(no subject)
There are advantages and disadvantages to having parents who waited longer than usual to have children.
Their relationship was incredibly stable, for one; they were together forever and that was the way they both wanted it. The stress of having children wasn't going to deform either of them into alcoholics or abusers or do anything similarly horrible to their psyches. They had something of a financial base that may not have been there earlier (and what they had was stretched to the absolute limit before relief came). They had a little more experience to draw on in giving advice my brother and I would seldom listen to.
One disadvantage is that I'm not yet thirty and I'm an orphan.
(Yes, these are not necessary qualities in older parents. Yes, there are those who are orphaned younger and more traumatically than I've been. Universals tend to be dangerous, and are generally best avoided. This is one of those times when I'm looking around expecting the world to stop spinning so the entire human race and assorted sapient species can acknowledge my pain.)
I think we hold partially apocryphal visions of our childhoods--a few memories settle in and form the basis of our self-narrativization, out of proportion when viewed from an adult's perspective. In my apocryphal vision of my childhood, my mom is in the hospital. This did happen several times, including several dangerous diverticulitis attacks and one surgery in the early 90's that my mom was given a fifty-fifty chance of surviving, but she's tried several times in recent years to convince me it didn't happen as much as I recall. Another element of having older parents is that their health issues come to the fore: arthritis limited the places my parents could take me when I was small; I learned fairly early on to consider my mom's dietary restrictions when choosing places to eat out; after the Big Surgery, my mom was in bed for a year while an infection drained. The power of children to perceive anything as normal so long as they're not told that it isn't meant that none of this was particularly traumatizing--what, you mean your mom isn't in the hospital all the time? Weird!
After my dad died, I spent a long time being terrified of the prospect of going through the same thing with my mom. I dare say this has been even worse. Her final weeks and months are hardly worth detailing now--hallucinations, pain, delusions, screaming matches about all of the above, martyr complexes on all sides, home-care aides forced to be the only sane people in the household. She'd say things very difficult to take back, then try to take them back; I'd try to act as the adult and wind up hopelessly passive-aggressive. Everyone else, Scott included, seemed to conclude very quickly that after my mom's immediate needs, the top priority was keeping me sane. And so there were days when my mom would be sleeping or telling her hallucinations about how we could stay out of her bedroom, and Scott would stay upstairs just to trade funny links with me.
Excuse me if there's not a clear line of thought here. I'm sitting at my dining room table looking at the fragments of her life left behind--the books, the cut glass in her cabinets, the wheelchair she hated because it hurt her knees. There are two half-eaten sandwiches sitting in the fridge, along with items I bought a few days ago so she'd stop asking for them under the pretense that she'd ever be able to get up and cook them. There's everything we did to her bedroom--the gel pad that was supposed to prevent bedsores but only partially worked, the rails I jammed under her mattress to keep her from falling, the extra chairs for the home aides, the hoyer lift she hated that we had to use to get her into the wheelchair she hated, the dozen-plus pillows we'd use to try to get her into some position that would be comfortable for more than fifteen minutes. Scott and I put her bed up on cinderblocks because the lift wouldn't fit underneath otherwise, and she would tolerate no talk of getting her a hospital bed. Someone searching for plus-size women's blouses will be very happy with Big Brothers Big Sisters sometime soon.
I still can't believe this has happened. I can't believe I can never ask her for advice, or share an in-joke, or hug her, or tell her I love her, ever again. I can't believe anything in the last eight months has happened, and I can't find a point in any of it. At least with my dad there was the fact that he never told me he loved me until a month before he died. Here all I see is loss--my mother is gone, my brother's job is gone, my car is gone. I will never forget the sight of my dad, the last time I saw him, after he'd slipped into a coma, and I will never forget the sight of my mom, the last time I spoke to her, asking her if she wanted to go to the hospital. Maybe her eyes weren't really focusing. Maybe she couldn't understand me. Maybe she was already gone. Maybe I should've taken her anyway. Maybe it would only have been putting off the inevitable (three strokes in eight months, that we know of). Maybe we were only putting off the inevitable ever since I let them put her on a respirator in October.
I told her I loved her every damned day, whether we were fighting or not. Sometimes when we were fighting she'd say she couldn't see how I could, considering how I was treating her, and I am going to try very hard to forget that. Otherwise, her answer was always: I love you more.
Their relationship was incredibly stable, for one; they were together forever and that was the way they both wanted it. The stress of having children wasn't going to deform either of them into alcoholics or abusers or do anything similarly horrible to their psyches. They had something of a financial base that may not have been there earlier (and what they had was stretched to the absolute limit before relief came). They had a little more experience to draw on in giving advice my brother and I would seldom listen to.
One disadvantage is that I'm not yet thirty and I'm an orphan.
(Yes, these are not necessary qualities in older parents. Yes, there are those who are orphaned younger and more traumatically than I've been. Universals tend to be dangerous, and are generally best avoided. This is one of those times when I'm looking around expecting the world to stop spinning so the entire human race and assorted sapient species can acknowledge my pain.)
I think we hold partially apocryphal visions of our childhoods--a few memories settle in and form the basis of our self-narrativization, out of proportion when viewed from an adult's perspective. In my apocryphal vision of my childhood, my mom is in the hospital. This did happen several times, including several dangerous diverticulitis attacks and one surgery in the early 90's that my mom was given a fifty-fifty chance of surviving, but she's tried several times in recent years to convince me it didn't happen as much as I recall. Another element of having older parents is that their health issues come to the fore: arthritis limited the places my parents could take me when I was small; I learned fairly early on to consider my mom's dietary restrictions when choosing places to eat out; after the Big Surgery, my mom was in bed for a year while an infection drained. The power of children to perceive anything as normal so long as they're not told that it isn't meant that none of this was particularly traumatizing--what, you mean your mom isn't in the hospital all the time? Weird!
After my dad died, I spent a long time being terrified of the prospect of going through the same thing with my mom. I dare say this has been even worse. Her final weeks and months are hardly worth detailing now--hallucinations, pain, delusions, screaming matches about all of the above, martyr complexes on all sides, home-care aides forced to be the only sane people in the household. She'd say things very difficult to take back, then try to take them back; I'd try to act as the adult and wind up hopelessly passive-aggressive. Everyone else, Scott included, seemed to conclude very quickly that after my mom's immediate needs, the top priority was keeping me sane. And so there were days when my mom would be sleeping or telling her hallucinations about how we could stay out of her bedroom, and Scott would stay upstairs just to trade funny links with me.
Excuse me if there's not a clear line of thought here. I'm sitting at my dining room table looking at the fragments of her life left behind--the books, the cut glass in her cabinets, the wheelchair she hated because it hurt her knees. There are two half-eaten sandwiches sitting in the fridge, along with items I bought a few days ago so she'd stop asking for them under the pretense that she'd ever be able to get up and cook them. There's everything we did to her bedroom--the gel pad that was supposed to prevent bedsores but only partially worked, the rails I jammed under her mattress to keep her from falling, the extra chairs for the home aides, the hoyer lift she hated that we had to use to get her into the wheelchair she hated, the dozen-plus pillows we'd use to try to get her into some position that would be comfortable for more than fifteen minutes. Scott and I put her bed up on cinderblocks because the lift wouldn't fit underneath otherwise, and she would tolerate no talk of getting her a hospital bed. Someone searching for plus-size women's blouses will be very happy with Big Brothers Big Sisters sometime soon.
I still can't believe this has happened. I can't believe I can never ask her for advice, or share an in-joke, or hug her, or tell her I love her, ever again. I can't believe anything in the last eight months has happened, and I can't find a point in any of it. At least with my dad there was the fact that he never told me he loved me until a month before he died. Here all I see is loss--my mother is gone, my brother's job is gone, my car is gone. I will never forget the sight of my dad, the last time I saw him, after he'd slipped into a coma, and I will never forget the sight of my mom, the last time I spoke to her, asking her if she wanted to go to the hospital. Maybe her eyes weren't really focusing. Maybe she couldn't understand me. Maybe she was already gone. Maybe I should've taken her anyway. Maybe it would only have been putting off the inevitable (three strokes in eight months, that we know of). Maybe we were only putting off the inevitable ever since I let them put her on a respirator in October.
I told her I loved her every damned day, whether we were fighting or not. Sometimes when we were fighting she'd say she couldn't see how I could, considering how I was treating her, and I am going to try very hard to forget that. Otherwise, her answer was always: I love you more.