Today, on my last full day in Chicago for a while, I spent most of the day with my Mom and Dad. I somehow didn’t manage to get a photo of me, Mom, and Dad together. Maybe tomorrow.
This morning, like many mornings this trip, I helped my Mom get dressed. Nothing anyone tells you can ever prepare you for this. In the act, there’s a tenderness, an intimacy, a reversal of roles decades after your childhood. Son now caring for mother. What a strange thing to happen. How easily I slip into the role, time and again.
Not even 24 hours before, she’d reverted to the old Mom, holding my hand, soothing me, as I cried my heart out in the middle of the lunch crowd at McDonalds. (That makes me cry harder: when the true her reemerges.) But that’s what love does: me for my parents, them for me. That love I seem to give too freely to others who may not deserve it sometimes.
It hit me today. It’s hit me before, don’t get me wrong; caretaking takes energy. Whether that’s for a parent or a child or someone else you love: caretaking, care, love takes energy. A lot of it.
I’ve had some people say this trip must be an amazing vacation, as if micromanging your mom whose thought process lasts 8 seconds and soothing your dad who seems to be on the verge of crying or breaking down and trying to fill the very large void your mom used to bridge within your family, stacked on top of other layers of complexity both here and in New Zealand, are somehow the epitome of enjoyment. This trip has been full of caring and caregiving and listening and sobbing and struggling to get something, anything, from someone who’s already left the room. I’ve been doing the emotional heavy lifting while trying to keep my head above water. Not very successfully.
But I’ve realized I’m stronger than I give myself credit for. I admit, I’m really worn out and tired. But there’s still some fight left in me.
One of my best friends Anne said I’m “dealing with a metric fuckton of shit nobody should have to deal with, and [I’m] kinda being held together with duck tape.” (Yeah water fowl reference.) And, she’s right. Cryptically, I’m going to say very few people in my life know the sheer hell I’ve been through in the past year. Comparing it to being ground alive in a meat grinder seems tame opposed to the reality.
Some people push away the love and care I give. Others keep demanding more than is available. That doesn’t make it disappear. The same patience, care, kindness, compassion, and love I show my Mom when she’s frustrated or bewildered or sundowning or antagonistic? I need to show those things to others in my life who deserve it. More importantly, to myself. I often talk about The Critic In My Head, as if that’s some antagonist in my life’s story. But, actually, it’s me. It’s the demons in my head, and their master is me.
So this evening, after we got home from a wonderful dinner my sister-in-law Darcie made for Mom, Dad, and me — when Mom was very confused and angry and confrontational because, deep down, I think she knows I’m flying out tomorrow — I handled it with as much grace and care and patience as I could muster. This disease isn’t her. It doesn’t define her. It doesn’t define our family and the love we have for one another. It doesn’t destroy the good times, the memories of the cottage at Delavan or the fine sand on the beach at Clearwater on a clear spring day or block parties on those still late summer nights where the inky blue evening seemed to stretch on, and minutes became hours, and a half hour more seemed somehow enough.
We persevere because we love. And that’s what we do for the people we give our love to and who deserve our love. Persevere. And love.
Beam Me Up, Scotty 
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