Photography by Lori K. Tate
My right knee has been giving me problems on and off for two years. About a week ago, I really messed it up on a run, so much so that I was limping around and avoiding stairs. Runs were out of the question, and running is therapy for me, so do the math in regard to how pleasant my mood was.
For a couple of nights, my daughter, Margot, suggested I do some yoga stretches that she knew. Every time she asked to show them to me I was busy doing other things and basically blew her off. I finally did them with her, and the next morning, the pain was gone from my knee and I was able to run my normal route.
As I’ve enjoyed my pain-free knee, I’ve thought a lot about how we don’t listen to children as much as we should — no matter what age the child is.
I am 46 years old (almost 47), and I am still my parents’ child, and their only one at that. This past week the three of us ended up in the emergency room waiting for my mother to get a CAT scan due to abdominal pain. As I sat with them in the ER for five hours, I felt like Margot must have felt as she tried to share something with me that she thought would help. She finally got through to me. I’m not sure that I was as successful.
Caring, or in my case beginning to care, for aging parents is tough. There’s not a rulebook for this because every situation is different by the time you factor in the type of illness, geography, finances and personalities involved. It’s hard to flip from being a caregiver to the receiver of that care, and it’s equally hard to achieve the reverse of that flip. Right now my parents and I are in the middle of flipping, and it’s not the happiest of places to be for any of us.
One of the hardest parts is watching Alzheimer’s slowly erase my mother. Though she is known as a smart, soft-spoken woman with a talent for baking great cakes (cherry pound and red velvet in particular), she’s also been known to push the Julia Sugarbaker button a few times in her life. (If you don’t know who Julia Sugarbaker is, that is super unfortunate is because she is by far the best depiction of a southern woman in the history of television. Google Designing Women, in particular Sugarbaker’s “The night the lights went out in Georgia” monologue, and see what I mean. Perfection.)
As for my mother’s feistiness, I can remember three distinct times in my life when she took someone to town with her words, and two of those times she did it for me. In the ER, I saw some of that feistiness, but now it comes out in an agitated and confused form. She’s not doing it for me; she’s doing it to me — and my father.
Trying to reason with her sometimes works, but most of the time it’s met with a turn of the head accompanied by a huff — an 81-year-old’s version of an eye roll. So as my dad and I sat in badly padded chairs, freezing in the ER, I looked for goodness.
Walking mom to the restroom, I noticed two framed pictures. One featured a blooming rhododendron bush, while the other featured a tree filled with autumn leaves about to fall. Those two pictures perfectly captured where mom and I are in our lives. I’m in the middle where everything is blooming all at once, and she’s lived through the season and is preparing for it to end.
My mom is not warm and fuzzy, so I was grateful that she let me hold her hand as we walked down the hall. When we were back in her room, she asked which book I was reading (Educated if anyone cares). My mother has always been an avid reader, and I inherited my love of books from her. She still reads some, but she doesn’t remember much about it. That said, I was thrilled when she asked about my book because it was a wink from my mom letting me know that she was still in there, even though this bastard of a disease is wreaking havoc on her brain.
Later my cell phone was almost out of power, so I asked the nurse at the desk if anyone had a charger. She soon brought me one that worked with my iPhone. I wasn’t on my phone much in the ER, as I’m working on being present, but it was nice to know that I was still connected to the other part of my life. The part where my kids swim at the pool on a sunny day and my husband texts about dinner plans — the part that is blooming.
Though my mom is doing better, my parents still don’t understand that they need help. But like my Margot, I keep trying to get their attention. At some point I hope that they listen to me so I can care for them the way they have always cared for me.