Saturday, January 3

My parents

(I wrote this January 03, 2004 to my sister but didn't post it here until 6 months later)

It's pretty messy here, even if it looked as if Daddy had tried to clean things up a little. It's not just the unswept floors and the smell of urine fermenting in kotices (plural of kotex), not to mention the clothing that they rarely change. We've through the usual drill of cleaning up the Aegean stables (I get that Herculean strength from lifting weights, he says modestly).

Mommy's increasingly out of it. One day, as she left us in the kitchen to take one of her several daily naps, and said, "If you need anything, just ask your Aunt Margie." So I asked her if she knew who my mother was, and she was a little unsure. I asked if Daddy was my father, and she said, no, he's your grandfather. I didn't get around to asking who my father was. (Much less who I am.) Or one day she poured herself a slug of Armagnac, thinking it was wine, and the next ate one of the dried hot peppers Daddy insists on keeping on the table.

One time when we're all in the kitchen, either Mommy or Daddy brings up Mommy's memory problem, which Daddy insists are panic attacks. The important thing was to focus on the positive, as if rebuking me for even bringing that earlier lapse to his notice. Not that I disagree about being positive, and I truly admire him for his patience, but I've heard them going through his memory exercises, and they're pretty painful. She really doesn't remember much at all.

A couple of days later "someone" left a 2" turd on the WC floor, which I duly cleaned up. I figured I'd let it go this time (well, I did clean it up). A couple of days after that, there's _another_ turd on the WC floor, and shortly thereafter, I noticed a brown smear on the bathroom basin. Then when I was with both of them in the kitchen it smelled pretty unpleasant, and it seemed worse than their usual dirty clothes smell. Daddy sniffed at Mommy until he found the shit on the sleeve of that b & w checked jacket she wears all the time now, and he said that could happen to anyone. I pointed out that she'd shit on the WC floor twice in the past few days, and he said in a panicky way, "Well, what do you expect me to do--send her to the insane asylum?" I was pretty surprised, because you know how he likes to keep cool. "No, but you could change your clothes more often." "Oh, yes." (I think he's gotten so used to fooling me that when I questioned him, he wasn't prepared. Anyway, apparently for Daddy, it's either look after Mommy himself or send her to a horrible place he'll never visit.)

Victory? Of a sort. A few days later, Mommy was wearing the b & w checked jacket, which hadn't been washed. So gritting my teeth, I called their attention to the shitty sleeve, and Daddy said that he thought he'd told Mommy to wash it.

And don't think she's not confused. They'll come back from the Galway and she'll ask if they're going out, or I'll hear her say weird stuff while they're in bed--like she'd "like to go home". She sometimes gets up in the middle of the night to go out. Daddy told me that "she hasn't done it recently", and that he's replaced the magnets on the chain with a little padlock (he gave me a key, but we'll probably all get burned up some night). During a very windy night that rattled the windows for several hours, I heard her say to Daddy she didn't "feel at ease here". And then she said, "You're an OK guy, but a little odd--but so am I." (I'm pretty sure she didn't know who he was.) So he says, "No, you're not." (My theory is that he's afraid if she feels she's odd, she will be.) Anyway, he cajoles her into staying for the night, and she wants to sleep in the living room, but he convinces her to sleep in their bedroom, although she says, "I don't want to be attacked."

The next day she actually remembered and was a little disturbed about it, but Daddy insisted that it was a panic attack.

I dunno. Maybe it's partly because she sleeps almost all day. Now she's all achey, and I wonder if that isn't also from lying in bed all day. But what's that alternative? For her to exercise, she'd need minute by minute supervision, and he already does plenty of that. In some ways, she'd be better off with someone supervising her 24/24, but she'd be miserable if Daddy weren't there, too, so I guess this is the best of all possible worlds. Yippee!

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