The Truth is not on QVC

I talked to my mom last night.  She started off the conversation with telling me there was something she had to confess.

Me:  "You buried Jimmy Hoffa?  You're really D.B. Cooper?  You are the Lindenburgh baby?"  Wow, looking back at these examples makes me realize I must be reallllly old...

Turns out Mom has been hitting the QVC crack again, has five packages in her room at the independent living place and hid the bill from my brother when he came down to help her pay her bills for the month.  I think part of the reason she "confessed" was because she bought me something and knew I'd ask her about watching QVC when it got there.  (OK, it's a toaster oven that is also a convection oven which is *really cool* but...yeah, not the point.  I digress.).  Both my brother and I have told her that she can't be in independent living, hang on to the house, and have a QVC bill each month that requires commas.  The house would have to be sold a whole lot faster if she chose to keep that up.

I've been talking to her just about every night since my dad died and, over the past five years, she's started to be a little more open in sharing her feelings with me which is a huge leap forward.  My mom's people are very stoic.  There is seriously a shot of two of my great-great-somethings out in the middle of Nebraska in front of some shack, holding a pitchfork and glowering.  They are Amish with electricity.  They could be sitting there with blood spurting out of a major artery and talk about the weather.  To borrow from the X-Files:  deceive, inveigle, obfuscate.  Above all, dear God, do not talk about your feelings.

But she's better at it than she used to be.  So we talked about how she kind of hopes she will be able to return home but knows she really can't, that she's lonely and getting packages is a nice thing to have happen when you're lonely, that she (like me) is more of an introvert and we tend to have a few close friends unlike my dad and my brother who tend to make friends easily and in copious amounts.  She tries to call herself stupid and hopeless so I have to yank her up short on that and remind her that she isn't and I don't want to hear that kind of talk about my mom.  She was very sheltered by her family and then my dad and I've talked to her about that and reminded her that she's faced a lot of new challenges since Dad died and I've seen her tackle every one of them, and nobody "stupid" or "hopeless" could do that.  She also had a suprising moment of self-reflection when she admitted she'd like to just be able to spend the money and throw up her hands at me and my brother, telling us it just doesn't matter before saying she knows she can't do that.

Between Mom and the SU, I really feel like I'm getting an emotional workout lately!  Mom and I decided she needs to eat more meals at her new place rather than just breakfast and disappearing back to the house for the day, maybe join in on the scandalous penny-and-dime domino games :), and go to a few more of the Happy Hours where she enjoyed sipping on her O'Doul's and actually talking to people.  Of course, it's up to her if she does any of this but I'm hoping she will realize she doesn't have to be head cheerleader for the place, she just has to accept what they are offering and remember that new things aren't necessarily bad.

The child is becoming the parent

Am tired. Am so very, very tired. (Started with a typo of "I'm tied". At least then, I might be able to be stuck in a dark closet somewhere where no one could find me and I could at least sleep!).

The usual suspects are still making me tired: working at my regular job plus learning the opening business of our restaurant so I can come in on Saturday mornings and allow the Spousal Unit at least one day where he can sleep in past 5:30. I'm getting there - the lunches and dinners are easier somehow and I don't know why. I can make lattes and coffee well enough but I have to think about the breakfast items a little longer, be a little more deliberate whereas the coffee drinks are, mentally, much more of a 1-2-3-done kind of deal.

The thing that is really exhausting me, though, is my mom. I knew there would be caretaking involved when my dad died in 2007 simply because my mom has never really been on her own in her entire life. She met my dad when they were 14, she went straight from high school to nursing school to marriage at age 20. Then, through a combination of my dad's own particular issues and her acceptance of them, she learned basically nothing about the requirements of running a home and paying bills beyond the basics of groceries, laundry, cleaning, etc.

Now, before I go any further, I need to express a caveat for myself if nothing else. Those things she did all through my growing up years and working as an OB/GYN RN on top of it were important things. I am utterly grateful to her for them. But the fact remains that there was a lot she was very content to let my dad take care of and was largely an observer of life in general.

While she's certainly made fantastic strides in learning how to deal with things like taxes, home maintenance, et cetera, she is still remarkably, almost aggressively, passive about her own life. My brother and I work on making her get out of the house for something besides a grocery or post office run, but since he is an hour away and I am across the country, it is unfortunately easier for her to ignore our efforts than we would like.

I think she gets that we are wise to her attempts to be a hermit so now things have turned to matters of her health. She sees a doctor every few months for bloodwork, checking up on her diabetes, etc. However, she also has a host of other symptoms that are worrying: random vomiting with no apparent trigger, bowel issues, incontinence issues, and sleep issues. It took me a few months to get her to mention these issues to her doctor at all after several iterations of this basic conversation:

Me: "Mom, make a list of these things. Take it to the doctor and ask him the questions."

Mom: "Well, it's just stuff. It doesn't happen all the time/it went away/other random excuse."

Me: "Mom, take the list to the doctor. Ask him the questions. I will call you after the appointment. If you didn't ask the questions, I will call your doctor and have this conversation with him."

The latest struggle has been over her potential sleep apnea. The Spousal Unit has it so I'm familiar with the signs and she has many of the same symptoms; has her whole life. I can remember her snoring like a house afire from the time I was a wee hermit. I finally got her to agree to ask the doctor about it, telling her that the CPAP device had helped with the SU's sleep, memory issues, fatigue, etc; all things she was experiencing. What does she tell the doctor?

Well, my daughter thinks this might be what I have but I won't wear a CPAP.

Cue now-slightly-bigger hermit banging her head against her desk in frustration. When I talked to her on the phone, I wanted to say, "So, you'll bitch about this ad nauseum to me but you won't do anything that could take care of the issue and improve your quality of life?" What I did say was, "You know, mom. That's your choice. I think you would be much happier getting a full night's sleep but obviously that's up to you."

Because, really, short of hogtying her to a bed and supergluing a CPAP to her face? There isn't anything I can do. And that's probably one of the hardest things to deal with as this one-eighty from child to caretaker-parent continues to take place. As a former health-care provider, I know she cared deeply about her patients and their care. She would fight doctors if she felt what they were doing was incorrect, not enough, or that they weren't providing a high enough standard of care. But, as herself, as a 70-year-old woman mired in depression who has just...given up, she doesn't care enough about herself to fight for the things that could help her.

It's so frustrating to watch this. Both my brother and I are physically limited in what we can do based on time and distance. Plus, she is not at a stage where we feel we can or should make decisions for her living arrangements and care that force her into a situation she is not ready for. That will only serve to alienate her and make her feel like we're trying to push her off somewhere where neither of us have to deal with her anymore. But, dammit, it's so frustrating to be constantly met with a wet blanket of learned helplessness that she stays in because it's comfortable and it's what she knows. "No, I won't..." is her mantra. Won't learn how to hit "reply" on an e-mail (so she reads e-mail only and that took a year to get her to do), won't listen to voice mail on a cell phone (so don't bother to ever call it), won't ask her doctor for tests or help in diagnosing issues because "they go away", won't get estimates on work because she "doesn't know how to do these things" and continually tries to put these things off on me or my brother...but refuses our help if we offer it in the first place.

I am...emotionally drained. But I can't give in. I need to keep calling her every night to talk to her because I'm pretty much the only human interaction she has during the day besides the drive-thru clerk at McDonalds or the cashier at the grocery store. I need to keep trying to be there for her because there is going to come a time where she is no longer able to be on her own, to keep the house up, to take care of herself and will need the resources of both myself and my brother to help her move on to that next stage.

But it's hard.