Questions

Rough day.

How much more decline can there really be?

What thoughts go through her head? Do thoughts go through her head?

How much longer does she have?

Will she rebound tomorrow?

When do I hire more trained help? How much can I do on my own?

Who, if anyone, does she recognize anymore?

What can I do to make her life better?

New Love

[I was reading back through my journal and ran across this entry. I thought it pertinent to this blog.]

7/11/2012

                “Stay in the house. I’m just walking out to get the garbage cans,” I explained, presumably, to two year old Matthew, but the statements subtly had a larger audience. “If you come out your feet will get dirty and the concrete is starting to get hot. And you don’t have shoes on,” I said as I walked out the front door. I looked back once to see if anyone was following me. No. They were still inside, but as I walked back up the driveway towards the house there were my little Matthew and my sweet mom both standing with fingertips on the glass door waiting for me to come back inside. As I looked at my sweet mother mirror the actions of my toddler, I felt the love that has grown in me since she moved into our home. It was slightly unsettling, in a good way, how similar that love felt to the love I have for my little dependent Matthew.  I say the love has grown because, to me, it is different from how I used to love my mom when I loved her as her daughter, a daughter of an independent, nurturing, intelligent, busy mother.  This kind of love—or perhaps a better word would be “relationship”—had to grow because it was not natural, at least not to me.  It was preceded by mourning and loss for the mother that I knew, by fear of who my mom was becoming and perhaps, by resentment that my long-time friend and confidant, my rock was no longer those things.  (It may seem strange to include “friend” as something that was lost, but it was, at least the friend I knew. I can’t maintain the same friendship when my mom does not even know who I am sometimes.) So a new love has grown, a love where I still feel blessed to have her in my life, a love that is a nurturing love that, as I said before, is unsettling in how similar it is to my love for my toddler with all of his toddler tendencies.

 It was not the first time that I appreciated the similarities between the two. This time it was their tendency to follow me wherever I go. They shadow me. They want to be where I am and watch what I am doing--And not, necessarily, from across the room.  Just like Matthew pulls on my leg or pushes a stool to insert himself into my tasks, Mom will sidle up next to me, right next to me, as I cut vegetables, fold laundry, read a book, or talk on the phone. I smiled, internally, one day when I laid down on the couch to read a book.  Within ten minutes, Mom was perched on top of my feet at the end of the couch and Matthew was trying to snuggle up beside me in a most un-relaxing way.

The first time that I remember watching them and realizing their behavioral similarities was about six weeks after Mom had moved in with us. I was helping her get ready for bed, and we went into the bathroom to brush teeth. I handed her the toothbrush, with tooth paste already applied and then started giving basic instructions including reminding her of what she was doing. On my other side was Matthew. I turned to him, loaded his toothbrush, and started to help him brush until he insisted on doing it himself. I stood looking the mirror watching my two charges and saw, perhaps, my first real glimpse of what I was facing.

Accepting our relationship change has not been psychologically easy for me, but acceptance has come. I smile, if not sometimes roll my eyes, when Matthew screams because Grandma has stolen his yogurt or is eating the food off his plate or when Mom is upset and trying to scold Matthew because he’s made a swipe at her food. I don’t, in fact, can’t treat her as I do Matthew, but I certainly have learned to accept and work with the reality that many of her actions reflect the self-centeredness and logic of a toddler. And I love her.