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such a long time
Feb. 24th, 2018 07:06 pmI don't even remember long form writing in semi-public. Man. Facebook is nonsense. I mean, I use it, because almost everyone left LJ to be an echo-chamber and Dreamwidth hasn't re-attracted those people. And because it serves as a kind of connection to people far-flung and long ago. But I don't post a ton there, either. Some political reposts. Some semi-random status updates. But it's even more self-curated than writing in LJ used to be, because it's not a community the way LJ was. Everyone wants to put their best face forward on the Face. I'm no exception.
This is going to be long.
Unvarnished? I think I have been pretty depressed for the past couple of years. I am not dealing with it. I have been avoiding going to my general doctor for ages and ages. I've made and cancelled something like six appointments in the past six months. I don't want to hear her berate me for how badly I am dealing with my diabetes and weight, and although I politically believe in Health At Every Size (HAES), I am not sufficiently badass to just stare her down and get what I need, whether that is a disabled parking placard (yes, that would be very, very good, as walking any sort of distance is pretty fucking difficult) or whatever else.
Also unvarnished: my mom's mild cognitive impairment is worsening pretty inexorably. The "d" word, dementia, was mentioned at least a year ago, and it continues, but not so terrifying as her wandering into the street or forgetting who we are*. That's almost worse, because she needs constant care anyway, and lives in a mother-in-law apartment in my sister's house, and the burden on my sister is intolerable. We have a very nice, chivvying woman who comes to see my mom three days a week for three to four hours, takes her out and about, etc., and an agency which sends someone three other days of the week, and I do Sundays, but it is really, really hard for my sister, who feels that her marriage is breaking under the strain. My brother-in-law's mother had MS and he was very traumatized by it, and does not want my nieces to suffer the same way. My younger niece basically has not known my mother as any kind of a grandmotherly figure.
I keep thinking about this image of old age in the early 19th century, in Ireland. An old woman in the corner of the main room in a rocking chair, possibly blind, peripheral. My mom isn't blind, but she's increasingly like that. Her short term memory is extremely hit or miss. She forgets what she is doing as she does it, whether that is going to the bathroom or saying something. She cannot use the computer anymore -- two years ago she needed to be coached through the simplest things that she once knew how to do... but now she just doesn't touch it, ever. She doesn't really do anything at all of her own initiative, except sleep. She sleeps all the time, unless we wake her up deliberately and make her get dressed and make her eat and make her go to the bathroom and (try to) make her talk. She can't even read anymore, really -- I think she doesn't remember what she's just read long enough to make it to the next section. She still checks out books from the library with Blanche, the amateur (but great) woman who comes Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday... but pointlessly, as she doesn't read them. She definitely cannot play her guitar anymore, as her hands are too shaky and weak for that.
Oh, fuck I am crying about this. Rachel and I cry quite frequently. My mom had so many talents and interests and she doesn't have any of them now. She used to garden -- in allotments, and in her own backyard, where she grew huge rosebushes and huge-er bushes of weed, which always made me laugh, as this was in the 1980s in Evanston, Illinois, definitely long before there was any tolerance for legalization. She sang and played guitar all the time when I was a kid -- she used to sing my sister and I these hella gory, semi-inappropriate Childe ballads about sisters who hated each other, and the older one (me) drowns the younger one (my sister), and others about selkies, and Woody Guthrie songs and all the lefty standards. For years we would sing together at socialist parties, of which there were a lot in my youth. I am listening to a June Tabor album right now that she would love, with other Childe ballads about Scotswomen who are burnt at the stake by their parents because they fell in love with Englishmen, and women who kill themselves when their fiances go off to war. (Also covers by June Tabor of Richard Thompson, Velvet Underground, and Joy Division). She was an art major who specialized in sculpture and pen and ink drawings, until she switched to education to become a totally failed elementary school art teacher. She was really into photography, both interiors and art photos. She was a great cook -- though I remember how she absolutely just STOPPED cooking organized dinners after my grandmother died, saying she'd done enough of it every night after work.
My grandmother, her mother, had congestive heart failure, and fell in her apartment, after which she couldn't really live alone. She moved to Chicago to live with my mom in a co-op apartment on Lake Michigan, and she was really cranky. She hated giving up her independence and her very nice modern apartment in one of the Little Sweden public housing blocks in Madison, Wisconsin, right off Capitol Square. She would walk around my mom's apartment (and mine; I lived there with them for two years at the end of my grad school career) on two wooden canes, muttering angrily barely under her breath how much she wished she'd died in Madison instead of living on uselessly. She had macular degeneration in her eyes, too, so she couldn't see the terrible, terrible, boring TV 80s detective shows she had blaring in her room all the time, on the Arts & Entertainment channel. Every so often she and I would have a big fight that would clear the air. But her mind was clear. She stayed sharp. Sharp and bitchy, a lot of the time. My mom is the nicest person in the world -- all of our friends, Rachel's and mine, envied us our mother because she was so fucking chill and tolerant. I always had a lot more in common with my mom than my sister did, and got along with her better -- though she and I also fought much more deeply than she did with my sister. My mom thought I was spendthrift, and got angry about that. Also, my mom is pretty cheap, and never indulged us much. Not that we had much money, anyway.
So. My mom has COPD -- chronic obstructive pulmonary disease -- she smoked like a chimney for twenty years or so. And she's incontinent, all the time. God, aging is not dignified. She's often not AWARE that there's a problem, that she's peed. She will argue that she doesn't do that. Or that if she does, she won't again. Or that if she does, it can improve. It can't. My sister and I just told her last weekend that we were getting rid of her underwear so that she would use the disposable underwear we've bought. She was upset about that, though she calmed down, but I bet she'll be just as upset again. Sometimes the worst thing is that when we can force her to wake up and get dressed, she just won't interact unless we are directly talking to her -- except she will watch shows and movies with me and seem to enjoy that, and listen to music with me and seem to enjoy that. If we're not directly talking with her, coming up with subjects and prodding her verbally, she just stares into space. Or lies down and goes to sleep again. I mean, it sounds kind of like depression and she's had chronic clinical depression for almost her whole life; she's on tons of meds for it and has a neurologist... but it's way beyond depression now. My sister and I thought about her starting talk therapy again (which she did most of her adult life) but she can't remember anything new long enough to benefit by that... She sleeps over at my house usually once a week, on Saturday night, and I've heard her talking in her sleep, fluently (not that I can understand what she's saying, just that I hear the cadences rise and fall and it seems like an involved conversation, and a satisfying one, maybe from her working life before retirement as a reference librarian?) for long periods of time. So sometimes there are things going on in her mind. But not all the time while she's awake. It's hit and miss. Sometimes I can have a conversation with her, though Rachel has a much, much harder time. But the emotional strain of it on my sister is, as I said, increasingly intolerable.
The other thing is that she has almost no balance anymore, and falls are routine. She refuses to use the walker inside, though she's fallen in her own apartment multiple times. In the past three years, she's fallen and broken one or more bones (a cracked pelvis; seven broken ribs and a punctured lung, and two more broken ribs on the other side, as well as hitting her head on the stairs and passing out) resulting in ambulances and the Emergency Room at Highland hospital four times, and rehab stays at a nursing home twice. Tim, my brother-in-law, lived with his mother doing that because of her multiple sclerosis, for which she eventually was put in a nursing home and from which she eventually died, and being called out of school as a middle school kid to come home and deal with that... he doesn't want his kids to deal with that with my mom.
Rachel wants our mom to be in a home. I was devastated when she first suggested it, but I am seeing how impossible it is for her to have a life with her family and deal with my mom daily. I have a one-bedroom apartment up two flights of cement steps. It's terrifying every time I escort my mom up or down those steps. So I see that Rachel is right. But although she's started a search for a place** -- and the prices for such a thing in the Bay Area are horrifying, given how not-that-much-life-savings my mom has, above her pension/social security -- we haven't told my mother yet. We have to tell her soon.
On top of all of this, I am suddenly facing a drastic change which -- I mean, it should be insanely fantastic given how crazy rents and property prices are here in the Bay, but I am ambivalent and scared. My father has said he will basically give me the downpayment for a condo -- what I would eventually inherit from him (I mean, you know, if he and my stepmother didn't need, themselves, to live on it in a nursing home, AS THEY MAY DO, for fuck's sake). What he is offering would actually BUY a two or three bedroom condo, in Evanston. It would only serve to get me a one bedroom and a monthly payment that is almost three times what I pay in rent now. Which scares me. It has been very nice to not worry about budgeting because I have the last cheap rent in all of Oakland. I've been in this apartment for twenty years, and NO ONE pays as little for a one-bedroom place now, no matter how crappy. Just after my father told me this, at Christmas, I got a letter from my landlord -- taped to the apartment door -- that he is selling the building, which will mean that the new owners can claim they cannot pay their mortgage unless they raise all the units' rents to market value. You know what market value rent is in Oakland? For a one bedroom? About $2400. (Which, by the bye, is also more or less the higher mortgage payments, including taxes and HOA fees and insurance I am seeing... some are less than that, though none, so far, in Oakland itself... only crappy suburbs like San Leandro.) So I don't really have a choice, though it scares me especially because my retirement income isn't going to be so great, for various reasons. Even though I save regularly. It's not enough. It's never enough, on one single fucking income.
So, there's two or so years' worth of unvarnished LJing. It would be kind of nice not to have to vent all in one giant gasp like this, but to start writing a bit more. Maybe.
*She did, actually, not recognize my sister several months ago when she left the Senior Center to get on a bus (why the hell was she alone and not with Blanche I no longer remember, because jesus christ she cannot be let wander the streets of Oakland alone or ever get on a bus) and Rachel went to pick her up after a call from Blanche. I can only imagine how fucking heartbreaking that must have been for Rachel. It hasn't happened yet, to me. She was apparently very frightened by a strange adult woman approaching her. Oh, fuck.
**None of these places, according to my sister, will let my mom take her aging Siamese cat with her. Rachel thinks my mom doesn't pay any attention to Levi, but I hear her talking to him a lot. She doesn't pet him as much as he wants, and she doesn't remember whether she's fed him or not. Rachel doesn't want him. I guess I'll get him, with what effect on my only cat Devlin, I do not know.
This is going to be long.
Unvarnished? I think I have been pretty depressed for the past couple of years. I am not dealing with it. I have been avoiding going to my general doctor for ages and ages. I've made and cancelled something like six appointments in the past six months. I don't want to hear her berate me for how badly I am dealing with my diabetes and weight, and although I politically believe in Health At Every Size (HAES), I am not sufficiently badass to just stare her down and get what I need, whether that is a disabled parking placard (yes, that would be very, very good, as walking any sort of distance is pretty fucking difficult) or whatever else.
Also unvarnished: my mom's mild cognitive impairment is worsening pretty inexorably. The "d" word, dementia, was mentioned at least a year ago, and it continues, but not so terrifying as her wandering into the street or forgetting who we are*. That's almost worse, because she needs constant care anyway, and lives in a mother-in-law apartment in my sister's house, and the burden on my sister is intolerable. We have a very nice, chivvying woman who comes to see my mom three days a week for three to four hours, takes her out and about, etc., and an agency which sends someone three other days of the week, and I do Sundays, but it is really, really hard for my sister, who feels that her marriage is breaking under the strain. My brother-in-law's mother had MS and he was very traumatized by it, and does not want my nieces to suffer the same way. My younger niece basically has not known my mother as any kind of a grandmotherly figure.
I keep thinking about this image of old age in the early 19th century, in Ireland. An old woman in the corner of the main room in a rocking chair, possibly blind, peripheral. My mom isn't blind, but she's increasingly like that. Her short term memory is extremely hit or miss. She forgets what she is doing as she does it, whether that is going to the bathroom or saying something. She cannot use the computer anymore -- two years ago she needed to be coached through the simplest things that she once knew how to do... but now she just doesn't touch it, ever. She doesn't really do anything at all of her own initiative, except sleep. She sleeps all the time, unless we wake her up deliberately and make her get dressed and make her eat and make her go to the bathroom and (try to) make her talk. She can't even read anymore, really -- I think she doesn't remember what she's just read long enough to make it to the next section. She still checks out books from the library with Blanche, the amateur (but great) woman who comes Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday... but pointlessly, as she doesn't read them. She definitely cannot play her guitar anymore, as her hands are too shaky and weak for that.
Oh, fuck I am crying about this. Rachel and I cry quite frequently. My mom had so many talents and interests and she doesn't have any of them now. She used to garden -- in allotments, and in her own backyard, where she grew huge rosebushes and huge-er bushes of weed, which always made me laugh, as this was in the 1980s in Evanston, Illinois, definitely long before there was any tolerance for legalization. She sang and played guitar all the time when I was a kid -- she used to sing my sister and I these hella gory, semi-inappropriate Childe ballads about sisters who hated each other, and the older one (me) drowns the younger one (my sister), and others about selkies, and Woody Guthrie songs and all the lefty standards. For years we would sing together at socialist parties, of which there were a lot in my youth. I am listening to a June Tabor album right now that she would love, with other Childe ballads about Scotswomen who are burnt at the stake by their parents because they fell in love with Englishmen, and women who kill themselves when their fiances go off to war. (Also covers by June Tabor of Richard Thompson, Velvet Underground, and Joy Division). She was an art major who specialized in sculpture and pen and ink drawings, until she switched to education to become a totally failed elementary school art teacher. She was really into photography, both interiors and art photos. She was a great cook -- though I remember how she absolutely just STOPPED cooking organized dinners after my grandmother died, saying she'd done enough of it every night after work.
My grandmother, her mother, had congestive heart failure, and fell in her apartment, after which she couldn't really live alone. She moved to Chicago to live with my mom in a co-op apartment on Lake Michigan, and she was really cranky. She hated giving up her independence and her very nice modern apartment in one of the Little Sweden public housing blocks in Madison, Wisconsin, right off Capitol Square. She would walk around my mom's apartment (and mine; I lived there with them for two years at the end of my grad school career) on two wooden canes, muttering angrily barely under her breath how much she wished she'd died in Madison instead of living on uselessly. She had macular degeneration in her eyes, too, so she couldn't see the terrible, terrible, boring TV 80s detective shows she had blaring in her room all the time, on the Arts & Entertainment channel. Every so often she and I would have a big fight that would clear the air. But her mind was clear. She stayed sharp. Sharp and bitchy, a lot of the time. My mom is the nicest person in the world -- all of our friends, Rachel's and mine, envied us our mother because she was so fucking chill and tolerant. I always had a lot more in common with my mom than my sister did, and got along with her better -- though she and I also fought much more deeply than she did with my sister. My mom thought I was spendthrift, and got angry about that. Also, my mom is pretty cheap, and never indulged us much. Not that we had much money, anyway.
So. My mom has COPD -- chronic obstructive pulmonary disease -- she smoked like a chimney for twenty years or so. And she's incontinent, all the time. God, aging is not dignified. She's often not AWARE that there's a problem, that she's peed. She will argue that she doesn't do that. Or that if she does, she won't again. Or that if she does, it can improve. It can't. My sister and I just told her last weekend that we were getting rid of her underwear so that she would use the disposable underwear we've bought. She was upset about that, though she calmed down, but I bet she'll be just as upset again. Sometimes the worst thing is that when we can force her to wake up and get dressed, she just won't interact unless we are directly talking to her -- except she will watch shows and movies with me and seem to enjoy that, and listen to music with me and seem to enjoy that. If we're not directly talking with her, coming up with subjects and prodding her verbally, she just stares into space. Or lies down and goes to sleep again. I mean, it sounds kind of like depression and she's had chronic clinical depression for almost her whole life; she's on tons of meds for it and has a neurologist... but it's way beyond depression now. My sister and I thought about her starting talk therapy again (which she did most of her adult life) but she can't remember anything new long enough to benefit by that... She sleeps over at my house usually once a week, on Saturday night, and I've heard her talking in her sleep, fluently (not that I can understand what she's saying, just that I hear the cadences rise and fall and it seems like an involved conversation, and a satisfying one, maybe from her working life before retirement as a reference librarian?) for long periods of time. So sometimes there are things going on in her mind. But not all the time while she's awake. It's hit and miss. Sometimes I can have a conversation with her, though Rachel has a much, much harder time. But the emotional strain of it on my sister is, as I said, increasingly intolerable.
The other thing is that she has almost no balance anymore, and falls are routine. She refuses to use the walker inside, though she's fallen in her own apartment multiple times. In the past three years, she's fallen and broken one or more bones (a cracked pelvis; seven broken ribs and a punctured lung, and two more broken ribs on the other side, as well as hitting her head on the stairs and passing out) resulting in ambulances and the Emergency Room at Highland hospital four times, and rehab stays at a nursing home twice. Tim, my brother-in-law, lived with his mother doing that because of her multiple sclerosis, for which she eventually was put in a nursing home and from which she eventually died, and being called out of school as a middle school kid to come home and deal with that... he doesn't want his kids to deal with that with my mom.
Rachel wants our mom to be in a home. I was devastated when she first suggested it, but I am seeing how impossible it is for her to have a life with her family and deal with my mom daily. I have a one-bedroom apartment up two flights of cement steps. It's terrifying every time I escort my mom up or down those steps. So I see that Rachel is right. But although she's started a search for a place** -- and the prices for such a thing in the Bay Area are horrifying, given how not-that-much-life-savings my mom has, above her pension/social security -- we haven't told my mother yet. We have to tell her soon.
On top of all of this, I am suddenly facing a drastic change which -- I mean, it should be insanely fantastic given how crazy rents and property prices are here in the Bay, but I am ambivalent and scared. My father has said he will basically give me the downpayment for a condo -- what I would eventually inherit from him (I mean, you know, if he and my stepmother didn't need, themselves, to live on it in a nursing home, AS THEY MAY DO, for fuck's sake). What he is offering would actually BUY a two or three bedroom condo, in Evanston. It would only serve to get me a one bedroom and a monthly payment that is almost three times what I pay in rent now. Which scares me. It has been very nice to not worry about budgeting because I have the last cheap rent in all of Oakland. I've been in this apartment for twenty years, and NO ONE pays as little for a one-bedroom place now, no matter how crappy. Just after my father told me this, at Christmas, I got a letter from my landlord -- taped to the apartment door -- that he is selling the building, which will mean that the new owners can claim they cannot pay their mortgage unless they raise all the units' rents to market value. You know what market value rent is in Oakland? For a one bedroom? About $2400. (Which, by the bye, is also more or less the higher mortgage payments, including taxes and HOA fees and insurance I am seeing... some are less than that, though none, so far, in Oakland itself... only crappy suburbs like San Leandro.) So I don't really have a choice, though it scares me especially because my retirement income isn't going to be so great, for various reasons. Even though I save regularly. It's not enough. It's never enough, on one single fucking income.
So, there's two or so years' worth of unvarnished LJing. It would be kind of nice not to have to vent all in one giant gasp like this, but to start writing a bit more. Maybe.
*She did, actually, not recognize my sister several months ago when she left the Senior Center to get on a bus (why the hell was she alone and not with Blanche I no longer remember, because jesus christ she cannot be let wander the streets of Oakland alone or ever get on a bus) and Rachel went to pick her up after a call from Blanche. I can only imagine how fucking heartbreaking that must have been for Rachel. It hasn't happened yet, to me. She was apparently very frightened by a strange adult woman approaching her. Oh, fuck.
**None of these places, according to my sister, will let my mom take her aging Siamese cat with her. Rachel thinks my mom doesn't pay any attention to Levi, but I hear her talking to him a lot. She doesn't pet him as much as he wants, and she doesn't remember whether she's fed him or not. Rachel doesn't want him. I guess I'll get him, with what effect on my only cat Devlin, I do not know.
