[This is quite unreal but typical for a period of Mercury in Retrograde: I just lost, to a POOF of a moment, an entire blog, and I am pissed! This, after ongoing miscommunications and missing emails for weeks.  So, let me try to reconstruct it …

My tale of woe began last Friday when my recently purchased iPhone 7+ and I were having breakfast. All was well (though according the The New York Times, it was not.) Nothing strange was going on at that moment although I had visited the apple store two days prior with questions about my phone’s intermittent charging.

In an instant, in that moment when something is living and dead, my phone was, well, for all intents and purposes, bricked. First the screen was untouchable–fading and totally unresponsive, I could call the phone and it would ring, obviously from a different Universe-it had been transported…but could not be answered. And then the screen was black, the screen of virtual death. Without reason. Done. I tried to revive it via a “hard reset” (mouth to mouth doesn’t work on the iPhone), but my attempts were in vain.

A panicked call to apple support and the tech and I agreed the phone should have another visit to the apple store. One of the greeters at the door listened carefully and just like I did, pressed the power key and the down-volume button and the phone sputtered and came to life, all the while snickering at me.

Back to the Genius Bar: the tech suggested that we wipe the phone and reinstall everything. The reason being that when a phone’s data is installed from the previous phone, bugs can be transferred. And so it was done. For a few days I kept reinstalling apps and searching for those I had. It is like moving into a new apartment.

And then came last Tuesday. The phone rang at 8:30 am, not a good sign. The only calls that come in at that time are calls about my mother. You know what? I didn’t have a clear head, nor a semi-full stomach and I didn’t feel like talking. Can’t anything be solved without me? But the phone kept ringing. My cell phone was taking messages. I was eating whatever I could get down and bowed to the relentless rings. What the hell?

Yes, it was about my mother. There were calls from the agency that employs the aides, calls from the aides…messages like you would think the Titanic had sunk with my mother on it.

No, it was I. I was sinking. Something was happening and happening too often. The calls of panic.

Because there had been an issue with my mother’s Ensure nutritional supplement, which usually comes in a small can, the ones we had purchased from the pharmacy and from Target which come in a bottle shape and have a screw off cap, MIGHT, I say might, contain a different amount of product. Lena, the aide on a few mornings, allegedly poured Ensure into a glass, and, the glass wasn’t full.

You can’t possibly blame this issue on my mother’s half-glass-full way of thinking, however, my mother INSISTED that the Ensure reaches the top of the glass and THEREFORE, the aide was drinking the missing quarter of a glass. And just like she was (allegedly) meddling in my mother’s meds and going through her clothing in the closet, she had NO BUSINESS doing so and was subsequently declared A THIEF, and sent out in shame. Right out the door, where she walked to the elevator, took a seat on the bench and began to call me…and the evening aide—pulling her into this…and the agency coordinator. Hmmm, there was discussion about calling 911 on my mother (something that my mother had threatened to do on Lena, but somehow the building social worker prevailed and nothing like that was done, AND I told the aide coordinator to NEVER–I mean N E V E R pull that as it was counterproductive, inappropriate and cowardly.

And so the building social worker, came up to reason with my mother, accompanied by the aide, Lena, in question, the thief, the absconder who wears an apron and who can stuff her pockets, the closet meddler who wanted to run off with my mother’s midget-sized clothes, the very aide who is taking my mother’s blood-pressure medicine. Yes, Lena.

This twosome drove my mother to distraction. She saw them to her best macular degeneration ability, at the door, and began to shake and shout. And I am not talking about a dance from the 60s that was inspired by the Isely Brothers. I am talking about near heart attack insane mode.

Nothing was resolved. The twosome left. My mother was left—in her room, alone, and would be until 5:00 pm. I told the building coordinator to leave her be, this has happened before and she needs to chill. I said, if something happens to her it was her decision to be alone, just let her be.

Sometime soon after dealing with her, I believe I called my mother, but then she may have called me to spill the tale, who knows?

Spill, she did. On and on. Over and over. About the missing meds, about the clothes that disappeared and reappeared when she threatened to call the police, about the Ensure. I made the mistake, and I have done this many times, of asking a question. Why would I do that? Part of me is trying to use reason and honestly a part gets so pissed that I have to deal with this that I meanly want to incite a riot. Well, I said something like, “How do you know it is the aide who is taking/drinking your Ensure?

Hysteria began to build. I could feel the crescendo coming. “She has POCKETS in her APRON!”

Now, I am trying to figure out how one quarter of a glass of Ensure can wind up in an apron pocket, sans container, but in that very moment a scream is building within the four foot nine-ish inch woman who gave birth to me. A scream so primal it is unrecognizable.

I vaguely recall a scream like this from my childhood: I was about nine years old when I accompanied a friend to a bus without my mother who remained in the apartment with my sister. I stepped off a curb to cross the street, hidden by the little bus, an oncoming car didn’t see me until I was right in front of it; luckily it had good brakes. But the screech was so loud my mother heard it from a few blocks away up on the fifth floor, and knew it involved me. My little girl faux pas was enough to raise panic throughout the household. My mother was screaming, wailing and talking in the tongues of millions of other mothers who almost lost a child … or who did.

When I came to from this momentary reverie, I heard my mother, still screaming, sounding like herself sixty years ago, sounding like herself sixty years later.

“YOU NEVER BELIEVE ME!”

Now she is the child who may or may not have taken something. Or carelessly crossed a street. Or misjudged the contents of a glass, or what was or was not in the closet. Now she is the child.

She hung up on me.

This series starts here:
Part 1: And The Band Played On … a mother’s life, a daughter’s journey

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