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January 24, 2003
1:30pm or so
Largely, I'm sure, to the loving energy so
many of you sent my way, I slept like a baby last night. I
didn't end up going to sleep until around 10, but I went right out
and didn't wake up again until 6am (that's not happened in years!).
It can't be just a coincidence that the very day I bitched about it
in my journal, it got better!
I had already determined to take a quiet
night. I dear friend of mine gave me a little reality check
(in a very loving and supportive way) and that allowed me to shake
the
Superfection table in my head so that all of the pieces fell
into the right shaped holes. That was the beginning of my mess
starting to make some sense, so I can really feel myself climbing
out of this.
The early evening started off a little
rocky. Eric knew I was having a hard time through the day.
I had all this emotion and grief waiting to come out. I talked
to my brother early in the day and he told me it didn't look good.
She was losing ground and the toxin levels in her bloodstream were
climbing. According to her doctor, the level of toxins in a
normal person's bloodstream is about 20, 100 is coma and 120 is
brain damage. This is, mind you, pretty much third hand
information. Hers is staying around 90. Her
pulse was staying quite high and her kidneys were failing.
They diagnosed her with ARDS (Arrested Respiratory Distress
Syndrome) and had her on 100% oxygen. They tried to cut her
down and her oxygen saturation level plummeted, so they had to boost
it up again.
So I was fairly bummy, being bombarded with
images and memories of my fairytale childhood. We were dirt
poor, but I never knew it. I thought everyone ate beans and
ham for every meal. My mom was amazing. She could sew
anything. Dad once said that if he needed any car
part, he could show mom a picture of it and she'd whip one up.
When my favorite clothes were outgrown, she'd cut them down and make
clothes for my dolls from them. When she'd make a new dress
for me (and back then, flour came in wonderfully sturdy print cloth
bags just the right size for making little girl clothes), she'd use
the scraps to make a matching one for my Barbie or my baby doll.
She would walk my little legs of to take me to a particularly nice
picnic site she'd found. She'd plop down into the mud to make
dozens of mud pies with me to play "restaurant." If she
got bored, she'd make a new stuffed toy or doll from her material
scraps. As long as I knew her, my mother had some giant
container, like a giant barrel or box or crate, that was full of all
kinds of scraps of material. She got them from everywhere.
She'd take me blackberry and strawberry picking and she knew which
parts of the woods grew the best ones in the wild. She could
find the best hazelnut and black walnut and hickory nut trees and
the wild apple trees that grew hard, sour little apples that gave us
what mom called "green apple bellyache" if we ate too many.
She found persimmon trees (and lord, I hate persimmons). She
was the most creative mom I've ever known. We played for hours
with little plastic formed animals who lived in barns made of old
Puffs boxes and drank from ponds made of cupcake liners. She
once made my baby doll a crib from a giant Quaker Oats box.
She would cut pictures from magazines and paste them (with paste she
made from flour and water) to the poster boar- like cardboard my
grandfather would bring to me by the stacks. The board was
used to separate stacks of cans at the canning company where he
worked for an exotic Greek man named Mr Panagos. My
grandmother (the one from several posts ago) also cleaned house for
Mrs Panagos for years. Anyway, mom would paste the pictures
onto the cardboard and cut them out in goofy shapes to make puzzles
for me. She had a gallon pickle jar full of buttons and would
let me spend hours sorting them into her metal muffin tins by color,
by shape, then string them onto kite string with a darning needle.
Of course, I didn't know to appreciate that
at the time. That was just how life was. My first ten
years were incredible kid-happy days. It must have been
horrible for my parents. I know the rent on the first house I
can remember was $50 a month. Someone, when I was born, gave
me a 1922 silver dollar and my mom and dad used to take it down to
Mr Colk at the general store to let him hold for them to buy
groceries against. They were extremely poor, but I never knew
it until I was an adult and talked to my mother about it.
For reasons I still don't understand,
largely due to missing information and my mom looking at the past
through her own filters, it all started to fall apart around 1969
when she had my youngest brother (another brother was born in 1967).
She had a terrible, nightmare birth that involved forceps and should
have been a c-section. My brother suffered a damaged muscle in
his face that caused one of his eyes to droop when he was tired and
mom suffered something that changed her forever. After that
time, she was always in chronic surgery mode. By the time I
was ten, it pretty much fell to me to take care of the house.
It felt like betrayal in a way because it was day and night from the
way it had been before. My brothers were two and four and my
father worked long hours. Mom was always preparing to go into
the hospital, coming out of the hospital or in the hospital and that
hasn't changed much since then.
Because of all of the time she's been at
death's door and sailed right back, it was hard to take this
seriously. My mom hears a doctor tell her all of the things
that could be causing her symptoms, then focuses in on the worst
case scenario and to her, that becomes her diagnosis. Any time
she'd tell us what was wrong with her, we'd pretty much have to
divide by half or a third to get the likely side of reality.
We'd ask the right questions and get to the truth.
This time, I realized it was the real
thing. She wasn't bluffing or embellishing or looking for
attention. That hit me really hard and I had a tough time
dealing with it, on top of the depression I was already fighting.
Yesterday, it all fell apart. When I talked to my brother and
heard how bad it was, it was almost more than I could take.
Nathan was in rare form, probably in response to my tension.
Eric called and said, "You sound down. Is something wrong?"
(?!) Pfft, YEAH! Do you remember the part about my mom
being at death's door? I let him know what I tough time I was
having and that I just wanted to go into a cave and rant and rage
and grieve. He swore that as soon as he got home, he would
handle the world and I could go to our room and deal with things.
When he called me on his way home, he casually mentioned that he was
going BY HIS FRIEND'S HOUSE for a while after work. ???
That was the last straw for me. I was pretty rude to him,
including him saying, "I need to process this" (the fact that I was
furious with him) and me replying "process this" and hanging up on
him.
When he got home (um, he didn't go to his
friend's house), he took me to the back and we talked for a while.
He helped me get some perspective and I was able to articulate a lot
of the things I was feeling. It was good for me to get my head
in perspective and he was able to help me quite a bit. After a
couple of hours, I left the room and checked my e-mail and found a
letter from my friend, full of good advice and love. It helped
tremendously. A few minutes later, my brother called again to
say that she was conscious now and seemed better. I told him
everything that I wanted him to tell her and while we were talking,
a nurse told him there was a phone he could use to call me from her
room. I could actually talk to her! He hung up and
called me again from the room. He held the phone to her ear
and I was able to tell her how much I love her and how much I
treasure the memories of my childhood. I told her that she was
the reason I wanted to be a stay at home mom, so I could give some
of what she gave me to my kids. I spent about 5 minutes
talking nonstop, telling her how I felt. I told her how much I
appreciated that she had given me her big book of poems to show that
part of herself to me. When I started talking to her, I went
at it with the idea that I was saying goodbye, but as I talked to
her, I could feel her presence very strongly and it just turned into
me telling her I'd see her later in the year and that I *would*
visit. She was reminding me, yet again, that she wasn't going
yet. I did tell her that if she could, to fight to stay and be
with us a while longer. I also told her that if she was tired
of fighting and knew she'd be happier on the otherside, then to go
with my love and gratitude and understanding.
Ed (my brother) talked to me afterward and
told me that while I was talking to her, her vitals returned to near
normal and she started trying to speak (probably to tell me how full
of shit I was, but hey, it's progress!). After I talked to
him, Eric and I watched "Down From the Mountain," which is a
documentary of a concert of the music from my favorite movie of all
time, "O Brother, Where Art Thou." It's the music I was raised
with and a number of the people in the film had the exact accent
from where I was raised, so that was soothing. Despite what
other regions might think, not all Southerners sound alike.
Eric and I talked more about my feelings
about not going back to Kentucky just yet and he suggested that if I
couldn't see my mom, maybe I'd feel better if I honored the other
direction of the lineage and looked into costs to go visit Joe in
Canada. I looked and it is extremely, disgustingly cheap in
both directions. After some negotiation with Joe and Sandra,
at this point it looks like he will be coming down to visit in
February, which is a very, very good thing. I miss him so
much. He and Eric are best friends and he is very close to the
little kids, so it will be good for everyone. I feel like I
can honor my mom by being with my own children.
Speaking of them. I woke up this morning
feeling much, much closer to them than I have in a long time.
I think the memories of my mom's early parenting put me back into
the mode of remembering why I'm doing it. I've been able to
focus more on Nathan today and spend more time with him with him,
just generally feeling better about being here. He hasn't
screamed even once and seems much calmer.
I think what bothers me most about the
situation with my mom is that rather than focusing on the wonderful
things she gave me at the beginning of my life, I've spent all of
the interim years feeling bad for the way her actions trashed out
the 30 that came after that great childhood ended. In this
journey through forgiveness that I've been walking in the past
couple of months, she was (I think) the final frontier and one that
I didn't even consider exploring. I am grateful that I had the
opportunity to tell her how I feel and how much she means to me.
I didn't even know she did mean that much to me.
My brother called during the several hours
during which I was writing this. My style of writing is best
described as "whack
a mole," in that I pop up and down and up and down every few
minutes and every few sentences. It's not particularly
conducive to nonfragmented literary creation. ;) So Ed
called and said that Mom is doing better. When the phone rang,
I was sure it was "the call," but instead, he told me that they have
isolated the cause of the problem and are working to correct it.
Unfortunately, they can't cauterize the part of her stomach they
need to cauterize until she's breathing on her own and they can go
down her throat to do it. She's doing much better in that
respect and they've been able to take down her oxygen
supplementation to 50%. Her kidneys seem to be functioning
better and her creatinine levels are stabilizing. She's not
out of the woods by a long shot, but she's doing much better.
If she doesn't make it, she has still given me incredible gifts
beyond those she directly provided. I feel much closer to my
kids, much more at peace with the life I have chosen as a stay at
home mom. If she does make it, I'll have a wonderful opportunity to
see her through different eyes and hopefully visit her before the
year is out.
Thanks for being there through this,
everyone.
Love,
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