Confounded By Quilting

Volumes

This was a difficult post to write and to share, yet as ashamed as I am at its content, I need to confess – apparently in a long and disjointed fashion.

I could write books on why I’m not a good person. Let’s just start with one chapter for now, though, shall we?

Let me tell you why I am the world’s worst daughter.

On April 16th of this year, my mother’s car was struck by another car in a low-speed accident. Her airbags deployed, and she sustained a severe concussion, which resulted in traumatic brain injury. In a nutshell, my mother now has dementia induced by physical trauma and cannot remember anything short-term, cannot speak well and cannot read.

Needless to say, she needs a lot of assistance. She cannot drive safely, she cannot work. She hasn’t seen any money from her lost income, and she is at risk of losing her house. She has already lost her job as a psychologist. She is awash in debt and drowning.

Here’s the punch line, though, why I am just an awful excuse for a person: I resent every single second I have to spend helping my mother.

I’m frequently utterly unable to contain my impatience with her. She senses this, and we talk about it sometimes. I apologize for being impatient or for snapping, for for a facial expression I know she interprets, correctly, as frustrated or angry.

A dozen times per day, she offers to pay me “for everything I am doing” for her, and then in the next breath insinuates I am not working hard enough to get the money she needs. Each time, I refuse payment. I tell her I will not be taking money from her now, or ever, regardless of the outcome, regardless of any settlement.

I do not want the strings that come attached to the money.

I am driving her car, because we are both afraid she’ll forget not to drive and try to take herself someplace, become lost or hurt or hurt someone else. It’s a nice car, but not one I would choose myself. She will insist that I drive it as a reward for helping her, and then imply I am putting her out somehow by driving it. I try to give it back, she refuses. I relent.

In truth, I’m really not doing much, certainly not enough. As I tell her I’m not taking any money, that no she should not give me her car to keep, that I just want her to get better, what I don’t add, at least not aloud, is that I want her to get better so she can get back out of my life.

Without Mom’s insistent, intrusive presence in my days, I was so much happier. The drama level went down radically. I felt more peaceful. The nearly two years we went barely speaking to each other were, in truth, fantastic.

We talk about this, too.

She told me she had expected, had wanted, a girlie-girl and she didn’t know what to do with “someone like me,” who was a tomboy, who was adventurous and who wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the little pink frilly shirts, with the sweater vests that had ducks on them, and who instead wanted to play with Tonka trucks and climb trees and go on Adventures.

She said, “I’m sorry it took me so long to accept you for who you are, instead of who I wanted you to be.”

I apologized too, and acknowledged that she is far better at accepting me for who I am now than I am at accepting her for who she is.  She is far less harshly judgmental of me than I am of her.

“It’s okay,” she said; “I understand because I’m your mother, and mothers love their children unconditionally. Nothing will ever change that.”

In that moment, briefly, we communicated. She was clear and found the words she needed. She held a train of thought, showed no sign of dementia. We spoke honestly, without reservation, and it was … nice.

My mother is not a bad person. I don’t like her, but I understand her. We have our issues, but it seems all mothers and daughters do. I wish I could be a better daughter for her, but it exceeds my capacities for the time being. I’m doing the best I can, and it frustrates both of us that I’m not doing a better job.

I wish I could be better for her, be the sort of daughter who can come gladly and willingly to help her, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because I want to help her, because I love her, because it’s important, because she needs me, because I know in my heart she would do everything in her power to help me if the situation were reversed.

And yet, I seethe internally. I am so angry at this unscheduled intrusion into my life – the life that’s newly unfolding with Mike.

I loathe her manipulations, her button-pushing, her insistence that she is fully independent – provided she can pay someone to do all of her work for her. When the going gets tough, my mother hires someone. Strength of character is not one of her strong points.

Even though I am not doing a vast amount of work for her, everything feels like extreme effort. It’s difficult to take her to shopping at Meijer’s, a local superstore chain, and watch her doddle and fret about the store. She is only 61, yet she moves and acts as if she were eighty. This isn’t new. My mother is a fretful, anxious woman – I come by it honestly – and it drives me absolutely bonkers.

As she limps down the aisles, she complains about the pain in her foot, yet refuses to get into one of the motorized carts. “No, I need to walk, ouch, it’s good for me.” No, no it isn’t.

My mother’s thought processes have long flied in the face of logic. All she knows, all she can focus on (especially now) is whatever has fixed her OCD attention for the moment. Everything else pales by comparison.  Everything else can be rationalized away to fit into This Moment’s Obsession. It is… infuriating.

Last week, she told me her dog’s nails needed to be cut. A few moments later, I knelt by Kavi to do just that, and she said, “no no no, don’t do that! I just cut them two days ago! You’re only supposed to do it once a week.” So I stopped.

Ten minutes later, she asked me if I was going to cut his nails.

“No, you said you just did it two days ago.”
“I don’t remember saying that, I don’t think I did!”

I told her I would cut them next time, because I had reached my limit – how much of my mother I could take in one day. I had to escape, to get away.

It had only been three hours.

I had to go, I needed to storm out. But before I stormed out, I realized I needed to leave with some measure of grace, some kindness and compassion, because even though I do not like my mother, I do feel deep compassion for her. I don’t want her to know how infuriated I am at this entire situation.

No one, of course, chooses to have her parents become elderly and infirm and demented. I thought I would have another fifteen years before I was confronted with becoming a primary caretaker for one of my parents. I’m not ready for this, not in the slightest. I suppose no one ever really is ready for those awful things life throws at us sometimes.

My friend Travis recently lost his father very unexpectedly, very young. One moment, his dad was here and present and loving him and an important part of Travis’ life, and the next, he was in a hospital with a very poor outlook. A few days later… he was gone.

Travis is handling this tragedy remarkably well, or so it seems from my perspective. It’s difficult to know what lurks in his dark hours, what haunts him, what regrets he might have if he does have them, but it’s so clear he and his dad loved each other very much and that Travis misses him.

It forces me to wonder how I would feel if Mom had been killed or if she died even now. Would I have regrets? Very likely. But I know there would also be relief.

There are many people who are so much better than I am, who willingly and gladly step up to help the old and the infirm and the demented – while I make blog posts about how angry I am at my poor mother.

I’m a bad daughter.

But it’s all I can do right now. I only have as much patience as I have, even though I work at it (every day, every minute I am with her.) I resent this happening just as I was starting to get some energy back, starting to have my mental and physical well-being reassert themselves, starting to feel like myself again.

Then this happened and she landed back in my life with a resounding impact.

And I hate it.

Here is a glimpse of the scope of my selfishness and general, overall badness, as if the previous text hasn’t been damning enough.

Sometimes, I envision what it might be like if she couldn’t speak at all – if the accident had left her utterly incapable of forming words. And then I am overcome by a wave of horror that I would even, for a fleeting moment, think of something like that. I ponder to what depths of selfishness I can possibly sink to even partially wish for that in a moment of weakness.

I am appalled at myself. I picture my mom, suffering, and unable to tell us where it hurts, or why she’s confused, or how much she loves her dog, or what she wants to do in her garden, and it brings me to tears – not just the image of her suffering in enforced silence, but that I would be so unkind. And in that moment, I realize more compassion for her than before – but it is still not enough.

Because she begins to speak and I want her to stop talking.

Putting myself in her place, of course she has to talk about it. She is so frustrated, confused and helpless. She is miserable and depressed. In an instant, the carelessness of one individual ruined her life. Tonight, she sent me this, after I emailed an apology for leaving on a bad note earlier. It probably took her 20 minutes to type.

“I’m sorry too.  It’s so hard to lose my life.  I loved my job and I lost it so fast. I hate being in the house and not being able to do anything.  I know you’re doing alot for me, but you don’t keep me in what’s going on.  I can’t just act dumb – but I love you and appriate  you alot.

love you”

Mom has a PhD – she doesn’t make spelling errors, and yet you see them there. She often has to ask me how to spell her last name as she signs documents. Her brain is unraveling.

My mother was a reader of Olympic proportion. She was always reading several books at once, and it was her primary passion in life, second only, perhaps, to gardening.

She can’t read at all now – looking at words on a page nauseates her. She cannot follow a plot, even, so audio books are not an option. One of the things she loves most in life has been ripped away from her in a time when she desperately needs a way to pass the hours.

She’s going crazy, trapped in her house with the tiny yard, with nothing to do but worry and look at bills piling up.

I wish I had infinite gentleness and patience for her, because she needs it and I cannot access it, no matter how hard I might try.

Even though she is infuriating, and confounding, and frustrating, and manipulative, and obsessive, and histrionic… she is still a human being, a person deserving of compassion and kindness in her time of suffering.

My mom wanted a baby because she was lonely. Because she wanted the unconditional love a child brings. Sometimes, I think that was not sufficient reason to have dragged me, kicking and screaming, into this world. But for years, I gave her that unconditional love.

And then… I ran out. I ran out of love for my mother. I have none left, or at least none that I can feel currently.

For those two years we were not on speaking terms, she would still end her emails or voice mails with “I love you.” I never did. I couldn’t bring myself to say it, to lie, even though I know she desperately wanted to hear it. I suppose, perhaps, it was a form of punishment I was inflicting upon her for decades of her various punishments upon me.

After the accident, I began saying it back, began hugging her when I left. It was still a lie, but I thought it might help her. A few days ago, as I was leaving her house:

Mom: “Drive carefully, love you.”
Me: “Love you, too.”
Mom: “Do you really?”

My heart sank. Why did she have to ask, to nail me down on this?

Me: “Well, sometimes.”

She laughed, with surprising genuineness. “But not today, huh?”

Me: “No, today wasn’t too bad really. We did ok today, right?”

I do wonder what it’s like to know your child doesn’t love you.

While I don’t hate her, I do not love her, I do not even like her. We’ve acknowledged on several occasions how we do not get along, we are Very Different Sorts of People who would not choose each other’s company, we damage and twist each other.

Sadly, we are stuck with each other. I am an only child, she has no romantic partner. Her only good friend is dying of stage four breast cancer. Her business partner will do what he has to do as he watches their practice crumble around him. A few other casual friends don’t come by often. She has alienated her neighbors and estranged her sisters.

Tonight after work, I stopped by to drop off the tiny amount of money I got for selling some of her hardcover books and to look at some hornets’ nests she was worried about. I’d hoped it would be a mercifully brief visit.

As I was getting ready to leave, she fixated on some paperwork she wanted to give me, and set about searching high and low for it. Slowly. After ten minutes or so, I made my first attempt at departure, saying the dogs needed to go out – which they absolutely did.

“You never spend any time with me! You’re always in such a rush to leave!”

This, she remembers.

“Mom, I’m sorry I don’t have all the time in the world for you.”
“I don’t even know what’s going on or when I’ll get any money or how I’m going to live or even feed my dog!”
“I promise, I’m not going to let you starve.”
“But you have to keep me informed, you have to tell me what’s going on!”

I have, at many turns, kept her informed. This, she forgets.

“Mom, you’re forgetting things and that’s ok, but you just have to trust me that I’m doing whatever I can to get the money coming in, I promise.”

This is Truth. I talk to doctors, lawyers, accountants and insurance companies on her behalf almost every day.

All she knows, though, is that she is miserable and broke and alone and has no brain left. And that her daughter wants nothing to do with her.

I cannot bring myself to fake enthusiasm. I cannot even summon up simple grace and gentleness.

What the hell is wrong with me?

Surely there will be some karmic comeuppance for this.

And I will deserve every little bit of it.

There is so much more I want to get out, to confess, but I would imagine no one has read down this far and I’m out of the ability to express anything meaningful.

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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to 40…

Lately, I’ve been full of introspection – more so than usual.

As I manage to do from time to time (as The World’s Worst Buddhist,) I’ve been paying more attention to His Holiness the Dalai Lama when he pops into my periphery. He epitomizes so much I want to be in my life, yet short of which I soft often fall.

In a nutshell, His Holiness’ function in this world is to spread lovingkindness and compassion, and to love all beings. No judgment, no resentment.

I’ve seen him speak twice in person, and it is a profound experience. It was the site of the most powerful spiritual insight I’ve had, but even apart from that, sitting and listening to him speak, just being in his presence, was… it was calming, uplifting, soothing, enlightening. It made me strongly consider leaving a secular life and becoming a Buddhist nun.

Needless to say, that didn’t happen.

Still, when I am able to gather my senses briefly and go back to that almost magical space/time of being in his presence, it calms me. It provides much more fertile mental ground for introspection and self-analysis. I surely cannot call it meditation, per se, because it lacks any kind of disciplined focus. It does, though, sometimes provide good insights – some of which are basic enough to be forehead-smackers, like “how could I have been so stupid this whole time?”

Such as the following:

I spend a fair amount of mental time in the past – reliving moments, conversations, embarrassments, shame, happiness, love, excitement. I think many of us do. What I tend to do, however, is to place attachments and values on those moments, sometimes even subconsciously reorganizing present life to try to regain or relive some of those past moments – which are, naturally, gone. Sometimes, I foolishly try to reorganize present life to avoid the moments of the past – those moments that are long gone, but still affect me in some way. There is, of course, no avoiding them – they happened. But allowing them to dictate my present is just silly.

The majority of my emotional baggage comes from my mother, from when I was about 8 until well after I was in college. She relentlessly heaped her judgment upon me, mixed in with a lot of love and praise, mind you, but oh, the judgment, and even more, the disappointment. I live in that disappointment, I see my mother’s disapproval everywhere.

For fuck’s sake, people, I am nearly 40 years old. That’s got to stop!

Do daughters carry Mommy Issues around with them for their whole lives? Oh, probably. But I think I can probably shed some of this extraneous bullshit about what I should or should not be/do/look like. I don’t conform to what other people think I should be doing in most regards – I have usually gone and done My Own Thing, regardless of stereotypes, general societal norms, et cetera. But the past harsh words and judgments from my mother? Those still haunt me many times per day. It turns me into a more negative and judgmental person, myself.

NOTE TO ME: My school years are gone – long gone. While what happened during those times surely is a large part of who I am, I am free to be different, to become whatever else I want to be. Those years were practice for The Big Show, The Real Deal – this is the life part of Life. This is where I can make things happen.

Why, then, do I let myself be carried along by the river?

There are surely times when I feel more myself than I usually do, and those are happy times. The rest of the time, I am burdened by feelings of inadequacy, ineptness, of not living up to what other people expect of me, of disappointing. I care far too much about disappointing people, and I am frequently in awe of people who seem not to live in fear of it or who can outright brush it off and carry on unfazed.

To me, that is nothing short of AMAZING.

Reading this over, it all seems so “duh, Erin; it took you twenty years as an adult to realize this? Seriously?” and “how come you can fly in the face of what’s expected some of the time, but be so traditional and cowed by other things?”

I don’t know

I’m trying to figure it out.

When I practice mindfulness, I feel a pull internally and externally. It is only present when I am being mindful. It remind me of when I was a little girl, taking ballet lessons. The dance instructor told us all to visualize a string going through our bodies, from deep in the ground way up past our heads, running through our spines. With that vision in mind, it was easy to maintain good posture – but when it slipped, I slouched a little.

Our bodies, my body, respond so well to a little mental discipline – why is it so hard for some of us to exercise it?

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Toward Acceptance

I’m turning forty this year.

With this realization have come many others, including “why do I continue emotionally raging at my body?”  It is the shape it is likely to be, without a great deal of variation, for the remainder of my years. For me, being thin means hard work; I have to work out a lot, deny myself all manner of foods, be hungry most of the time and focus a lot of energy on the task of staying fit. Well, guess what: I don’t have that kind of time or energy anymore. Sure, I covet the slender women around me with their defined waists and their overall non-lumpy appearances, but that is not me. Not anymore.

“But Erin, it’s just a matter of eating right and getting some exercise!” No, no it’s not. If I ate well and got some exercise daily, yes – I would lose some weight. I would go back to my normal self, probably, of forty pounds ago, at which point I am still not thin. Don’t get me wrong – that’s a great cause, losing those forty pounds – I hope I can get there at some point when I’m not battling food allergies and sundry other issues. But until I have a bit more motivation, a bit less frustration, a bit more energy, this is who I am.

Even if I were at the same weight, but slightly more hourglass-shaped, I’d have an easier time with the whole thing. BUT I’M NOT.

I need to accept this person, this body.

I am a gluten-intolerant size 18 vegetarian.

Being pissed off about being fat (but not motivated enough to do anything about it) and raging at having a food allergy (over which I have absolutely no control, this is the rest of my life) is just wasting precious time and emotional energy.

This is me.

It’s me with all the stretch marks, rolls and lumps and non-standard shapes.

There is enough in my life that is about denying myself – looking just at food, meat was hard enough, now all the yummy gluten-having things – I’ve spent the last seven years denying feeling good about myself, feeling pretty or attractive, because I am fat. And now, fat and … older.

Heading into my forties, it’s finally occurred to me that it is a somewhat futile battle. I don’t have the willpower to stay fit – fine. Accept it and move on. I need to not buy into the market and feel guilty and sub-standard all the time because I won’t go to the gym, I hate running and I love eating delicious food. There are sacrifices that will accompany those things with my metabolism. So be it.

I have spent a lot of time trying to hide my shape. Baggy clothes sometimes hide the rolls but exacerbate the appears of hugeness. Tight clothes emphasize the rolls but give a more adequate impression. Lately, I’ve just been buying Comfortable Clothes, irrespective of visible fat.

Maybe someday, the pounds will drop slightly as I balance aspects of myself out – maybe they won’t.

I need to learn not to feel like shit about myself based on how much I weigh.

The Other Erin at work inspires me in this regard. She’s not petite, either, but she pretty vocally doesn’t buy into the media hype surrounding size. If I had to guess, I’d say she doesn’t obsess about her weight or how her clothes make her look. She seems to care more about whether or not they’re comfortable, and whether or not she likes them. She’s one of those people confident enough in herself she doesn’t fret about the same size-/shape-oriented bullshit I do. I’m sure she frets over some kind of bullshit needlessly, because we all do, but in this area, Erin has herself sorted out – or so I would guess.  I admire her.

I need more of that, less of my mother’s constant harping and nagging about how [insert piece of clothing here] makes me look [chubby/trashy/unstylish/whatever.] Hearing that throughout my formative years (when I weighed a whopping 110 pounds at 5′6″ tall) put the hurt on my ego in a huge way. But dammit, I am an adult now, I get to play by my own emotional rules… at least I can, once I figure out what those might be.

Look how many sentences start with “I’ here, huh? Self-obsessed? Perhaps, but starting now, I’m going to try to be less negatively self-obsessed. I don’t expect a switch to get thrown, but my internal barometer is beginning to rise.

Our culture isn’t helping any – the few fat women on television and in films are generally relegated to the “happy, friendly friend wearing conservative clothes and not even thinking about sex,” or “matronly mother of three, happily married to equally-chubby-or-chubbier-man to whom Size Does Not Matter.” How many smokin’ hot overweight women do we see out there in a positive light?

NOT MANY.

But they exist. Oh yes, yes they do. Watch this. Marginally unsafe for work.

This ad was censored by the ABC and Fox Networks, both of whom do air Victoria’s Secret ads that leave even less to the imagination. What’s the take-home message for the curvy woman from their actions? Yeah.

Now granted, that woman out-hots me in every conceivable way, and isn’t as overweight as I am – but her message is clear.

Still, it’s hard. So are a lot of other things for a lot of other people. They suck it up and sally forth, and so shall I.

Getting all the vestiges of this off of me, however, is like trying to get gum out of my hair. Or spiderwebs off my face. Or extricate myself from quicksand. Indeed, the analogies are endless.

For you other “plus-size” women out there – how have you overcome all the brainwashing? Or, if you haven’t, how do you cope?

I’m looking everywhere for inspiration, and I’m finding some good stuff. I’ll share next time.

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Very High Levels of What, Now?

First, please accept my apologies for the months of blog neglect.

I hope the following story will help make up for it.

The company I work for is filled with brilliant, clever, amazing, witty and extremely funny people. The banter in our Jabber conversations usually has me laughing out loud throughout the day, and it makes things much more pleasant to be surrounded by awesomeness.

In my new(ish) position on the monitoring team, I’m fairly well isolated in Data Center 1. There are only three of us there during the day, and things are usually pretty quiet. Sundays, however, I work in our brand stinkin’ new Data Center 3, a 90,000-square-foot horking huge building housing a bunch more people – except on Sundays, when there are usually only three or four of us spread out across the space. I like my solitude, though; I’m an only child. Quiet is good.

At 3pm yesterday, MattAdor, a senior monitoring technician, arrived to train a newbie, thusly ending my isolation.

But I like MattAdor.

As a plus, he ended my isolation with a flourish, however, first having a car that wouldn’t shut off properly, and second by regaling both the noob and me with a short, hilarious story.

“Hey Erin. Did you ever hear about the server with the very high levels of [excised]?”

“Lol, no?”

“Ok, so get this. Back when I was still in support, we got a ticket that started out, ‘I’m having problems with my [effing] server.’ The tech who had the ticket asked him what was up, and the customer finally responded that his server had ‘very high levels of Claude.’”

I completely lost it at that point, bashing my head on the desk as I doubled in two, laughing and snorting out loud uncontrollably.

Finally, I choked out, “…Claude?”

“Seriously. How do you even check for high levels of Claude? So the tech creates the file /etc/vandamme and puts ‘Claude=1′ in there to make sure the Claude level stayed low.”

I can’t remember what else he said, and it’s lost a bit in the telling because I was so busy laughing, I’ve forgotten the finer details.

I’m sorry if no one here finds that hysterical. It’s still making me giggle right now.

Our customers really come up with priceless gems from time to time, from the guy who accused the company of “trying to Detroit his biz” to the guy who managed to get a translation website to throw in the word “watusi” completely out of context.

That’s all for now – I hope you are all well.

Homestead Geek gets updated a bit here and there, if you’re interested in what else has been going on (Chickens! Kombucha!)

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Bad Blogger

I haven’t responded to anyone’s comments in a good month, at least. I’m sorry, that’s just terrible form. Haven’t been reading my Google Reader in a week, either, so I’ve not kept up with anyone else.

Truth is, I’m just exhausted most of the time. It’s this big, long, meeehhhhh punctuated by infrequent bursts of energy and enthusiasm. It’s hard to find the energy to do much of anything.

To those of you who’ve taken the time to leave comments but haven’t received a response – I’m so sorry for being impolite. I will get this taken care of soon.

Next week, I should be moving into a new job at work that will be less stressful – I think. I’m moving to the monitoring team, whose job it is to make sure all servers are up and running, and if they are not, fix them. There will be stress, but it will be of a short-term/burst nature, more of an OMG FIX THIS URGENT ISSUE NOW, as opposed to the oozing, long-term, emotionally draining full-on support I’ve been doing.

I’m a bit sad to be leaving the Enterprise team and my favorite customers, especially since we now have our very own supervisor looking after us – things will assuredly improve. However, I’ve done many years of computer support,  two of them at my current place of employ, and I am Le Burned Out. Knowing there’s a light at the end of this particular tunnel makes my days much more bearable.

I hope once my insides purge the toxins and recalibrate, and once I get into the swing of the new job, things will take a turn for the better. Plus, spring is coming! I have to find the energy to get all this Outside Stuff done, right?

In the meantime, I made this for dessert tonight (recipe pointed out by Barbara) and it was quite good:

Double-chocolate torte (I left off the orange)

Tomorrow, I’m hauling wooden pallets, perhaps buying lumber, clearing out space in the garage for the chick enclosure, and possibly building the enclosure itself. Also, I might make these: French chocolate/raspberry macaroons. For some reason, I’d always thought macaroons were those odd little coconut cookies, and I wasn’t ever wild about them. With The Giant Macaroon Craze sweeping the world right now, I figured I’d better at least Google a recipe to make sure what I’m actually missing is what I think I’m missing. Well, it’s not. And they’re even gluten-free. And I have almond flour. Score!

Of course, I have that tart to dispose of first… but I bet I could pawn some off, somewhere.

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