Early days in Stuyvesant Town

The tree outside my mother’s window was full and green when she moved into her apartment in late July. She enjoyed her meals, the people, the building, the staff. She spent her days in the movie room and seemed content.

The seasons change. The tree’s leaves turned to brown. It is now easy to see the building across the street.

Have you been wondering what happened to my “mother-daughter” series? It has been a while since I have written; I have been pushing issues to the back, dealing with the sick kitty, with persistent ocular migraines despite meds. I spend hours a day, still, on the phone trying to untangle information and move on to the next project to get my mother aide. I shop and lug huge packs of paper goods and sundries, searching for decent prices to keep the expenditures down. I bought her a lovely wardrobe and then had to exchange a bunch of it. I pay bills. Make calls. In all: I do. And do.

I deal with the aides and paying them and iron out disputes. I chat with the social worker weekly. Last month we signed all of my mother’s latest documents so they would be accurate for New York State, with the help of the building staff. These folks are beyond kind and helpful.

Sometime after the “signing” my mother caught a cold or the flu. She blames it on the folks who come to meals and cough at the table. The men who don’t use handkerchiefs. She had had pneumonia in Florida, if you recall, and was near death on Hospice care. Somehow my mother always survives. But put her near germ-ridden people and she goes nuts!

It took weeks for her to recover and she had been having her meals delivered to the room. Even though she was well, she decided she was no longer leaving the apartment. What was the point? She has seen all the movies, played all the games, can do the exercises on her own. It sounded like she was ready to check out any minute. If you broached the subject of why she wouldn’t go out, well,  forget it: all hell would break loose.

I was beginning to think that my mother had joined the 90+ club of curmudgeons. What is the cause? Old age and all that goes with it. Regrets? Anger? Perhaps the best answer is the inability to make peace with the loss of independence, with having to have an aide. With not owning what was transpiring: reality. I have seen this withdrawal before when she was living in Florida where she wouldn’t budge out of the apartment and she caught that hermit disease again.

Oh wait, she does leave the apartment: to get her hair done in the building. And then it would be back upstairs to hang with her two best friends: Wendy Williams and Judge Judy. Eating her delivered dinner at 4:30 pm with Doctor Phil, drawing the shades and going to bed at 7:30. All the while there are wonderful things to do in the building: singing, dancing, writing, piano playing, clubs, meetings, parties, a gorgeous rooftop solarium.

But you know what? There is just so much an outsider like me can do. Stubbornness is required for membership in the curmudgeon club. My mother should be President. She has an answer for everything and I realized she’s great at rationalizing. The defenses go up like a ship’s sails and off she goes.

She’s terrified.

As a social worker friend of mine said, “everything is based on the terror that this could be the end.”

Mind you, my mother has had allergies her whole life and easily gets respiratory infections and pneumonia. She is very frail. “But,” I tell her, “you have never complained of an ache or pain, you have never had arthritis, cancer. You’ve had falls with relatively minor breaks that have healed, you have all your faculties, you don’t wear glasses or a hearing aid. I’d say you were in damn good shape.”

She is self-protective and does very well thinking of what is good for herself first.

We have not had Thanksgiving together for over thirty years. “Would you like to come for Thanksgiving?”

“No, I don’t think so. You young people just don’t get it, I need quiet.’

Now I have to figure out a way to get Thanksgiving dinner to her and the aide in the middle of all that I have to do, and with company coming. Here I go again. The building staff is leaving early and there is no special meal, they are all going home.

The backup aide for my mother quit/left: I guess she got tired of being told that she snores. The one who was supposed to be off for the holiday with her three children can’t go home until I find a replacement.

Yesterday on the phone I tried a hardball approach. I didn’t plead, beg, fight. Here’s a woman who is fine, who makes excuses not to do anything, not to find joy.

“You know,” I said, “you are spending $7/day to have your meals delivered. That is over two hundred dollars extra a month.”

“We canceled the cable, you can used that money for that.”

“That’s not the point, I am trying to conserve your funds and they are dwindling.”

“What happens if I run out of money?”

“You have to move out”

“Where?”

“You go on Medicaid and have to go into a nursing home.”

“I will not go, I’ll be dead in a week, they abuse you and hit you.”

“I won’t let that happen.”

“You have to share a room.”

“You are sharing one now.”

“You are making me nervous, I have to get off the phone.”

It makes me nervous too, it keeps me up nights. Curmudgeon mothers. Three-legged diabetic cats. Enormous bills. Holidays coming.

I said to myself: Remember to be thankful. Everyone is alive.

This morning I received a text from the aide: “your mother said she is going to go downstairs to the dining room for her meals.”

Thank you.

 

 

 

This series is linked: see “continued here.” Also, below the line there will be links for the previous post and the next.

The series starts here

continued here