tomorrow. It had to be here somewhere. Same with the knee brace I brought to shore up a tender tendon injured recently in a fight with a bag of potting soil. Same with the sports water bottle I had left here last time I was at Peter's house. It was here. I just had to open my eyes.

Couldn't find ANY of them yesterday. I tore through all the too-many clothes, shoes, coloring books (aka my activities cache), knitting, etc. to no avail. I was pretty sure I was going bonkers right then and there. AND I felt chilled and it seemed far too dark outside during the day.


I fully blame the missing-in-action sunshine that was supposed to highlight this opening-of-summer weekend. I spent a lot of energy being really annoyed about its absence, remembering Memorial Days with more heat and sun when our family set up the screened porch for summer. My dad listened to the Indy 500 on the radio while he painted and scrubbed and put the screens in place. My mom would put little pin-up lamps next to wicker chairs so we could read after dark. When a neighbor drove his boat past the house on his way to the river, my dad would joke, "Look at that fool! He's going boating and he could be painting his porch!"

School was over, in effect, even though the teachers had to put up with us for another ten days or so. The Memorial Day marker meant we could start wearing our white clothes and shoes, a standard of sartorial propriety that has long since vanished. Parks and beaches opened for "the season" and stayed open until Labor Day. Mom made her patented potato salad to celebrate. The days were still getting longer. My birthday was coming.

Earlier in my life, when the holiday was also known as Decoration Day, I accompanied my grandparents to Aunt Nellie's grave for the spring clean-up and flower-planting. They lost her at age 27, pregnant with her first baby, decades earlier and were never the same. During the heat of summer they visited that grave every week, cut the grass, tended to the geraniums they had planted at Memorial Day. I remember seeing other families plant fresh new flags on the graves of veterans, not yet realizing just how lucky I was that my dad came home from war in one piece to help me grow up and give me my sister and brother.

Vermont this year could not have been much farther from those warm memories. Snow topped Killington Peak and Mt. Mansfield and yet another frost hit the fledgling gardens of those of us so eager for summer that we jumped the gun and planted before Memorial Day. No wonder I was discombobulated, cranky, unseeing, and more than a little bit resentful of my friends in the mid-Atlantic and the midwest who were actually enjoying a sunny warm holiday weekend.

At times like this, old-time Vermonters are quick to tell flatlanders like me tales of snow in June and other anomalies. They are never surprised or even disappointed by the weather. Only in our minds is sunshine something to count on. We get attached to an idea, maybe a slender hope, and hang on for all our might.

How scary it seems to let go, to have a Plan B, simply to be wholly present with whatever is. And yet, it is only in that letting go and letting be that we receive the gifts of sight (for finding those lost objects) and insight. That we find the gifts of treasured memories and gratitude for those who shaped us and those who served. For a chance to make one last fire and hope that tomorrow's forecast for sun comes true.

Wanted: Meaningful Work

When I stopped working last summer, the word "retirement" was bandied about, albeit with a necklace of caveats that dressed it up a bit and made it feel more presentable. Before I could cross the border into the land of "OMG--What have I done?" I left the country on my sister's shirttails to enjoy and find a way to feel useful in Armenia for most of three months (see DiploMom71.blogspot.com). When I returned just before Thanksgiving it seemed a given that no serious matters were going to be addressed until after the new year.

But now, a full five months on, I can tell I am definitely approaching the borders of "OMG--What have I done?" -- and without even a tourist visa good for 90 days, no questions asked. Maybe it was just the long winter here in Vermont this year, but I am feeling something has got to change here.

After the garden prospects, and landscaping changes, there was fun travel to consider. Researching the Western and Southern Cape of South Africa kept me busy and intrigued, but while it offers many and varied experiences and tons of natural beauty, it did not seem to meet all the criteria for "worth spending my own money on at this time." This is a high bar for me. If you have seen my 12 year old Subaru you already know this.

So I Googled "places to live cheaply overseas." Up came Cuenca, Ecuador, among other locales that appear to be charming American Boomers trying to live on their Social Security. Aha! This might do AND I could get back to that elusive goal of feeling minimally competent to travel in Spanish. With the enthusiasm of a Gold Rusher, I found language schools, apartments, restarted my Spanish with the aim of conquering indirect objects, located places I could do yoga, tried to find the symphony schedule for the fall, even found places I could volunteer.

While I was still in the rush of imagining Ecuador in the fall, along came a brief flirtation with going to Uganda to teach social work for a semester. Talk about whiplash! As flirtations go, it was wild. I went from facing up to my inordinate and lifelong fear of snakes to pondering life with intermittent electricity (i.e., reading by kerosene lamp) to thinking I could actually add value where it is needed. Turns out it is not going to work out for this year (see issue about spending own money above) but I am working on next year.

The piece Uganda has that other options haven't so far is the chance to do meaningful work again. That's what has to change. If not Uganda, then where? If Ecuador, then what? In the meantime, surely there is something that needs doing in Vermont.

The great thing thing about being a generalist in any field is that you enjoy a broad scope and have a wide-ranging portfolio of skills and eventually knowledge. After 40 years, you just know stuff. And hopefully you know how to integrate and synthesize. There is a bit of gravitas. So I know I have a lot to offer if I find the right niche. I don't have to be nor do I want to be "the boss." What I need is to be useful to others in a way that means something to them and to me.

So I am resting open, but there is a little sign around my neck that says: Wanted--meaningful work.

The Gratitudes

In the swirl of unthinkable events this past week I found myself gripped by fear and unable to move, physically lethargic and emotionally paralyzed for a couple of days. I know I am not alone, even thought I did not begin experience these events directly.
 
I think a lot has been piling up, all working toward an undesirable result, this paralysis. There was my dad's death and now trying to be a support to my mom, which feels something like being on a gerbil wheel most of the time. The State Department deaths in Afghanistan came next and then wham-bam! Boston and Texas.

It was more than two days before I realized I had been here before. Of course we all were here before with the 9/11 attacks. Some of us who are old enough remember when our president was killed. More recently in 2011 I was "there" when the U.S. Embassy in Kabul was under attack with my cherished daughter inside it. At that time, all I knew was that I had to get to a pond and paddle my kayak. I had a false start. Drove all the way to Curtis Pond without the paddle, but I knew I had to go back to get it. 

That day, as I hit the water with certainly vigorous and maybe maniacal strokes, I was grateful first for instantaneous communication and a daughter who thoughtfully let us all know before we even woke up to the news that she was sheltering in place in a hard building (of course, I wanted to hear from her every 15 minutes that this was still the case). I went on from there to feel gratitude for the U.S. troops defending the Embassy, for all their training and professionalism. To friends who hugged me in my initial panic. For my beloved kayak. I even felt gratitude for the opportunity to be reminded about what was important in life. By the time I paddled back to the put-in, I had a list of ten things I was grateful for. I was breathing again. Still very concerned (no cell at Curtis Pond meant I had to wait until I got closer to home to check my email and Google for the status of the attack, which went on for upwards of 20 hours). Still upset but not paralyzed. My stomach was not totally tied in knots anymore, even though my adrenalin was still running high.

My memories of the Kabul attack came back to me finally about two days after Boston and before Texas. And with them came this conclusion. The only way out of fear and paralysis is through gratitude and love. Very easy to say and know intellectually. Very hard to start moving in that direction from a fetal position while sobbing. At first, I just had to force it, something of a Goodnight Moon approach--kind of mechanical and not necessarily related to the events, per se. I had to acknowledge my gratitude for the books in my room, my comfortable bed, the way the sunshine was coming into my safe house, my family and friends -- the usual but no less valued litany -- before I could move on in a way that let the fear dissipate.

Only then could I feel wholeheartedly grateful for emergency responders and brave bystanders,  determined law enforcement officers, a cooperative public who responded to the request for leads. I could be grateful for the state of trauma medicine in this country (in no small part thanks to wars we shouldn't have been in), to the runners who kept running past the finish line right to the hospitals to give blood. I could be grateful for the restraint shown by our president and the governor of Massachusetts as they promised a just resolution (as opposed to "We'll get those guys."). And for the love and courage of ordinary Bostonians and others who remember, care for, and support those who were injured and the loved ones of those killed. And I remain grateful for instantaneous communication worldwide.

With my extended litany, my muscles slowly began to lose tension. I felt my heart opening again. I was not crying all the time. I could feel the golden light of love (like a teardrop at your heart's center, said a Buddhist nun recently) expand and send warmth and love throughout me and from me to the world. Powerful stuff. The gratitudes will get us through.

The Grief Thing

Grief caused by the death of loved ones is new to me. I am lucky that way. My "little" brother Bill died about two and a half years ago just shy of 61 and my dad died just six weeks ago at 92. The other day was my dear grandmother's birthday. "Ma" died in 1979 and this would have been her 112th birthday.

These losses all seem to be blending together. Maybe that's making the most recent one easier. I don't know. But I find I am crying more about the fact that I can't share something with my brother. I am half mad at him for not being here now in the wake of my Dad's death. On the other hand, I am glad my mom can imagine the two of them playing golf together at the Pebble Beach of  the Great Beyond.

At least I can talk to Ma about it on her birthday. Named Lillian (as in Easter Lily) for the fact that she was born a week after Easter in 1901, her birthday is always an occasion for remembering her and checking in with her. Of the many things I appreciated about Ma, I loved that she took things as they came. She was not a big control freak that I could see. She could do whatever she set her mind to and she was always full of good cheer. She definitely fit into the pro-Laughing Camp in the family. She avoided conflict and took great pride in whatever she did, including sewing some pretty amazing wool Easter coats for me and my sister or decorating a basket cake for a bake sale. She was big on Jackson & Perkins roses, but what I remember the most about her gardens was the patch of Lily of the Valley next to her back door.

Her first memory, probably from about age 5, was of standing on a chair, a big dish towel tied around her like an apron, washing dishes. Her young mother, already widowed thanks to an influenza epidemic, was trying to support Lillian and her little brother by cooking at lumber and other work camps. Ma always claimed to love washing dishes. I think she really meant it and I can guess that there may have been happy memories of being near her mother associated with it.

When I was a kid--before automatic dishwashers--after the Sunday family dinner Ma would organize the girls (naturally!)  into helping with the dishes. Now washing dishes is a lost art in the developed world. I am not complaining. Believe me, the person who invented the automatic dishwasher ranks right up there in my world view. But imagine the quiet time enjoyed by women who wash dishes. Everyone leaves them alone for fear of being roped into helping. They get to think all the way through a sentence without a child distracting them with a new demand, to integrate their day's experiences before moving on to the next of never-ending tasks.

Today on Ma's birthday, I wish I were back in her kitchen drying the dishes with her. I would ask her so many questions. What was it like growing up without a father? How did she bear the death of her younger son when he was only 29? How did she brace herself to go to the trailer park community center after my grandfather's death and find a card game to join? In so many words, how do I do this grief thing, Ma? I think we would have had a great conversation. Ma would have laughed a lot and she would have told family stories to steer me off the sad stuff (she was a Champ at Laughing in the Face of Adversity).

But it is not just about the answers to questions. Grief right now is lost opportunity for connection. Or, in my case, a stronger connection with people who shaped me, who gave me my bearings. And who left me with a treasure trove of memories to cherish and pass on to the next generation.

Negotiating with the Deer

I am getting ready--weeks ahead of the hostas--for the deer. Last year for the first time in 3 years, they came down the big wooded hill across the road and dined on my hostas, phlox, the tomatoes (!) and virtually anything young and green and full of nourishment. This is old news to many of my friends in Vermont. But I took it personally. Why me? Why now? Hadn't we had a nice relationship before? Why eat my plants just as I am really getting into gardening on this little lot?

The daffodils are just emerging. They are maybe 3" high right now. Usually deer ignore daffodils so I am not in a panic yet. But then I remember they ate the phlox and who would have expected that? I think it is time to take some steps.

Everyone has a sure-fire solution to preventing deer from dining in the yard. They all probably work, at least until the deer get wise. Coyote pee was popular when I lived in West Virginia. The idea is the deer sense a predator and move away. But then it rains and you have to spread the stuff again. And it is expensive. I am going to lean toward the do-it-once-and-hope-it-works kinds of solutions.
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First, fairy lights. I happen to have an abundance of little white lights (it's a long story). I don't begin to use them all on my Christmas trees. So I already have in inventory one weapon in the category of do-it-once. My plan is to skirt the beds with these strings of lights--just lay them on the ground at the edges of the beds. Plug them all together and into the big orange extension cord and then into the outlet on my little front porch. Bingo.

The back-up plan is Irish Spring soap. I have to figure out how to rig this up, but basically a chunk of the strong-smelling soap will hang from a string on a stick next to every possible plant of interest. When it rains, a little soap will wash off but if you have ever used that soap, you know the smell will live on, unlike the fake predator approach. For right now I am not going to get too obsessed about environmental impact.

We'll see what happens. It's not that I don't like the deer. I do sort of like knowing they are close (the neighborhood bear is another story). They are quiet and graceful and always look so startled when I drive down the driveway at night and find them hanging out. But there are limits. When I decided to move toward an edible landscape I also started to get more possessive about the plants. Now it's my food we are talking about.

Maybe this problem will just resolve itself over time. After all, the hosta lilies are not edible to me, so they will probably give way to something that is. Maybe I could move them to a spot where I can enjoy them but also go easy on the deer. After the initial deer repasts last year the hostas did grow back some. I did get to enjoy them eventually, a little. Maybe the deer got bored with them and that's when they moved on to the phlox and tomatoes.

It's just that in the early part of the spring, well, I am simply desperate to see something growing. I might even be open to a dialogue about the schedule. We could negotiate. Maybe the deer
could come by in August when I am starting to get sick of weeding and watering and help me out. I could be a lot more generous then. Heck, they could even have the zucchini by then. But, let's face it, when was zucchini a good bargaining chip? People who never lock their cars in Vermont start locking them in zucchini season for fear a friendly soul will leave some on the back seat.

No, I think I will just go with my two-part strategy. See what happens this year. Try to be chill. Put a big pot of pansies on the porch in the meantime to satisfy that need to see something growing.

Laughing in the Face of Adversity

My Aunt Helen has a gift. Her voice is sunshine. And then she laughs--a deep belly laugh. The kind you cannot fake. The kind that makes you laugh right along. That picks up your spirits right then and there. Cranky types might call her a Pollyanna when she exclaims her pleasure in the most mundane aspects of life--blue skies, a bubble bath, a delicious cooky made by a neighbor. These are the things that those of us in a rush or a rut sometimes fail to appreciate. Now in her mid-90s, Aunt Helen is still looking on the bright side. Like those gag gift birds that bob up no matter how many times they are pushed down into the glass of water, she comes right back.

I got to thinking about Aunt Helen's iconic laugh after a recent meditation experience focused on sound. The leader told us, "Get comfortable. Close your eyes. Trust your ears." He played some music on a stringed instrument and then on a flute. He chimed a brass bowl. All very chill. Then there were the people outside in the hallway talking in their "outside voices." Someone coughed. The person next to me was doing noisy yoga breaths. After about ten minutes the leader invited us to comment on the experience. As you might expect, there were many different viewpoints about what meditation is supposed to be, some of them ardently held. We commented on how the various sounds affected us. There was almost universal annoyance at those chatty people outside. Skilled Leader observed that annoying things come up in life. He asked us to think about how we respond to them. I realized that sometimes I can actually laugh at them.

That led me to wonder what would it be like to throw a few laughs into the sound mix for the meditation? Maybe one like Aunt Helen's. Or the infectious kind of laugh that bubbles out of happy toddlers. I think I know what would happen. Some people would be annoyed by one laugh or another, others would be unable to suppress their own laughs in response (which would probably really get to the already annoyed). I think I might be in the latter group.

In my family there are different opinions about laughter. There is the camp that thinks Life is Too Serious to be Laughing all the time. That laughing is just a way of looking at the world through rose-colored glasses or overlooking the harsh realities. The other camp thinks Life is Too Serious NOT to be Laughing all the time. They seldom find common ground.

I have been accused of Laughing in the Face of Adversity. This crime, both at the felony and the misdemeanor levels, is also known as not taking something as seriously as someone else wants me to, or just having a more light-hearted take on a situation. Sometimes when this happens I admit I am probably on the verge of hysteria. Like the time my family and I got off a train only to realize that it was not the station where we had parked our car outside Paris. Uh-oh.

Given the two Laughter Camps in the family, some of us thought it was a bigger Uh-oh than others. Our problem-solving assets included the shards of a 65 year old father's high school French, a 13 year old first-year French student (who bore up very well as the family's language lifeline on this trip), and my own spatial/map-reading skills. But these did not kick into gear until I had laughed to the point of tears. It just seemed terribly funny, like a bad movie about clueless Americans in France on vacation, which I suppose we were.Once I got that out of my system, I was able to help figure out where we were and what station we needed to get to. The would-be French speakers had come to the same conclusion going about it in a different way. Moments later we boarded another train. At the next station we found our car and went on our way. To this day when I put myself back on that platform, I start to laugh. And to this day, others who were present remind me We Could Have Been LOST in a Foreign Country.

Okay, I get that not everything is funny. When my mood is sour or I am feeling anxious, it's hard to dig down for a laugh. And yet, laughter sustains me. It can make very minor adversity--a grey day Vermont, for example--much more tolerable. It can help me not take myself so seriously. The late Art Buchwald, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, laughed in the face of serious adversity. His kidneys were failing and he refused dialysis. He watched funny movies and told jokes, spent months in hospice, then left, went back to his columns, and wrote another book. His kidneys finally got him, but not before he had the last laugh.

I hope if I ever have to face the kind of adversity Buchwald faced that I will be able to laugh. It would definitely qualify as felony level Laughing in the Face of Adversity. In the meantime, I intend to keep practicing at the misdemeanor level just to stay in shape. Aunt Helen would like that.