Mommy’s under the Christmas Tree, Get the Net.

I have been living the life of the adult child of an aging parent , and like the programs that I re-watch on Netflix I find myself wanting to fast forward because I  want to get to the end: I have better things to do.

Currently my mother and I are living in a world the demilitarized by a technological detent.  We  text  rather than talk, a convenience that strips out all nuance of tone and eyeroll. I imagine that within the next year she will lose the cognitive ability to use her telephone other than to call. The hints have been building since Covid began,  the lost phone, or keys, the incoherent stories that are tortuous.  The lies: the doctor gave me Ritalin as a little pick  me up or that cognitive testing says I am just fine.  These past six weeks her words are disappearing and now her conversation is like a geriatric version of Password.  Her, “Those things you gave me last year. You know red.  I washed the power source. A part fell out, where do I get more?

Currently on our firing range is a missile that threatens the technological detent: my mother’s special talent of screwing up her TV.

When we talk I listen to her cast about for words as if English has become a second language for her… and when I try to help she yells at me to let her finish. Somewhere I will lose it and yell back at her. We both have a lot of venom.  Hers is natural and fueled by accelerating dementia.  Mine is  fueled by the anger that our relationship will forever remain arrested in a land of  the unreconciled.   When we talk I like to frustrate her, recounting a myriad of details about an event that has now become hazy or beyond grasp for her .  This is exactly what experts say you should not do because it is upsetting, which is exactly why I do it. I am 61 years old and behaving like a toddler.

In March 2020, I predicted that she would get lost coming home from the grocery store with three years.  It feels like I may have been spot on with my prediction.  There will be a day (soon) that she calls upset  and lost, not knowing where she is.  Dementia is stripping away all but her most basic personality which is sadly rooted in fearful and lashing.  Her decline is stripping away all my goodwill and kindness,   I suspect when the time comes  she will  bypass assisted living and move straight to memory care.  I am grateful for the resources to keep her there.  But today as I type out this bitterness the word grateful  is a double entendre:  as if full of (being) grated, as if  shredded.

There was never meant to be an happy ending for the relationship between my mother and I, but I had always hoped.