Mom and Cynthia

And so what happened on Sunday after that terrible nightmare I just told you about? I had a long talk with my mother. For most of my adult life my relationship with my mother has been via the telephone. When you have a telephone relationship you are forced to communicate–or not. If you choose not, you are left with shallow, meaningless words that fill time and not you. My mother and I have spoken a lot over the years. It wasn’t always easy. It is not easy now: the walls of time are closing in. I want to grasp at every memory I can and save it. My mother is recalling more and more details of her earlier life and she tells me things I never heard before. She must have spoken non-stop for an hour and I desperately tried to burn everything she said into my memory.

She conveyed the following. Mind you, what she said she had told my answering machine on Saturday night. I was out and forgot to check it.

practicing for the future

• She received the Mother’s Day gift and was very appreciative: There was a basket of goodies but despite the wrappers, all the tea tasted the same. She shared some with the weekend aide; she loved the miniature roses;
• She was miffed about the weekday aide, Cynthia: “She is too controlling. I could never live with a person like that.” What she fails to realize is that she IS living with a person like that; if Cynthia hears her cough after she has some milk in her coffee, milk goes on the Verboten list. She watches my mother like a hawk watches over her young. My mother’s reaction: it’s scary, she watches over me TOO much;
• She acknowledged that she needs someone with her;
• She didn’t entertain the idea of moving to New York and living in a residence where she was convinced she would again be neglected (lord help us when the money runs out; there is no choice);
• I told her that Cynthia was kind enough to mail me photos of her for Mother’s Day. I tried to explain that even though the aide is tough it is for her own good; if my mother falls again she is back to the hospital-rehab circuit and that will be the end;
• She’s been looking at herself in the mirror in disbelief, like she just survived Buchenwald. I hate to confirm this but there is something to it; My mother has been starving for years but this year was the worst. “I look animal-like, my face is so long. It was worse last month.” I wish she could get better food.
• A Hospice volunteer in his eighties visits and shares her health newsletters; she has been subscribing to these newsletters by doctors who practice alternative medicine for years, a testament to how she has lived this long;
• The Hospice doctor is obese! He comes so infrequently and when he does he makes me nervous–he stares at me.
• She flashed back to her mother and how my grandfather died when he was in his fifties shortly after I was born. My grandmother was uneducated and illiterate having been raised in Russia where girls were not allowed to go to school. An anecdote: My grandfather was a furrier and was apprised of a good stock tip by a friend. He purchased some of the recommended stock and hid the certificates in the back of a Bakelite radio.

• at some point after my grandfather’s death, the radio stopped playing. My aunt removed the cardboard from the back and found the stock certificates stuffed into the radio’s interior. No one knew about them and it was just luck that the radio stopped playing. My grandmother was able to live off the money from the stocks  with a little help from her four daughters until her death when she was in her eighties. Who knew?

The conversation went all over the place and ended up back where it started: at the beginning and the end, the old cycle that goes around and around spinning me all over the place and not giving me any answers about the future. What can I do to stretch out the money that is diminishing every hour and keep my mother’s life status quo?

I keep telling myself: One day at a time. Why won’t I listen?

You can play the message on the answering machine that was left on Saturday night. I just found it today. I had to save it.

Just hit play.

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