On the way to Mama's. . .

We went ballooning. . .

Looking up:

Looking out:

Looking down:

When we got there, my mother was in her chair, with an ice pack on her lower back, hydrocodone and Ibuprofen doing their best.  The surgery for her spinal stenosis was cancelled when they discovered her heart had probably had an attack and something else.  So she goes to the cardiologist tomorrow.

"I don't know how I got here," she said, "I was going along just fine and then I was old."Her body is heavy from the sweets that seem to give her a bit of relief, but now there is the diabetes.  Her spirit is heavy too now.  During my last three visits, she has worried that she wasn't there for her mother when her Dad left them for another woman, more than sixty years ago.  She has a book that she bought that is supposed to help record memories.  Page after page asks questions and then holds open the space.  It is meant to be a gift from a grandparent to a child.  In the front of the book, she has stuck pictures of children I don't know.  The book is all blank.  I asked her several times if I could ask her some of the questions and maybe she could talk to me and I would write down the answers, but she just stared at me.  "I was supposed to do this," she said, "a long time ago." Four times she showed me a picture that she took off the refrigerator, telling me that these were my cousin's grandchildren.  Four times I said, "Well, isn't that something?"

There are foods in the freezer downstairs whose "best by" date is two years ago, but she wouldn't let me waste them by throwing them away.  The caretaker that was there is named Anna and is in her late seventies.  She showed me how to crochet and I showed her my knitting.  The last time we were there Mom called me afterwards to say she was mad at the caretakers because they took all my time.; how rude it was that they kept talking to me and that they talked more to me than they ever had to her.  My sister was with me that time and we both told Mom that yes, we talked to them because it was important that we got to know the people that were now so important in her care.  We didn't say what a gift it was to have a little new conversation and some relief from the weight of her decline.

As we left this time, Mom saying as usual with that look in her eyes that she didn't want us to go, and we as usual wanting desperately both to leave and to not leave her, Anna asked us where we lived. "Near Charlotte," we said, already taking some relief from having bags in the car. We all pretended that Anna was going to come and bring Mom, that they were going to pack bags in Greeneville and drive over the mountain this way, instead of the number of times, who knows how many, we will instead pack here and do the traveling.

My brothers arrive today, and will go tomorrow to the cardiologist with Mom and St. Sonja,  the main caretaker.  The doctor may or may not clear her for the surgery on her back.  If he doesn't the prognosis is increasing pain and decreasing control over her bladder and bowels.  "Who's going to want to take care of me then?" Mom asked, looking off into the distance.

What we could learn. . .

A friend who was sexually tortured by her parents tells me a story.

She has been watching a goose couple who have moved into her pond.  She has born witness as they have laid eggs, and started to raise a brood of six.

"The Mommy and Daddy and six children," she calls them.  A little family.

She tells me how the parents protect the little ones, how the father stays awake all night, vigilant on behalf of his wife and the babies, on the lookout for predators.  My friend turns on her outside lights to help.

She tells me how when they head to the pond for swimming lessons, the Daddy leads and the Mommy brings up the rear; how when they gather on the bank, the Mommy is at one end of the row of little ones, the Daddy on the other.

She tells me that she talks to the Daddy, "You are the best father, you take such good care of your little family," she says.

"I wish I'd had a Daddy like you."

What to do about Mama. . .

So my cousin called, the one who first broke the astonishing news about periods, the one whose Mama is my Mama's sister.  Evidently my mama who can't hear had called her Mama who has difficulty speaking and trouble began to brew.  According to my cousin who heard it from her Mama, my Mama said we were "trying to put her in a home." And my cousin, who kept saying it was none of her business, was calling to change our minds.

Oh dear.

The problem is that this is ever so slightly true.  In the past three months, our dear Mom has turned 89 and happy birthday has developed diabetes, spinal stenosis and two bulging disks.  This is in addition to the rheumatoid arthritis, hypertension, depression, osteoporosis, etcetera.  She is now on heavy pain medication, bless her, in addition to the rest of her prescriptions.  This very morning she is meeting with (what we hope is a highly competent, but how do you know) neurosurgeon whom we hope will agree to fix her back, however that is done.

Meanwhile, the neighborhood where she has lived for fifty-odd years seems to be headed South; the west side of the house needs painting, she can't drive or handle her checkbook anymore and the laundry is located down some perilous stairs.  Each of lives at least guilt+300 miles away. Until recently, although it is hard to imagine now, she was taking herself to the grocery and had a caretaker a couple of afternoons a week.  Now with the back pain and the diabetes, we are up to 24-hour shifts, and occasional no-shows which give Mom the chance to eat cookies for breakfast.  I know, if you can't eat cookies when you are 89 when are you going to get to do it?  


Well, this is kind of like the other morning.  Evidently it was pretty rough, the back pain and all, and no one had showed, again, so Mom called Sonja the Saintly (her primary caretaker who is the Number One reason for her being alive today) and asked if it would be all right if she had a glass of wine with her pain pill.  Sonja, who lives all the way down in Mosheim, whose next-door-neighbor-good-for-nothing-son-in-law had just been taken to the hospital for what turned out to be a unfortunately short period, said she didn't see any harm in a small glass.  Sonja is Baptist, so this may have hurt her, but everybody means well and Mom is still with us and was a happy camper when I called her later that day. On the what-are-you-doing-to-your-body scale, it probably ranked right up there with the chicken McNuggets she had for lunch yesterday.  Better living through chemistry.

But I digress.

Mom has the brochure for The Home, and has actually been out there and thought it was pretty nice.  Plus, according to my brother, my second-grade teacher is there (how can that be?  She was a thousand years old when I was seven) and my sixth-grade teacher is there too, (who was a thousand and four). And rumor has it there are a couple of people from The Church.  Periodically when we are talking, Mom will talk about how hard it is to keep up with everything, and perhaps unfortunately, we children are raised to go into action and fix whatever we can.  It helps with the guilt.

The seesaw of going or not going, evidently, had Mom having panic attacks, which manifested in her having trouble breathing while simultaneously wanting to "go and do," our old neighbor's euphemism for getting out and about.  Decision-making is not my mother's best thing, which she knows, under the best of circumstances, and when you add the pain and the pain medication, well, everything gets a little screwy.

Decision-making really it isn't our best thing either, the Committee of Four, her supposedly grown children.  So until we get this back thing figured out, Going or Not Going to The Home is on hold.  I told my cousin this, and that it is ultimately up to Mom.

What we want, of course, the Committee of Four, plus Mom, is for her to be happy and to be safe.  What we really want is for her to be thirty or even forty years younger and in perfect health. What we really want, just to the left of our wracking love for this woman,  is to not be looking in the mirror.

Something borrowed. . .

I don't normally do this, and may never do it again, but this spoke to me so clearly and was said so beautifully, I wanted to pass it along. . .(P.S.  The New York Times, June 1, 2012)

Are We Living in Sensory Overload or Sensory Poverty?

By DIANE ACKERMAN

Diane Ackermanon the natural world, the world of human endeavor and connections between the two.

TAGS:

CELL PHONES,ENVIRONMENT, SOCIAL NETWORKS, TECHNOLOGY

IT was a spring morning in upstate New York, one so cold the ground squeaked loudly underfoot as sharp-finned ice crystals rubbed together. The trees looked like gloved hands, fingers frozen open. A crow veered overhead, then landed. As snow flurries began, it leapt into the air, wings aslant, catching the flakes to drink. Or maybe just for fun, since crows can be mighty playful.

Another life form curved into sight down the street: a girl laughing down at her gloveless fingers which were texting on some hand-held device.

This sight is so common that it no longer surprises me, though strolling in a large park one day I was startled by how many people were walking without looking up, or walking in a myopic daze while talking on their “cells,” as we say in shorthand, as if spoken words were paddling through the body from one saltwater lagoon to another.

As a species, we’ve somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we’ll survive our own ingenuity. At first glance, it seems as if we may be living in sensory overload. The new technology, for all its boons, also bedevils us with alluring distractors, cyberbullies, thought-nabbers, calm-frayers, and a spiky wad of miscellaneous news. Some days it feels like we’re drowning in a twittering bog of information.

But, at exactly the same time, we’re living in sensory poverty, learning about the world without experiencing it up close, right here, right now, in all its messy, majestic, riotous detail. The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature’s precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature.

Strip the brain of too much feedback from the senses and life not only feels poorer, but learning grows less reliable.

I’m certainly not opposed to digital technology, whose graces I daily enjoy and rely on in so many ways. But I worry about our virtual blinders. We’re losing track of our senses, and spending less and less time experiencing the world firsthand. At some medical schools, it’s even possible for future doctors to attend virtual anatomy classes, in which they can dissect a body by computer — minus that whole smelly, fleshy, disturbing human element.

When all is said and done, we exist only in relation to the world, and our senses evolved as scouts who bridge that divide and provide volumes of information, warnings and rewards. But they don’t report everything. Or even most things. We’d collapse from sheer exhaustion. They filter experience, so that the brain isn’t swamped by so many stimuli that it can’t focus on what may be lifesaving. Some of their expertise comes with the genetic suit, but most of it must be learned, updated and refined, through the fine art of focusing deeply, in the present, through the senses. Once you’ve held a ball, turning it in your hands, you need only see another ball to remember the feel of roundness. Strip the brain of too much feedback from the senses and life not only feels poorer, but learning grows less reliable. Subtract the subtle physical sensations, and you lose a wealth of problem-solving and lifesaving details.

As an antidote I wish schools would teach the value of cultivating presence. As people complain more and more these days, attention spans are growing shorter, and we’ve begun living in attention blinks. More social than ever before, we’re spending less time alone with our thoughts, and even less relating to other animals and nature. Too often we’re missing in action, brain busy, working or playing indoors, while completely unaware of the world around us.

One solution is to spend a few minutes every day just paying close attention to some facet of nature. A bonus is that the process will be refreshing. When a sense of presence steals up the bones, one enters a mental state where needling worries soften, careers slow their cantering, and the imaginary line between us and the rest of nature dissolves. Then for whole moments one may see nothing but the flaky trunk of a paper-birch tree with its papyrus-like bark. Or, indoors, watch how a vase full of tulips, whose genes have traveled eons and silk roads, arch their spumoni-colored ruffles and nod gently by an open window.

On the periodic table of the heart, somewhere between wonderon and unattainium, lies presence, which one doesn’t so much take as engage in, like a romance, and without which one can live just fine, but not thrive.

Remember?

From a dear acquaintance, I have just received an email,  long and embittered. In it, she details how she continues to be betrayed, how she continues to bear up, despite the abuse, heaped and heaped and heaped, how she continues to be the heroine of her story, replete with villains.


I want to say to her, don’t you see?  Don’t you see that you are the director, the scriptwriter, the costume warden, the composer, don’t you hear?  Those people are but phantoms, perhaps not even that until you give them a role to play, hand them a script, take them into the closet to pick out their clothes, play them music to direct their limbs.  Don’t you see all of your power, flowing out out out to inflate this world of enemies? 


You are loved beyond your wildest imagination, I want to say.  You are safe, from everything.  


Take a deep breath, I would say, if she could hear me. I will hold your hand.


Here’s a pin.

Just checking. . .

So, in the wake of what has become known as the Holidaze around here, I granted myself some quiet time.  It took a good two weeks for the 2011 train to slow down.  The weather didn’t cooperate, pretending for the first five weeks of 2012 to be March.  But by the third week in January, resigned to 60 degree daytimes and therefore no mesmerizing fires into which to stare, no quietly drifting snows to help blank out all the unecessaries, I got quieter anyway.  The calendar cleared for a week, the partner willing to bring home groceries at the end of the day, the car firmly parked, I began to more deeply exhale.

It didn’t take long for me to realize I wasn’t alone.  I was being followed.  From the moment I woke until I drifted off at night, I had company. He was male, definitely.  He had a tight little mouth, was about my height, my weight, my shoe size, short hair and glasses.  Always with him he had a clipboard, always.  On it were a series of forms that he seemed to consulting.  Periodically, he would mark things off and when  page was finished, that one would get tucked under the others, edges perfectly aligned and a new form poised for completion.

I never got a good look at the categories, or the questions, but from what he kept saying to me, perhaps we can guess.  He wanted to know, rather constantly:

1. Are you sure this is a good use of your time?
2. Are you sure this is the most efficient way to do this?
3. Other people are going to jobs they absolutely hate, right now, how do you justify this laziness?
4. Is there not something more productive you could be doing right now?
5. What are you going to have to say for yourself at the end of this day?
6. Etcetera.
7. Etcetera

Hmmm.  Once I realized he was there, and that I had employed him, I was able to at least get him to turn down the volume a bit by the end of that week.  I tried to fire him but he insisted that wasn’t the way it worked, that the only way he could leave would be for me to realize something that I hadn’t yet acknowledged.

Hmmm.  What I’d like is not have him be in charge.  He’s worked a long time, deserves a retirement.   I’d like to have the freedom to move through these gifts of coming days without what feels like such harsh measurement.  I’ve asked him to move to the sidelines, allow me more room to maneuver, more space to breathe.  Right now, he’s willing to be flexible.  But I know him, if I get too busy, he gets more insistent.

We’ll see.  Wish me luck.

Winter. . .?

It is pretend winter in North Carolina.  We have worked outside in shirt sleeves for the last several days, clearing out the asparagus patch, pruning fruit trees, getting the big garden ready for greenhouse construction.  The old maple with its gnarled bark is budding out, now, in the last breaths of January, a herald of Spring.  There are daffodils blooming down next to the creek.

We all keep waiting, mittens and earmuffs by the door.  Where is the snow? The ice?  The chance to have to stay home?  

I have built fires anyway, even though the nights barely dip below freezing.  Because you are supposed to be able to build fires in December and January, and go in there after dinner and read and pet the dog with your feet.  It is one of my favorite parts of living this far north.  

But evidently the heat is blooming.  The USDA just redid their maps, and we are officially 7b instead of just 7, and there are parts of our land that are definitely 8’s, maybe southern slopes that would even be warmer.  For those of you who don’t plant, those numbers simply signify the number of nights per year that the temperature drops below freezing.

It means a lot more than whether you need your gloves on for a late run to the grocery.  Plants choose where they thrive based on temperature ranges and they don’t pick up and move easily.  Our local agricultural extension agent has already predicted gloom for the fruit growers around here as it takes a certain number of freezing nights to set both foliage and flower for fruit trees and we ain’t had ‘em.  For those of us who don’t sell peaches or plums to send our kids to college, its no big deal.  For those who do, if this is a trend, it could be a life changer.

In my family psychology, if this is a trend, the blame can be laid squarely at the feet of Al Gore.  In my family, you simply don’t talk about problems.  If you do, they exist.  If you don’t, they don’t.  That Al Gore insisted on bringing it up, over and over, well clearly, this is what you get, daffodils in January which we are using as code for what is happening to the polar bears which is too heartbreaking to discuss.

Daffodils in January is code for a lot of big fat unpleasantness.  Suddenly we are the mercy of erratic, intense weather patterns.  The rain seems to simply stop for big areas of the world, and deluge somewhere else.  The thermostat got stuck in Texas last summer and fall, only resetting when the sun itself moved its gaze to the Southern Hemisphere.  

I’m trying to enjoy the unusual pleasure of January sun on my skin, of being able to get a head start on clearing out the gardens, on getting ready for Spring.  I’m trying to pretend its early March, which is what these mid-sixty degree days would tell me.  I’m trying not to listen to my inner Debbie Downer who keeps whispering, if it is this warm now, what is it going to be in July?

Perhaps a positive part of this is that we are being reminded of Nature’s power, in no uncertain terms.  We can do what we can now, driving less, racing to develop more sustainable technologies, conserving energy, recycling, but Nature is already responding to our decades of wanton abuse.  It is on. 

We are being brought to our knees.  Once again, which is where we started, we humans, on our knees in reverential respect to the Rain Gods, the Thunder Gods, the Sun Gods.  All powerful, unpredictable.  Nature, the ultimate Decider.  

So maybe the beauty of those daffodils, the startling yellow, the deep green, the first shoots of the daylilies coming back, maybe if I just settle into the awe, maybe that’s the place from which to watch what is unfolding, whatever it is.