From my previous blog …

Just to rewind a bit, my mother was found to have macular degeneration by my ophthalmologist who sent her to a retina specialist. It was a long, tough day which lasted a good four hours. During that time, interviews took place, photos were taken and diagnosis were made. And the diagnosis was that my mother is now legally blind in the worse eye, and in need of treatment in the better one. Treatment for her better, “wet-macular-degeneration-eye” is a shot…in the eye. You heard me, don’t cringe. That’s what they do to deal with all that is going on in there and I won’t say too much, but a chemical is needed in the eye to stem the bleeding of the retina. My mother pulled through like she went through a battle.

 

So, now you know that things are in transition; there are knowns and many unknowns. Will my mother respond to this medication and eventually what will the outcome be?

But, there are more unknowns. We all have brain-blips: there are times we forget where we put our keys, wonder if we paid a bill, can’t place a face or a name. For the elderly, long-term memory is the strong-suit. My mother can recite the names of all her elementary school teachers and provide an anecdote for each, tell you about the time she and every kid on the block in Brooklyn checked into a local hospital to have a mass tonsillectomy. She can tell you about the days she and her sisters would spend hours across the street at the Pitkin Avenue Movie Theater. She could convey the delectability of the smell of the fresh rye bread her father would bring home on a Sunday morning and how divine it was with a slice of onion and butter. She could tell you all about the time her teacher awarded her with a Kodak box camera for never being absent. She could tell you all of this and more.

But today there was a problem. A problem with memory that sent the aide to the phone crying, to me, to her supervisor. A problem that sent the supervisor to the phone to ask me to intervene. Every now and then there are these episodes: someone ends up crying, someone ends up screaming, someone ends up calling. Several people end up calling me “Susie.” My mother usually ends up deflecting an issue with a segue. Whatever the issue is she might relent or re-frame on one level and on another justify whatever happened in her favor. The hurt aide might come back and might not: at my mother’s request. The bottom line has on many occasions been the fear of some kind of theft. And as my mother has–well used to have–an eagle’s eye, she caught a few aides in the act of transgression.

One actually was taking the Dove soap I was bringing and leaving my mother with some nameless boxed facsimile that felt like it was skimmed off the top of a fish tank; the guillotine was raised and released soon after this woman told my mother proudly that she made a fortune from a strip joint she owned.

Today was different. After I listened to this aide, who I have met and like, who appears loving and competent and professional, weep on the phone that my mother will give her the reputation of a thief, I began to wonder: is my four foot seven inch mother that powerful?

So, she began to tell me what happened.

She was given $10.00. She often shops for my mother and this is nothing new. She was to buy a box of trash bags and a loaf of bread. She returned with two receipts. One for the trash bags indicative of a $6.52 expenditure and $3.48 change. She had to go to a different place for the bread and that receipt displayed a cost of $2.50.

According to my mother, who steadfastly held to her facts, who stated her case over and over to the aide and to me, she was shortchanged. The aide heard the story over and over. I heard the story over and over. The supervisor intervened and heard it from the aide.

Here is the logic as per my mother:

 

The aide, who we will call “A” went to the store to by the bags. “She had $10.00. It says on the receipt that she got $3.48 change. So she has $3.48 in her pocket. Then she went to get bread. The bread was $2.50. $3.48 and $2.50 are $5.98.  She only gave me .98 back. I am missing $5.00.”

I tried to explain that A spent $6.52 on the bags. That she spent $2.50 on the bread. The total was 9.02.

My mother kept interjecting about the $3.48 change.

I tried to explain by making up a story of my mother might relate to about her going shopping. It didn’t work. She could not disengage the assets from the expenditures.

I was beginning to think I was the one losing it.

No matter how I broke it down, no matter how I tried, I was unable to curtail her preseveration: the inability to let go of this hiccup. No matter that I had been a teacher of some of the most difficult special education students, many deaf and language impaired, for over thirty years. No matter. I seemed to have lost my education mojo.

I tried again. This time, my mother had repeated her problem-solving steps about another ten times. She reiterated that she was taught to add the sum of expenditures and subtract from the original number to get the change. She had the abstract down but the concrete was failing.

 

“OK, Ma,” I am about to embark on another sinking ship of explanation, I am trying to stay calm and I am entering rough seas. “Let’s try it this way. The first receipt says she spent $6.52. ”  (But she interjects: “It says $3.48 change!!!!!”)

“Yes, that’s right, but that’s not necessary right now.

“Well, where is the $10.00??”

“Mom, she spent it, she gave it to the man for the bags!!” “If you add the $6.52 and the $3.48, there is the $10.00.”

“Why didn’t she give me the $3.58 change?”

“Because you told her to buy bread.”

“Mom, she had $3.48 IN HER POCKET. She had to buy bread. The bread was $2.50. She took that $3.48 out of her pocket and looked at it. She said, “I need $2.50 for this loaf of bread.” She handed the $2.50 to the man and came home with $.98.”

I hate to say it, but until this final scenario hit home, we went through even more permutations of computations. I have low blood pressure. It began to zoom. Maybe I was angry at her for getting this old, for intruding on my life which at this time is cluttered with all kinds of stuff I can’t even begin to tell you. Maybe I was angry at her for her tenacity, or because she threw out my comic books and Mad magazines and my hand-me-down doll house and Cousin Barbara’s charm bracelet. Maybe I have years of unresolved anger that is coming to a head.

Or maybe I am angry at myself for being angry at a ninety-eight year old woman from whom I expect too much.

Or maybe I am scared.

Years ago I had a friend, a colleague whom I adored, a school psychologist. She who was about old enough to be my mother. We used to do mother-daughter things. My mother was over a thousand miles away and living in Florida, her daughter was almost as far,  also in another state. We each filled the role for the other. And, she was like a grandmother to my then little son.

She was family.

One day we went to lunch and shopping at Lord & Taylor. She engaged the woman next to us in conversation and wanted to pay for her lunch. She was baffled by the coupon in my hand and what it was for.

It was the beginning, the soft sign, the birth of Alzheimer’s.

My mother had remained intact through her elder years with occasional blips of, for want of a better word: paranoia. Not the psychotic kind, but the fear that, based on experience, something was being taken from her. Like the gold earrings  I bought her in Italy, that she had for years  and that suddenly disappeared while she was on Hospice care in Florida.

Finally I said: “Mom, you have to trust me. I am telling you the truth. I pay your bills every month. You were only supposed to get $.98 back.”

Was she conceding? She said she told A that if she were wrong she apologized. She left herself an out. She must have seen a glimmer of truth somewhere. Somewhere in these interactions something made sense. But the aide was already resigned to leaving and dialing her phone and giving up.

My mother turned the conversation back to me. “How are you, this one, that one? “I let things roll off me,” she modeled trying to be in control, to be the upper hand, the matriarch. You have to do that.”

But then we were back within the tornado of complaints:

• the food is disgusting, she can’t eat it, can’t chew it, the same thing again and again.
  
• the aide sprayed her furniture with insect spray (“Mom, are you sure you don’t mean Lysol?”) and it bleached the furniture two shades
• where I come from you add the two things and then you subtract them
• I caught aides stealing from my kitchen, they take your things

And I figured out why I am angry: I don’t want her to go like this, to end like this, for her to start losing her senses. For us to be like this. For the phone to keep ringing with complaints about my mother who is now my child, sitting with her notebook in elementary school. Doing the arithmetic that no longer adds up.

 

The previous installment is here

The next post is here

This series starts here:

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