The Slow Exit...

I think karma has overcharged me. I mean even though my butt was firmly planted in the pew every Sunday morning until my collegiate departure, there were a few times in my growing up that come to mind now as a seasoned mom that make me want to put my once upon a time childish self into a permanent time out.

But becoming the eventual parent to not one but two of my very own parents has made me contemplate the very real fact that payback for teenaged terror isn’t always meted out exactly as the punishment fitting the crime.

I used to think that the firstborn with whom I was gifted, stronger willed than most ornery thoroughbreds on the track, was most certainly my mother’s revenge times 10. So as I began to see the light at the end of that tunnel and found myself still standing after the tumultuous ups and downs of raising my often times rebellious and almost always impulsive daughter, I was no where nearly prepared for the journey ahead when parent number 2, my own mother, decided to lose her marbles and substitute temper tantrums for conventional conversation.

I mean 13 years earlier, I had gotten a whirlwind course in one flew over the cuckoo’s nest when my dad was diagnosed with Alzheimers and I truly believed that after that experience, anything that came along with my mom’s future aging would be a piece of cake. I was pretty good at being thrown into the fire with school aged children and a business traveling hubby all the while navigating all the unknowns of his disease and eventual death, right? My mom slid right in line with my kids, seeming to not have a clue how to handle his demise, really making that a sink or swim experience for me. Surely, my mom wouldn’t follow suit. Like what are the odds? Turns out, pretty high.

No one is prepared for this kind of tide to turn. It’s like one minute the skies are blue and the waves are lapping at your feet as you walk along the beach. And the next, a full blown tsunami has knocked you breathless and upended the life you thought you knew so well. You find yourself gasping and reaching for the surface of the churned up water but just can’t quite get turned right side up to reach the air.

Many years ago, I would look at my little ones as they’d reach for my hand and call me mommy and wonder when it would happen—the day they’d be too big to hold my hand or decide that I needed to be called Mother instead. Yes, true story. I am “Mother” to both of my kids. As I type that, I realize that even though I sort of got used to the formal sounding title, I still think it better suits someone of British royalty with a buttoned up, freshly starched collar and perfectly coifed mane. But none the less, it happened. One night I tucked them into bed, kissed their soft little cheeks good night and climbed into my own sweet slumber only to awaken and find that they had become too big to have a “mommy” or hold my hand.

I also used to wonder where time chose to shift as I watched mature women timelessly dressed like Jackie Kennedy contrasted to their counterparts who had relegated any sense of style they may have once owned to the elastic waistbands and matchy-matchy knit tops they had currently frumped themselves into. You know the uniform—the older women’s section in every large department store where the pants hang beside the two or three top options, ready to mix and match with not a zipper in sight. And I’d think, did they go from stylish and put together to old and frumpy overnight? Or are some women just born to leave the house in polyester with elastic holding up their pants? But I digress.

So if nothing else makes much sense these days, it does seem that life has a predictable rhythm. One day things are fine. The next they are upside down and you find yourself living in a repetitive day of opposites. The child is the parent and the parent, the child. What you always knew as fact, in the face of dementia, no longer holds true.

No matter what I did as a kid to get my mouth washed out with Ivory soap a 100 plus times or that pretty awful and unintended debutante party when I was supposedly sweet 16 and never been kissed yet too blinded by rum and Mr Pibb to find my way home before sun up..on Mothers Day..with a police search…well, never mind any of that, nothing I did has even come close to the battles I’ve waged on behalf and in spite of my now 88 year old mother.

If she had ever secretly wished karma on my smarty pants, impulsive and rebellious self back in the 1980s, in the fog of dementia she bumbles in and out of most days lately, the fruits of her labor in raising me to see my just desserts are as lost in space to her as those cosmonauts from Russia.

It stinks. Because no one knows just how long a life will last when the body is mostly still functioning yet the mind has started to go places that can no longer be convinced just aren't so.

How do you day in and day out pick up the phone to check on your mom yet spend the majority of the call unsuccessfully trying to convince her that her husband who passed away 13 years earlier is not coming by to take her home?

How do you convince her that yes, she has lived in the assisted living home for almost two years now, and yes, you know this is true as you were the one who moved her there, while simultaneously asking her to look at her walls where pictures of her family members hang as a reminder that she really is home? Even when she insists that she is standing at a pay phone on some highway miles away. Waiting for her long ago deceased parents to come do her laundry.

I guess the real question is how do you survive losing two parents to the same cruelness of them losing their minds, one memory at a time. One piece of reality every day. Bit by bit by bit.

Yep, karma can be a cruel little bitch. But I don’t believe that anyone should ever receive the punishing blows that watching a parent become a child can deliver. Never mind doing that twice in one lifetime.

I know that one day when I stand over her coffin, I will know how much of her I had already lost and grieved. And that just makes it that much harder while she is still here. She ceased being my momma a while ago. When her mind turned on her and the blank look on her face can be felt through the phone, I am no longer the daughter who once drove her mad. She is living a madness for the both of us and most days, she doesn’t even know.