Tedious ramblings..

Sitting here, so many months after I’ve written, it seems an impossible feat to try to encapsulate all that I feel inside to a blank notepad. Not that my feelings are all that complicated, but that it is overwhelming to me, and I do not quite know how to distinguish my current feelings from my past, or how they intersect with my mother’s feelings.

These last few months have been very difficult. My mother’s health has deteriorated at quite a rapid pace. When first we moved here together, she could walk unaided. She began falling immediately, and soon enough she was told she would need to use a walker. She resisted, which resulted in more pain for her and her body even more difficult for her to cope with than before.

Even just one month ago, she had more freedom than she does now, and with her loss of freedom, there is the frustration and despair that goes along with it.

My mother believes she was always very independent, when she was not recuperating from surgery or sickness. And she was, for several years. But the truth is, she was never truly without physical limits, back surgeries and illness made doing anything strenuous very difficult, my father did the heavy cleaning, shopping, carrying, so many things that she took for granted.

It took making a dreadful mistake to realize just how lucky she was, in the man she married, my father. To marry someone else, someone so like T, woke her to the realization of just what kind of man my father was, how unique and special he was. On one hand she can understand more what I went through, but it makes her grieve for what was, even more profoundly.

My mother cannot do anything for herself any longer. She feels completely useless, her future bleak and happiness a thing of the past. I cannot truly blame her, for I have lived with those emotions for years. I do not condemn her for how she feels, although I do my best not to compound it. I do all I can to encourage her, try to help her look to positive things.. this is not easy for me, since I was always one to see a glass half-empty.

This last month has been the hardest. She was able at one time to get up in the night by herself, to use the bathroom, or to transfer from one chair to another, carefully. But now she cannot, she needs me to help her into bed, into her wheelchair, to push her around since she does not have the arm strength to do so, although she can go short distances using her feet to move her in her wheelchair in a room or hallway, which gives her a bit of exercise in that way.

I know it must be demeaning for her to need my help in all the most intimate things, having to dress her, having to assist her with clothing for using the toilet, walking her everywhere. Her days consist of watching TV or playing games on the computer, and I have not had more than 3-4 hours continuous sleep for several weeks, with no idea when I might have them again. She needs my help in everything and I do not begrudge her that at all, she needs to vent on all of her discouragement, and I must listen. The hard part of it is that I cannot vent myself, for then we both down spiral and that place is not healthy for anyone.

If there is any resentment, it is in that.. my emotions ignored, my feelings not made allowance for sometimes. We have had some bad disagreements, at times so bad I wonder if she will look to leave. Things that she says are so vicious, that cut to the core of me, that I cannot believe she would utter them, and later on, she cannot believe herself that she would say such things, she hates the way she feels, the way this situation wears on her, wears on us both.

Living in my own depression and negativity has always been a struggle for me, living with hers on top of it is almost impossible. My mind whirls with things, mistakes I’ve made, trust lost, regurgitating time and again how I arrived at my life, how I carved this niche that I loathe.

Not that I loathe being here to assist my mother, for in truth I do not, I am thankful that out of all the mistakes I’ve made in my life, that I can be here for her, I do not look for ways to get out of this.

What I do regret is the lost chances I had, the worst being the marriage to T, of course. Hearing her describe the man she married two years ago, narcisstic, arrogant, controlling, demeaning, and selfish. All the ways he put her down, all the things he did that hurt her, almost a carbon copy of how T dealt with me. And I become baffled, time and again, at my having been so blind, so foolish.

My self-deprecation has descended to new lows of late, I hear those 5 sentences he said to me dozens of times a day, in my dreams, or nightmares. I cannot shake them, no matter how hard I try. And it is not entirely about my disastrous marriage that unnerves me, it is that those words apply to so many things in my past. So many idiotic mistakes, how time and again I chose the wrong path, how I seemed completely bent on destroying any chance of happiness I might have had.

For I did. If I had deliberately planned it myself, I could do no better, or worse, as the case may be.

I shake my head in numb disbelief at myself. Who knows, maybe this is what God would want for me, for if I had taken other paths, then I would not perhaps be able to take care of my mother, as I can now. And does it really matter how I feel? Not that much, these tedious emotions will not solve anything, will not aid in anything.

In November, we visited my brother, sister-in-law and my niece in their home in Indiana. This whole situation was an answer to prayer for he and his family, to be able to move to where he could buy a comfortable home, work close to home, enable his daughter and wife to go to college. Things I am glad of, I do not begrudge that in any way. If my mother had not married the idiot, my brother would never have taken those steps to move his family back east. I am very happy for them, honestly happy for them. He worked so very hard to be where he is, he sacrificed in many ways, they all did. I am proud of how he turned his life around, times when it seemed he was going to self-destruct, but he did not, and I would never wish them to not have what they do now.

He and I have never been close, he does not understand me, or emotions, very much at all. I attempted to thank him one night while there, for bringing us there, but he waved me off to not be emotional, which left me with very little I could say to him. He believes my emotions to be dramatic, which makes it difficult for me to talk to him, my emotions are often close to the surface, because I worry that he’ll judge me harshly for how I feel. So I spoke to Debbie, my sister-in-law, and Amber, my niece. Hoping they can relay how I feel, help to “translate” for me, to him. He always hates to hear about our mother falling, he feels helpless and that is not a comfortable thing for him to feel.

When we returned, my favorite cat, Tailkinker, was extremely affectionate and stayed close to me as much as she could. She was 16 and getting arthritis, she was such a tiny cat, so dainty. She died two weeks before Darkren came to visit for the holidays. It was the most horrific ordeal, it started late afternoon and she did not pass until 4 a.m. It was a Saturday evening, with all she went through, it was agony. I still cannot quitehandle the memory, but it is vivid.

I torment myself with it though, I played one CD that night, on repeat, and now when I am up in the night, I replay it. I think partly because I hope she knew how much I loved her, trying to soothe her by whispering to her how much I loved her, that it was alright to leave, that I did not wish her to suffer.

She was my heart, she was with me through everything. T and I got her when we purchased our home in 1990. She was 4.5 weeks old when we got her, so we had to feed her formula for the first two weeks. I have never felt so much for a cat before. When I bought her a companion that she rejected, she in turn rejected me for 3 years. I did all I could to make it up to her, it was not until P moved out the third time that she finally forgave me and came to me for attention again. I hate that I missed all that time that I could have had with her, but I console myself that she must have cared about me some, even if she ignored me. I did not know until now that it was her that prompted the cats to come to the door whenever I came home, for my mother’s cat Teddy does not bother, nor does Brightspot. She was happy that last day, I knew her time was short, but I could not face losing her. I knew.. I knew that in losing her, I would lose the last bit of softness I had inside me.

I feel so lost without her, more so than any other time that I can remember. I go through the motions every day, trying to not indulge in emotions that serve no purpose.

That is pretty much the extent of my life. To absorb the despair of my mother, take care of all her needs, and to do my best not to look at “what could have been”. I have begun learning how to shut my ears at her reminiscences, the things she had for years, which I have never known and never will know. I have shut down in heart and soul, so that my daily life does not affect me as much as it would otherwise. I have had to shut myself away from almost everyone, because I do not know how to explain things anymore. People get tired of the regurgitation, as much as I dislike the sour taste in my mouth of doing so.

I write because there is such a wealth of emotions that are bottled within, I am making an attempt at siphoning off some of the stress of this, although I do not know how much it will help. I wish it were not so bleak.