“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

This is the eighty-first part of the series of my mother-daughter journey that began more than two years ago. I haven’t written since my mother’s ninety-seventh birthday in March; things have been relatively quiet. I say relatively, as there is, in fact, something always going on, but the occurrences vary in degree. I might be dealing with outside agencies and making call after call to follow up on an issue. I might be paying bills, tracking finances, delivering the rent and trust check. I might be pissed as hell at the nurse downstairs who is impossible most times and give me the run-around. This is all the pain in the neck stuff that never seems to go smoothly, in addition to dealing with government agencies that try to slip new programs by you without your permission.

How is an elderly person expected to manage on their own?

Of course, my biggest dealings are with my mother, then with the aides who take turns in caring for her. And, ultimately there are the dealings with the aides’ supervisors.

There is a reoccurring motif that plays continually in the background of my relationship with my mother: The song is about reality. My mother’s reality, is as clear as polished glass; when she converses she knows exactly what she is saying; she is strong, decisive and peppers her communications with a touch of drama. Sometimes her reality is clear but tangled here and and there with time warps and accusations. At that time there is no point in debating or arguing, she knows what she knows, or what she thinks she knows. She is open to correction but never make her feel that there is something wrong with the way she looks at the world. She is one tough survivor of the  years that passed through the Great Depression and World War II. You don’t mess with these dames.

 

Show time!

We get into our costumes and proceed with the replay of a familiar production.

She is mother, I am daughter. The roles may flip so watch carefully.

 

“The best way for the elderly to live is to be in there own homes with help coming in.”

This is one of her lines and it has been my premise all along: that she did not need a nursing home, assisted living or the like. She needed a “regular” place, her place, to live in with help coming in. Two years ago she was indeed established in a new home, in the state where she used to live where the advantages are plentiful. She has had help coming in all along.

Our singing begins:

I start with the aria: “Well, that is what you have. You are in your own home and you have help coming in.”

She counterpoints: “This isn’t my home.”

I counter with: “It is. It is your apartment, your place.

She wiggles away from the concept, and thrashes like a fish just caught and plopped in a bucket of water:  “I can’t even walk outside! It’s full of car fumes.” She calms and mentions that when the weather is nice she goes up to the magnificent roof if it isn’t (fill in the blank) __________ [too– cold, hot, windy, sunny]

I join her in the repartee and offer to take her out for a ride to any destination for:  _______(fill in the blank with a time) to change the pace.

She does her dance step: “Don’t you understand my limitations? I  _______________ ”  (fill in the blank)  [am old,  am tired, I must rest].

I try to end our Act I on a compassionate note.

My mother has had several aides during the time she has been here, and since last summer I have been dealing with an agency in the building. I have met most of the help. They arrive at 7:30 am and leave at 3:00 pm giving my mother two hours by herself. Someone returns at 5:00 pm to help her with dinner, clean up and get ready for bed. Essentially you have an aide leaving their own home at 5:30 am to get to work, the same or another aide leaves my mother at 7:00 pm. It’s a long day.

Act II opened a short while ago. It is called “Stealing.”

I have been getting phone calls from one aide in particular whom my mother has accused of taking two large bottles of dish washing liquid. Other times, with other aides it has been soap. I have heard the stories over and over, clearly, succinctly from an elderly woman who is my mother, who is convinced her things are going out the door.

The aide called me crying saying, “I can’t take it anymore. That my mother (who is 4 feet, 7 inches tall and eighty-four pounds) screams at her, throws her out of the room, says she is lying and going to steal her things. I don’t steal! I never steal!”

I begin to get an ocular migraine. Biofeedback has helped me turn off the emotion and calm the system that kicks my head into a spasm-overdrive; sometimes it works. Other times I succumb. This time It worked. I came in from doing an early morning errand, I ate breakfast and called my mother before responding to the message she left me while I was out.

The machine flashed red: “Hello! Hello! Pick up! Pick up! If you are there, pick up, it’s important!! It’s URGENT!”

I know the aide called me from outside, shopping, and has since returned to my mother’s apartment.

I pick up my lines: “Mom, how are you?”

“Perfect!” is written into the score. “Everything is just fine!” (But I know better. She wasn’t alone and will call me later when the aide steps out for lunch).

So, I call the aide’s supervisor she had called me as well. She is singing that my mother had called her earlier  to tell her the story about the stealing aide and that she wants this woman out. This is about the third aide my mother booted. I tell her my mother just sang her part and that “everything is perfect.”

I tell the supervisor, “Let me investigate, for now do nothing.”

My problem is, I can’t believe that hired help would steal from an old lady. Soap? Are they doing so poorly that they would walk out with dish washing soap? Then again there was the one who switched my mother’s Dove soap with some oily, strange, unmarked facsimile thinking that my mother wouldn’t notice. Oh, she sees EVERYTHING … FIRED! The first theft episode involving the Dove soap (expensive as soaps go) planted the seed in my mother’s head that this will forever be a given. She would now be an official victim of theft! And it would be ongoing!

Just a few weeks ago another opera played. It was the tale of another aide who must have been stealing because my mother opened a cabinet and saw things she hadn’t seen since her arrival from Florida. My mother summed up the plot: This aide must have unwrapped the things and put them in the other cabinet under the kitchen sink, near those bags she comes in and out with; she was planning to throw my things into those bags and confiscate them.” There were big knives, other things from her Florida kitchen AND her set of salt and pepper shakers that look like little, fat chefs! “Why, there was a huge bunch of stuff, but I moved it all into a drawer  in my nightstand! “She was secretly moving my things from cabinet to cabinet and the next stop would be out the door!

I listened to the tales in all their glory and waited.

Soon came intermission. The aide left for lunch and I got a phone call from my mother who provided lists of “what the aide did” and that this woman must go (like she told the supervisor, earlier), I was no better off in clarity of this performance than before the curtain went up. I am supposed to believe my mother. I want to believe my mother. I don’t want to deal with theft and lying: “She has even left the laundry wet and put it on the bed.” (This was verified by aide number two that day who had to remove damp sheets from the bed and the closet and re-dry them).  She stole my cookies, I had four! There were none left! On top of the refrigerator, my Vitamin C is missing.”

So now I am dealing with a thief AND lousy laundress who takes Vitamin C.

I think back to when my mother asked for a tea bag and the box was no longer on the refrigerator. “You see! Somebody TOOK them!!!”

I counter: “You told me you didn’t want them and to take it home!

I have seen this blame due to forgetfulness more than once. The aide called me last week to tell me that she accompanied my mother to the doctor in the building so mother could get her Vitamin B12 shot. The aide maintained that she and my mother were deep in conversation and that the nurse did in fact give my mother the injection. However, when the aide came to work the next day my mother greeted her in a panic: “We left and I NEVER got my shot.” But the aide said, “she did, she did!”

My mother insists there was no band-aid as usual and that they went down to the nurse a few days later and my mother got her shot. “That makes two,” the aide said to me.

What is the truth? The opera theme is deep and resonant: Would the aide lie? Would these devout, Island women, these church-going, bible thumping aides, steal? Am I not seeing something between the lines, not getting the theme? Am I in the wrong production as a naive babe-in-the-woods?

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
— Marcus Aurelius

Is this happening to me and if so, why am I not more grateful that I am still the child of a living parent?

The truth is this:

My mother is telling the truth.

The aide is telling the truth.

I am telling the truth.

But the truth is only as valid as our perceptions of reality. Or what we want to believe.

 

The series continues here