Happy Sunday from a rainy New York City, friends. I’m glad you’re here as I need to unload.

Life is funny: it is almost as if I am living in a ping pong game, I being the ball, am being batted over the net as the caretaker between the two teams: husband on one side and mother on the other. To wit: husband’s game is tomorrow, the day we journey to Manhattan to two different hospital buildings–one for a C-T scan and another, nine blocks away to have his twenty plus metal staples removed from his head and sutures removed from his abdomen. He feels better balanced and that he is walking better although there will hopefully still be improvement as two weeks since surgery have not gone by.

But, that ping pong ball is also being batted to the other side of the net, back to my mother’s side, to her game. She seems to be in a cyclical pattern of paranoia which rears its head monthly.

So, let me rewind a bit and set the scene. The barometric pressure has dropped and we are getting a bout of dreary residual rain from hurricane Matthew. It is Sunday morning. I don’t sleep well and by last night I was exhausted and conked out around midnight. As usual, one of my eyes opened at my witching hour, about 4:00 am. I still have an ongoing issue for two months or more of seeing a shape in the lower quadrant of my right eye, mainly in the dark. It comes, it goes. Initially it was in the shape of a broccoli, with vein-like channels. Today was a first: the shape looked like a rose, with the vein-like channels forming a stylized version of petals. Kind of like so:

 

 

Now, I honestly prefer a rose to a broccoli but if I had my druthers, I’d rather see sheep leaping over a fence. Then I’d like to be out cold for a few hours. But there’s been no luck for me, I am always “on duty,” and it just might be my head is trying to make light of it all, or it is signalling me to produce some writing or art–my best escape.

 

I finally got back to sleep… I was walking by a reservoir and a man was wading into it. Before I knew it there were five men, in the water, our drinking water. It was up to ME to get these guys out. What was I supposed to do? Well, what would you do if five guys (not the burger chain) were in YOUR drinking water? I had to get tough. I told them that if they didn’t leave immediately I’d shoot! How’s that for my Second Amendment rights? As I don’t have a gun in my dreams or otherwise, I had to take creative license. I yelled B A M !!! I must have yelled loud enough to wake myself up. Now that was what I would call counterproductive. So much for sleep. (Dream analysis: I am in charge of all things, protecting the common good and always vigilant).

Eventually I drifted off again only to have the phone ring. At 7:30 am on a Sunday morning. I didn’t answer. I checked the caller ID fearing the worst–that it was my mother’s aide or the agency. I didn’t recognize the name or number and tried to go back to sleep but within an hour the phone rang again and it was the coordinator at the agency responsible for assigning aides to my mother. “The aide is complaining your mother accused her of stealing her paper towels and some eggs are missing. The aide is very upset.” (Obviously she was the one who called.)

We’ve been here before. Why is this always on a Sunday morning? (And as I write this I have a visual migraine growing in my field of vision.)

So, I call my mother. It is now around 8:00 am.

“Hello Mom, what’s the problem?”

“Oh hi, what problem?”

“The agency called me, there seems to be a problem?”

Open the flood gates: her side of the story is revealed. (I ship large orders of household goods from Target to save me the shopping trip and from having to deliver heavy packages. One of the items in the order is paper towels.) It seems that, as per my mother, the aide has been hiding partially used rolls of paper towels under the day bed. She knows it has to be the aide–she was even going to take one of my mother’s Ensure and had put it on top of the roll, ready to go. It also seems  that the aide bought eggs on Thursday and why are there only a few left?  “I am heartbroken,” my mother said, “this was my favorite aide.”

 

This story comes on the heels of a tale from a couple of days ago. It seems that after the evening aide left, a fellow came through the corridor with a “huge machine like a vacuum, that made a racket from 7:00 to 10 pm. It had a mirror on top which was a “recording device.” People were opening their doors and yelling that it was late and for the guy to be quiet but he just ignored us. I opened the door and told him to get that big thing away from my door. Nothing stopped the noise.”

“So I said to myself, what should I do? And a voice answered, ‘call 911.’ ”

“The woman listened to my story and told me that 911 wasn’t the right number, that I should call 311, but I forgot the number and dialed 31 and it was wrong. But then I looked out again and saw a woman running up the hall to get the kid with the machine. She was afraid the police were coming and she pushed him to the elevator.”

“Mom,” I said after biting my lip and taking a breath, “did you give the woman on the phone your address or tell her anything about where you live?”

“No.”

“Then listen to me: the man and woman in the hall with the machine had NOTHING to do with you. They weren’t running from fear of the police because you made that call.”

“How do you know? I think she was scared.”

“Mom, the woman didn’t know where you were and it was not her job to deal with a noise complaint. 911 is only for emergencies.”

 

After I spoke to my mother I called the main desk of her building. (This is an apartment building with perks, meals, activities for seniors, it is not assisted living, there is always someone at the desk though my mother insists they go home at 6:00 pm and there is no one downstairs at the door/phones.) After speaking to the gentleman on duty I learned that as per health code, the carpets must be steam cleaned twice a month and it is done after hours when the folks are in their apartments. And yes, there is always someone on duty.

“Mom,” I said after calling my mother back. This is the story…” And I explained everything I learned. Now why, if this is an ongoing thing was it an issue  a couple of nights ago, is beyond me, as I would think this wasn’t the first time they made this racket between 7:00 and 10:00 pm, but noise has become an issue and as I learned during a call from the aide, something is going on aurally, and as my mother said, her vision gets worse but her hearing gets “better.”

Dear reader, are you following this, as we say, “mishegas“, (craziness)? Probably not but please bear with me while I untangle myself.

Before the aide called me, she was one of many before her, accused of stealing items or money, I assumed that perhaps, perhaps my mother is perceiving all of this correctly, after all, I am going there less frequently to check up on things, and maybe a roll of paper towels and Ensure are the “cost of doing business.” But this aide was a long time coming. This aide is good and she does more than the others and seems very kind. THIS aide is the successor to many other previous aides who either left or were dismissed by my mother. This aide said: she bought the eggs more than a week ago so there were just a few left today, she bought the bread on Thursday; my mother put a partly used roll of towels on her bed and took a big new one, (so perhaps the aide did put the smaller one under the day bed.) But here is the kicker: My mother keeps hearing music, sounds, chains dragging on the floor, whistling noises in the bathroom and calls the aide over who hears nothing but humors my mother by agreeing.

This is the umpteenth time I have smoothed feathers, have reminded an aide that my mother was ninety-eight years old, never leaves the room, has no stimulation but the TV, likely is displaying the signs of dementia possibly due to arteriosclerosis and is in decline. That this all wasn’t about the aide and her ego, it was not personal, it was about an old lady who was going to die soon. Was it all worth getting so upset about?

And they all say, “I couldn’t take it anymore.” And there I am on damage control, telling these ladies to please take a deep breath, to step back and let it go.

And I tell you, I don’t know how I am doing this. Keeping it together, orchestrating the lives of two people, keeping up with appointments and casualties. But I do know, at the end of the month I have an appointment for my own medical needs. FOR ME. In Manhattan, and I am getting on the get-well journey.

The interesting this is this: my mother is well aware of what is going on, she wants to know how everyone is here, especially how I am. She reads my voice and knows when something is not right. My answer is always that I am tired. (I am THE care taker to what feels like multitudes, but she doesn’t get that she is part of the issue and I know it isn’t her fault. She does mean well, she give me ongoing pep talks to “be strong,” to “not get stepped on.” And that is what she is doing, for in her world, she must be defensive. “Do you know how many people in this building have died? because they aren’t getting the right nutrition, they are eating all the garbage on the menu, there is too much SUGAR.” I can imagine her, all four feet eight, waving her index finger in the air and declaring war on fructose. But what she isn’t taking into account is that the people who are dying in a building for the aged are OLD.

It goes on. Her ice cream novelty was not delivered at dinner, hence an aide must descend the five floors to the dining room and claim her cone. Now this dinner delivery issue with missing items has been ongoing but it dawned on me that with all the people having meals delivered, and the fact that it must take about an hour to get through a twelve-floor building, with the meal delivery cart how in the world could  an intact ice cream make it to anyone?

Alright, for now I rest my case. And then this…

…a teenager walking past my house in the rain with an iPad. He reversed direction and walked the other way, up the block. And, I am thinking, what the heck is this all about? It dawned on me: this kid was looking for a free wi-fi signal, and might even be the person who got onto my router with an android device about a month ago. (I’ve since shored up my settings.) That is MY perception of reality.

 

Summing all this up: what is real and what is what we perceive or fill-in when there are gaps in our truth? How is it that our minds fill in that which we don’t really know and assume we have created a reality that everyone around us abides by?  We are all in the same boat, drawing on perception and creating the truth.

But the problem is, I am still not sure what my truth is.

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

The previous post is here

The next post is here

 

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