What love looks like - 2024 02 01

 

2024 02 01 - Jenny Notes

844 am

Thursday morning. Mom is still asleep. I took in her dentures, refilled her water glass, and brought her glass of cranberry juice. The kettle has boiled, ready to make her cup of tea when she wakes up.

It is a strange place to live. Knowing that we don't know how many days she has left. Knowing that the next time I walk into her room she may not be breathing. Hearing the slap, slap of her slippers as she shuffles out from her bedroom to the big green chair. Finding my last nerve plucked like a raw piece of wire when she sings through her recitation of nursey rhyms for the umpteenth time. Finding my brain misfiring as it tries to make sense of her insistence that she needs a new envelope from her desk so she can write the word "Cop" on it. Then putting a chocolate bar in the envelope and telling me to put it in the mail. Laughing with her when I put the envelope with the chocolate bar in it in the freezer and say, "There, I mailed it." The chocolate bar stayed there, in the envelope, in the freezer, until after Mom had gone to bed that night. It was then I took it out and ate it, sitting in solitude in my caregiver's chair, reading a work plan proposal to study family caregiving.

There is no doubt the benefit we have derived from bringing Mom home. There is also no doubt the taxing toll it has taken on our household and on my own person. There is no doubt that we will keep Mom here with us as long as we possibly can. Once she has to leave this home, I don't expect her to live long in a new setting. Without her family nearby, what could possibly inspire her to make the effort? She spent 40 years in mental health group housing waiting for us to bring her home. Now that she is home, I can't imagine the pain of having to leave again.

My Mom loves her kids. She loves being our Mom. She never asked for, or chose, mental illness. It chose her and changed our family history. It changed all of us. For better and worse. But we have all survived, and that is a testament to my mother's strength, constancy and unwavering love. That is her legacy, that she was able to inspire the effort that we are carrying out today. That each of her children, according to each their capacity and capability to provide caregiving, is doing what they can to keep her home.

This is what I need to remember, as I look forward to another year of making sense of the insensible. My mom loves me, she is counting on me, she is depending on me. For whatever reason, she came to me, to us, for these last years at home. It is a strange place to live. 

This is what love looks like. I wouldn't have it any other way.