It's Complicated

She likes to watch the goats from the dining room window. When she comes into the room at mealtime to start prepping her area, she often starts by walking to the window and standing there to look out and count the ones she can see. Then she speculates about where the others might be. Most of the pasture where the five neutered boys live is visible from her seat at the table, but there are a couple of spots she can’t see. Most of the pasture the five girls are in is not visible from her angle, so she’s usually counting just the boys, and sometimes points out girls when she can see them. I used to milk at least one goat, but that kinda fell by the wayside after the move, and sometimes I think about why I still have them. Maybe they are there for her entertainment for now. Farming didn’t work out the way I thought it would here.

Prepping her table setting involves straightening the placemat and folding her cloth napkin so that it sits across the bottom few inches of the placemat, folded into an accordion. She has another cloth napkin that covers her pill container in a basket between her placemat and the window. The pills are covered because she once read that one of her medications should not be exposed to temperatures over 78, and she is concerned that the sunlight might heat them up too much. I’m not sure she even takes that medication anymore. (That, by the way, is also the reason that, when she had her apartment thermostat set at 78, if the sun coming through the picture window heated the room to 79 in winter, she turned on the AC.) I have lots of cloth napkins, but she uses a paper tissue at her place as a napkin. Her choice.

She reads while she eats, either from a hard copy book or an e-book on her tablet. She reads the same dozen or so books over and over. I’ve offered to get her new ones in any of the same mystery series she enjoys, but she prefers to keep reading what she has. Maybe it’s comforting to keep reading familiar books. In the evenings she usually checks her e-mail, though she rarely gets anything significant. When her tablet memory becomes full enough to slow it down, she starts deleting e-mails, even though I’ve explained several times that they are not stored on her tablet. What is stored on her tablet are the books she downloads from Kindle or Nook. No matter how many times I explain how to take them off the tablet and that she will still have quick access to them (and my sister explained before me), she doesn’t remember that they are the memory hogs, much less how to get them out of memory. Once in a while I have to take some time to undownload the many she has collected there.

She eats two meals a day and that’s really all she has time for. Each meal takes at least two to three hours, sometimes more. By the time I’m sitting down to lunch (if I haven’t already lost my patience for any of a number of reasons and gone out for lunch to get a breather), she is still eating breakfast. She usually starts prepping her supper between 4 and 5 pm. She has been eating the same things for years. Breakfast is cereal, juice and hot tea (she switched to black tea from coffee years ago to cut back on caffeine (she uses a family size tea bag for one cup; technically I guess that’s cutting back) and a handful of pills. Supper is more pills, some before and some after, canned chicken over a slice of bread that’s been cut in half and stacked with broth from the can poured over it, green juice (mostly fruit, but some vegetable content), mixed vegetables, 6 canned peach chunks and 5 prunes with hot peppermint tea. She used to cook her frozen vegetables, but I do it now. There are three possible mixes. Two mixes have spinach, julienned carrots and raisins with either green beans or broccoli florets. The third is bagged coleslaw with carrots and raisins. About once a week or so I cook one mix of frozen veggies in the microwave and the bowl lives in the fridge as she eats through it. She has a countertop in the kitchen that is her counter where she puts out what she needs for the meal and measures it (yes, in a measuring cup) into the bowl or on the plate. While she’s getting the meal ready, she boils the tea kettle once and then again when she’s ready to put it all on the table. At supper she puts the finished plate in the microwave, not to heat it, just to keep the dog out of it, and goes to the bathroom before she boils her tea water the second time and sits to eat. I know, all of this sounds very practical and even healthy. But I have to leave the kitchen while she’s working because the slowness and the OCD-ness of it about drive me crazy. If she needs me for anything, I’m close by and out of the way. She shoots for being finished with supper by 8pm to start getting ready for bed. If she finishes eating by 7 or earlier, she allows herself dessert (a cup of low-fat chocolate frozen yogurt and a quarter cup of M&Ms).

Between meals she has about 3 to 4 hours. The first thing after each meal involves at least an hour in the bathroom to brush her teeth and use the toilet. Then she has tasks she has assigned herself listed on a small clipboard for each day of the week. One day’s task each week is sitting in her recliner to create the list. If she has time (if!) she may also do something else too, like taking blueberries out of the bulk freezer bag to put in pint jars in the freezer. Otherwise, that one has its own day. They get moved to the fridge as she needs them. Two days a week her task is showering. That used to take about an hour, now more like an hour and a half (time in the bathroom, not counting undressing, dressing and brushing her hair). She has asked me to be at home and inside while she showers so I can hear in case she falls, because she read that falling in the shower is one of the most common ways older people get injured. I know that’s true, and even though I have been frustrated with the detainment during her showers at times, I’ve learned to just relax and read if I don’t have something I need to do indoors. I usually use one of those showers to sort her meds into her pill boxes, another of her tasks that I have taken over. The “shower” takes as long as it does because she starts out on the toilet, then scrubs the chair she sits in for the shower, takes her shower and then ends up back on the toilet. On shower days I help by taking out her meal items from the fridge and putting them on her counter or on her plate to save her a little time because she gets a late start after her shower. Other afternoon tasks include clipping her nails, changing the sheets on her bed or sweeping her bedroom. She keeps complaining about how exhausting these last two are, and I know some day they will become another thing I do, but as long as she can do it, I’m not volunteering. The more she can keep doing for herself, the longer she feels some degree of independence.

Living with my mother requires a whole new level of patience, and patience isn’t something I’ve traditionally been particularly good at. But if we’re going to live together, it would be preferable not to fight too much; and, if we were going to cut back on the fighting, it had to start with me. She has never been a person for whom compromise comes easily and patience is not her best thing either. She does seem to be recognizing that she can’t always have her way now and is getting a little better at compromise, as am I. A couple of years ago she still sometimes wanted to be the “mom” and assume she knows things she needs to teach me. She does not respond well when I tell her that the thing she is trying to teach me is not correct. If I try to turn it into a moment for me to teach her, it rarely goes well. The obvious answer of course is to keep my mouth shut or say ‘uh huh’ or ‘okay’, and I’m getting better at that. Her wrong information isn’t going to hurt anyone, even herself, most of the time. She surprised me recently by telling a doctor that our “mother/daughter” relationship has sort of flip flopped. I knew that but didn’t think she did.

In the past year or so I’ve developed more empathy for her than I thought I would. From my perspective we have always had a difficult relationship, so I did not come into this with high expectations. She was not an affectionate parent offering unconditional love. Yelling at us and weaponizing her tone of voice were among her favorite communication techniques.  My decision to move to another state, farm and all, to be her caretaker was not an easy one. Sometimes I still miss my life from before I moved. I had a network of long-time close friends, chosen family and bio-family. I miss the farm I thought I’d thought I’d spend the rest of my life on, the familiarity of the surroundings, favorite restaurants, favorite places to shop, the person I thought I’d grow old with. I miss it all a lot and sometimes I want that life back. But I’m here. My choice. I’m building a new network of close friends and finding new valuable resources. I have close neighbors who are caring and supportive. I’m building a new life that helps me miss my old life less. Also, as I’ve told friends and family, I now live in a place where other people vacation. The foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains is a beautiful area with lots to do for a girl and her dog who love being outdoors. I think I’ll be okay.

I’m not sharing all of this with you because I want you to feel bad for me or be concerned about me (or her). I’m fine and so is she. I’m here telling my story because lots of people around my age are becoming caretakers for parents or even spouses. This is something we have to do, someone has to do it, and I think it’s important to share the fact that this is not Oz and I can’t click my heals together and suddenly find myself back in “Kansas”. This ain’t easy. But we’re making it work.