“I’m still the boss of me”

Saturday, February 9, 2008 at 7:23 pm (Youngest of Seven)
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We all know that life can turn on a dime. In this case, it turned on an ankle — my mother’s 89-year-old ankle. It broke (quite badly) this past Monday, required surgery on Tuesday, and whisked her from her independent life in her own home to a short-term rehab facility with orders not to put any pressure at all on it for 12 weeks.

Now you and I could learn to manage with crutches or a walker and by hopping a bit. But at her age, she’s all but an invalid, requiring help from 2 people to go from bed to wheelchair to chair and back again. We’re hopeful rehab will help, but…how much it can help is still uncertain. Whether her ankle will even heal (thanks to the osteoporosis that caused the break in the first place) and the long-term prospects after her short-term rehab stay is over are even more nebulous. We’re rapidly trying to learn the ins and outs of Medicare, what various facilities offer, what in-home services might be available, how 7 children with full-time jobs can drop everything to help, and what we can possibly do to make her 3-story, very elder-unfriendly house accessible so she can come home. 

It’s nothing a million other families aren’t dealing with every day — caring for elderly parents, sick or disabled kids, spouses, loved ones — it’s all in a long, hard day’s work for so many people. It makes me marvel at the “good old days,” when there always seemed to be an available grown daughter who didn’t work, lived close by, and could care for an aging mom or dad with relative ease. My own mom did it for her parents, but was lucky that neither of them required a nursing home stay. She’s unprepared for all this, and so are we. It’s not that we didn’t think this day would ever come — we’re not naive. But when you have a stubborn old woman telling you “I’m fine” and not willing to consider leaving or even modifying said accident-waiting-to-happen house, your hands are tied.

Until, that is, the turn of an ankle forces you to face it anyway, hands still tied, trying to Houdini your way out of a hopeless situation so she can ultimately be free to live as she did before.

All I can say is, thank God there are 7 of us to try to untie each other…and thank God we can still laugh at our feisty mom. Especially when she says things like:

“I don’t want any more pain meds, I’ll just scream.” (this in the ER, because the initial morphine they gave her made her sick. My sister told her they frowned on screaming.)

“I can go home. I’ll just go up the steps on my rear end.” (two sets of stairs with a landing in between and no thought of how she’s going to get up off the floor when she does get to the top. We can see the headlines, “Able-bodied Children Sit Idly By While 89-year-old Mother Forced to Crawl Up Steps.”)

“Oh I wouldn’t want one of those.“ (this after a helpful nurse suggested a chair lift for the stairs — obviously these are just for old or disabled people)

“I’ll take anything that’s free.” (this after my sister and I chastised her for taking a plastic rosary offered by a hospital volunteer that she neither needed nor intended to use, preferring to “count on her fingers” instead)

And finally….

“I’m still the boss of me.” (in response to my sister telling her, basically, she needed to do what she was told or she wouldn’t get well)

Well, true as that last vehement statement may be, it won’t stop your 7 bratty kids from trying desperately to do what’s best for you, despite who is — and always has been — boss.

We’ve put more effort into helping folks
reach old age than into helping them enjoy it. 
                                                ~ Frank A. Clark

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Hands down

Thursday, January 17, 2008 at 11:37 am (Smile Lines, Youngest of Seven)
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lotions1.jpgI’m wondering, why, when I have this many creams and lotions to choose from (including several new additions thanks to Christmas), my hands are still painfully dry. 

Yes, it’s winter, and probably not drinking enough water and too much hand-washing are to blame (drink more, pee more, wash hands more — it’s a vicious circle). But why the heck are they looking so old? They were fine up until a couple years ago and then ugh — lines and wrinkles instead of smooth, firm skin. I read that Zsa-Zsa Gabor (or maybe Eva) always wore a hat and gloves in the sun because the hands and face will give away your age before anything else. Smart lady!

Because my mom was older (45) when I was born, her hands always looked old to me. Broad fingers, thready blue-green veins I loved to squish, never any “nails” to speak of, arthritis already beginning to thicken the joints, loose skin, but always very soft. I can still remember how comforting they were and the smell of the Aquamarine lotion she used. I can remember those hands throwing coats over us in bed on really cold nights (we lived in a big old drafty house — the metal bed actually trembled a little in the wind). And painfully brushing and braiding my long hair until I finally cut it off in 5th grade. And soothing my frequent coughs with Vicks and an old piece of woolen cloth she’d warm up before laying it on my chest. And working, always working — scrubbing, dusting, laundry, cooking, paying bills, praying (lots of that) — just what you’d expect for a mom of 7.

My hands don’t really look like hers — yet — but the first signs are there. Of course, they haven’t seen nearly the work hers have — haven’t raised 7 babies or fed load after load through a wringer washer and hung them outside to dry or washed endless dishes (no dishwasher) or scrubbed second- and third-story windows while perched precariously on the sill (legs inside, body outside) or prayed thousands of rosaries.

Come to think of it, they’re beautiful hands. I should be so lucky.

If evolution really works, how come
mothers only have two hands? 
                      ~ Milton Berle

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We had ice cream.

Monday, December 17, 2007 at 10:19 am (Youngest of Seven)
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My family has been lucky the past few years to be able to spend Christmas all together — for many years, that didn’t happen. It’s still a novelty when we are all in the same place (sadly, without my dad these last 6 years).

I think it’s a unique experience whenever families gather, paticularly the conversation, which sometimes leaves outsiders, well, outside. I first read about the phenomenon many years ago in a Garrison Keillor book. He wrote about a man (can’t remember if it was himself or another) who felt as if he’d entered a foreign country when he went to his wife’s family home, a place where everyone spoke in non sequiturs or downright nonsense. For example, his normally very coherent wife would ask her father to fill a glass “just to the second chicken.”

This reference to a childhood cup was one of many obscure inside jokes that went into the familyspeak at this house.

I loved reading that passage because my own family gatherings are filled with familyspeak. It’s never simply, “I knew it!” but always “I knew it, Marie!” (This because nearly 40 years ago, the little sister of my childhood friend, Marie, uttered those words in an apparently quite memorable way when playing at our house.) My niece, now 30, recently revealed she’d always wondered who Marie was.

My family also has the odd habit of referring to our parents as “my mum” and “my dad” when speaking to each other: “My mum called me this morning” or “My dad used to do that.” This grew out of needing some way to refer to them other than Mummy and Daddy, which was a little embarrassing after we all became adults. But in the end, saying “my mum” and “my dad” doesn’t really help. We’ve all had other people hearing us ask, “Don’t you have the same mother and father?”

Many conversations are sprinkled with references to The Wizard of Oz, a movie not merely loved but revered at our house. You’d be surprised how often the dialog fits day-to-day life…“Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don’t they?” “How would you like someone to come and pick something off of you?” “You don’t want any of those apples.” “I’m a little muddled…” “These things must be done delicately.” “She bit her dog?” That last one is particularly applicable, rolled out whenever someone just isn’t getting it.

Star Trek references are also common. My one brother and I watched the original series so many times, we once listed all 100+ episodes. Many snippets apply, particularly because of the dramatic inflection.

Childhood utterances from 40 or 50 years ago often come back to life — “It’s an emuhgency” comes in handy, said urgently, like a little boy who couldn’t say his r’s who managed to set his socks on fire on the gas heater in the bathroom. Or when you need to sound innocent…”I dunno. I just turned around and bumped it with my elbow…” first used to describe how the gaping hole appeared in the plaster wall in the hall outside the bathroom, a hole that just happened to be the size of the plunger. (This akin to Ralphie’s icicle story when he broke his glasses with his new Red Rider BB gun on Christmas morning.)

Finally, there’s the all-purpose, frequently needed phrase that references one of those feel-good/do-good commercials from the Church of Latterday Saints. A little girl returns home from a party, anxious to tell her family about the great time she had. One by one, mom, dad, sister, shrug her off without listening to her story. Finally, she sits down dejectedly next to the dog, saying tearfully, “We had ice cream.”

It’s quite effective — try it the next time you desperately want to say something, but no one is listening. If your family is like mine, you still won’t be listened to, but it always gets your point across, and maybe even a laugh from those in the know.

 Home is not where you live but where they understand you. 
                                           ~ Christian Morgenstern

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