So we made to DC and back in one piece and one relatively stress free trip. We had the stuff loaded and were back on the road in less than an hour. K has one take home final to finish and one final to take, and then freshman year is in the past. Hard to believe. Sometimes I think that I will never believe that the 8-year ordeal with my mother is over, and that time includes when K was sick for a year and half. It seems like I'm stuck in that time loop somehow.
I made it through the whole trip feeling pretty good, too, although the sinus headache kicked in the second I walked into my house, thanks, I'm sure to those hairy little beasts who live here. But the day began on another note, because you really can't imagine how many times two fiftyish type folk (I this past January, Hubs upcoming in September) need to hit the rest stops on a long morning drive.
My mother, the late Shirl, had what we politely called in Yiddish shtick. What this means is that she had quirks, was eccentric, unusual. Sometimes this was charming, like whenever we drove into New York across the bridge and she would sing The George Washington Bridge Song, which consists of endlessly repeating the words "George Washington Bridge" to a tune I can't otherwise name, in a voice that rose and fell but always screeched and quivered. Her grandchildren loved it.
At other times it was not so charming, but it took awhile for modern mental health to catch up with her, so it wasn't until she was in her seventies that we heard the words bipolar disorder, and then a few more years before the initials OCD came up. Now, the bipolar was interesting in Shirl. (She would describe herself as "up" or "down", depending.) When she was up, she would hardly sleep, and would call different 800 numbers all night to get all kinds of information, and then pamphlets would come in the mail. She would cut articles from magazines and save them to read later. She would shop and shop but rarely spend, she just liked the adventure of shopping. I once described her "up" to someone by saying "Would you like to move? Just tell her; she'll pick up your house and move it across the street." She had a lot of energy when she was up, sometimes hard for other grown-ups to take, but the grandchildren loved that, too.
When she was down she did very little. She sounded uninterested when you called her on the phone. She slept a lot and rarely went out, although she still got her hair done every week. She cancelled out on her weekly Mah Jongg games. She couldn't deal with things, but she didn't fall apart. Mostly, she would just be quiet.
You could get used to this, and we did. But as she got sicker and sicker after she was diagnosed with metastasized breast cancer in 1995, the bipolar seemed to go away. Maybe it was the cancer medication, I don't know. But this was when the OCD really kicked in.
She had always had a concern about germs, but not that anyone would really notice. She did wash her hands a lot, but there was nothing about that that seemed strange. She had, like I say, quirks, but nothing was a big deal. But once she got sick, the OCD took over a lot. What made this hard was not that she had it, but that since she was ill and often unable to walk or move easily, it made her make everyone else do what she was inwardly compelled to do. I used to say that when I went to see her, I felt like a ball-boy at a tennis tournament, crouched, waiting for her to issue a command that I was obligated to spring up and follow. "Empty the ashtray! Make sure you wash it out!" (There would be one butt in it.) "Get me some water. But don't fill it up too much. Just an inch. Make it an inch and a half." You get it.
But her biggest compulsion was, politely, the bathroom. Due to her various conditions, her bladder, it seems, had shrunk, or had something pressing on it, and not only would she go every twenty minutes, she would spend the 19 minutes in between planning when she would go again. It consumed her, almost.
What really consumed her, you guessed it, was poops. She lived on a diet of laxatives and ... whatever the opposite of laxatives are called, I don't know. When you called her on the phone -- when anybody called her -- the one question you never wanted to ask was "How are you?" Because unlike most people, she had forgotten that the answer to this question is "Fine," or in the case of someone ill as she was, "Better today" or "Not so good." She thought that the answer was when she had pooped, how much, and on and on and on. When we would tell her not to talk poop with people, she thought we were foolish. Why would people ask how she was if they didn't want her to tell them?
So we made a vow, Sibs and I: never talk about poop! The first rule of poop club is, don't talk about poop! Because baby, it turns out that Shirl's problem, aside from the OCD and the bipolarism and, of course, the cancer and osteoporosis, was that the woman had intestines that should have gone to the Mayo Clinic for study. Yes, she wrecked them with the obsessive need to medicate them into perfection, but they weren't so good to start with, I guess. I guess this because, yes, we've all got them, too.
The second rule of poop club is, it's okay to talk to your Sibs about poop. Not obsessively, mind you, or in detail. It's okay to say "I had a bad stomach today" and we will always relate and sympathize.
The third rule of poop club, it now seems, is, it's okay to talk to your mom about poop. The kid is away at college and sick as a ... well, grandma, and she needs to ask "What should I take now?"
The fourth rule of poop club is, what did it really matter if Shirl needed to talk about poop? We were her daughters, after all. As for those other people (everyone she knew), hey, they could have hung up the phone. Right?
--------------------------------------------------
I'm watching Manor House
--------------------------------------------------
last ::
next
Sweet Sorrow - 06.12.2007
So ... - 12.19.2006
Christmastime Is Near - 12.18.2006
Fifteen Years - 12.17.2006
A Message From Our Sponsor - 12.16.2006
|
