This is how I am feeling about our house

"You think you’re waiting for help. For someone to tell you what the right thing to do is. Even though, at the back of your mind, you already know what that is. So all you’re really waiting for, is a time when you’re forced to do it." via - I Wrote This For You

Aging Parents

As most of you know I live thousands of miles away from my parents. My father is 81 and my mother is 78.

My father for the most part is really healthy. He has some orthopedic issues with his knees. Years of football and having polio as a young adult doesn't help the natural problems an 81 year old would have with his knees. He also has some heart problems, but mostly he is healthy as a horse. His mother died shortly before her 100 birthday. He seems to have gotten her good jeans for health in old age. For this I am eternally thankful.

My mother on the other hand is not so good. She has a long list of health issues. She has a terrible time getting around. Her legs don't work very well, her balance is off, her eye sight is failing. She has diabetes, heart problems, and the very beginnings of dementia which is impairing everything form her judgment to her memory. The list goes on form there. Not good. It doesn't help that she is terribly stubborn, much like my 4.5 year old.

It is hard for me. I miss my father terribly. I am after all what they call a daddies girl. He does not travel so he has only been able to see his grand daughter twice. My mother does travel and has been able to see the spawn at least once a year since her birth. I guess what is hard for me is that I would travel back to Birmingham more often if I was willing to see my mother more often. This is a difficult thing to admit, and judge me if you will, but my mother is a piece of work and the immense boundary issues (among other things) she has prevent me from exposing my impressionable 4.5 year old to her more than once a year. Hell, I don't want to expose this impressionable 43 year old to her more than once a year.

I had a conversation with my brother this morning that included talk of me needing to come there more often if my mothers health demands it. I knew this time would come and I thought I was prepared for it, but truthfully I am not. You see there are a 1000 or so reasons why I live thousands of miles away from my mother. I have absolutely no desire to take care of her in her old age. She has a special kind of insurance for that after all. I am more than willing to help make some hard decisions with her about her living situation, etc. but actually help take care of her, no way! Does this make me a bad daughter? Does this mean I am a selfish, mean, ungrateful woman who should be thankful that I still have a mother to call, and that I should shut up and do what society expects of me? Perhaps. I pose these questions from a different place than I would have 5 years ago before I had my own child. I really hope that when I am old and my batteries are running down that my own daughter isn't writing something similar to this on what ever thing there is then that resembles a blog. Should my worry of my own daughters potential feelings about me guilt me in to taking care of my own mother?

I find myself profoundly sad today. I am missing my father, wishing I had a different kind of mother (a wish I have made millions of times in my life), knowing on a base level that that wish will never be granted and the best way to even get close to it is be a better mother to my child than my mother was to me. I am sad because I certainly don't want my mother to end up like hers did, alone at the end. I am wondering if it possible to overlook profound abuse, neglect and transgressions so much so that I could suck it up and be there for that parent no matter what they did in the past. I am not sure I am that good a person.

I promised my brother today that I would call my mother at least once a week and have a hard conversation with her. Are you eating? Have you gotten dressed today? What day is it? Have you taken your meds? and so on. There will be the other kinds of phone calls also. The ones where the spawn talks to her and I tell funny stories about her antics. But the need for the more frequent hard phone calls has finally arrived.

I am not sure why I am writing this here, in such a public forum. I certainly leave myself open for criticism and judgment. But maybe just maybe someone out there knows what I am talking about, understand this seesaw, and could perhaps offer some words of support and wisdom.

Cutie

The quintessential Lucy face.

Love the freckles.

Reaching For This

This quote is from a blog I regularly read. I am not revealing the authors name or a link to their website because quite frankly it would reveal to much of my personal life to some who might read this blog. But I could not resist posting this little snip it of a recent post. Relationships are hard work, really really hard work and this sums up what I am after, what I think we are getting at. That hard work is paying off, big time.

"...we both need to make those tender spots in us stronger. That’s precisely what relationships are for, to me, at their very best: so much goodness in the combination of us both that we run up against our own shortcomings, and we feel empowered enough to change them, to reach, to become better, to grow, to change: nothing short of transformation."

Facebook Reconnect

So I have to admit Facebook is a mixed blessing for me. I have been able to reconnect with some folks that I long since thought I would never talk to again, and that has been wonderful. But, I have also had to unfriend some folks that were getting in the way of my Facebook enjoyment. Well yesterday I received an email from an old high school boy friend that is one of my reconnects on FB. He had found our junior prom picture, scanned it and sent it to me. He wondered if I had a copy and I do in fact have one somewhere in my photos. I love this picture. My blue eye shadow is priceless. As a side note we are both out gay people. Oh, if we had only known.

Anniverary

As I approach the third anniversary of my breast cancer diagnosis I find myself wondering where the time has gone. Wondering why I seem to waste so much of it and trying to figure out how to make it more full of the less mundane. I was poking around the blogs I regularly read and discovered the poem below here and it resonates with me on so many levels as I try to figure all this out.

“When Death Comes”
by Mary Oliver
from New and Selected Poems

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Proud of Spouse

Marnie and her c0-CEO's were on the front page of the SF Chron. Business Section yesterday. You can read the entire article here: TechSoup sees upside for nonprofits in downturn That's the spouse closest to you in what I think is a great photo.