More Procrastinating…

 

I sat down to write and they called me…the cupcakes.

“You can do this,” they said.  “You can make fondant flowers.  Come on, it’ll be fun!”

They raced across the computer screen, taunting me away from the sandy backyard garden scene I was trying to write, luring me with the scent of vanilla buttercream frosting.

 

“What about chocolate?  Don’t forget chocolate buttercream!”

“And silver fairy dust!” The littlest cupcake cried.

   

And it was all good.

I settled down, ready to release my two trapped characters from their story, content in the knowledge that sometime, somewhere, cupcakes and fondant pansies will appear in a story. 

Home Is Where...Where?

It's nursing home day. I don my social work hat, abandon my laptop and drive off to see what's new with my old guys...



Willie Mae has to move out of her private room, into a semi-private one hall over. Her family can't pay the extra $450 a month to keep her where she is and so the social worker tries to smooth over the transition.

"Isn't this a nice room?" She asks Willie, pointing out that it's at the end of the hallway, so she'll have more privacy.

Willie Mae shrugs, unconvinced. "But how will I find it?" she protests. "I'll never remember how to get to my new room." Willie Mae stops and frowns. "But then, I don't know where my room is now, so what does it matter? All right. I'll move."

Willie Mae takes these things in stride, just as she has all of her life. She worked hard in the cotton mill and raised her son. Later she made almost daily trecks up to this same nursing home to look after her elderly brothers. Tough and independent, Willie Mae was a tiny tornado of a woman. Barely five feet tall but wiry and quick to jump to her brothers' defense.

Then she fell, fracturing her hip, and Willie Mae's world began to crumble. As it so often happens with the elderly, an infection or anesthesia seems to trigger confusion and hallucinations. From there, it's an easy slide into dementia. Some physical trauma occurs and the brain never fully recovers. At least, with the people I see in the nursing home, that's how it seems to happen.

Willie Mae joined her last remaining brother in the nursing home and when he died, she grieved- then forgot all about it. Her aide reminds her. "No honey, he's passed, remember?"

If I were Willie Mae, I don't think I'd want to be reminded that I was now all alone.

Today I found Willie Mae wandering the halls. Thinking she was going to Residents' Council, I offered to lead her to the dining room where they were having a special lunch.

"No, she doesn't go in there," an aide told me, turning us away from the party Willie Mae thankfully never knew about. "She needs to go back to her room."

And therein lay the rub...

"I don't know where my room is," Willie Mae said, clinging to her PVC plastic walker.

I slowly lead her through the rabbit warren of hallways, down a burgundy-stripe, wallpapered hallway and into her new room.

"Here you go," I announce, ushering her inside.

Willie Mae looks around, frowns and shakes her head. "This isn't my room."

I remind her of the move that happened a few days ago. I point out the pictures on her bulletin board and the book lying open on her bed.

The book stops me. It looks like heavy reading for little Willie Mae, a woman too forgetful to find her own room. It is entitled something like "Why Christians Shouldn't Be Antisemetic." But her name is written in spidery, old lady script across the front cover.

"Is this your book?" I ask innocently.

Willie eyes the book. "I have that book at my house!" she cries.

"I think it must be yours," I say, showing her the name written in blue ink. "Isn't that your name?"

Willie shakes her head. "No. Someone might've brought mine from my house and left it here, but this isn't my room. I know the woman bought this place and she's a mean 'un. We don't want to get her riled," she says, indicating the little old lady sleeping in the bed across the room. "Let's go."

I spend the rest of the day retrieving Willie Mae from other hallways and gently leading her back to her room.

"I know you must be tired," I say finally.

"I really am," she sighs.

We pass by her old room. Earlier, an elderly man had been in the bed, pale and sleeping, unaware of Willie Mae standing in his doorway, a hurt, puzzled expression on her face.

A few hours later, as I walk back up Willie's new hallway, I almost collide with a grey-draped gurney carrying a dead body out to the waiting hearse. When I round the corner and pass by Willie's old room, the bed is empty, its sheets stripped. In the corridor, a small cluster of visitors huddle, crying into tissues.

Willie appears, seeming to materializie out of nowhere just behind me. "I don't see why I can't go in there and rest awhile," she says. "They told me I could still use it now and then."

I distract her away from the room that smells like death. We walk slowly down the burgundy-striped hallway and into the room with the book that has her name written across the cover.

"That's a Jewish book," Willie Mae says. "It's about Jewish history."

"It says anti-Semitism is a sin," I say, leafing through the pages.

"That's right," Willie agrees. She smiles at me like I'm a slow student beginning to grasp a difficult concept.

"That poor lady!" her new nurse murmurs when I pass her a few minutes later. "You'd think they wouldn't confuse these poor people like that. They shouldn't move them." I love Willie Mae's new nurse.

When I leave for the day, Willie Mae is sitting in the day room, a forlorn expression on her face. Her eyes are puffy and red with fatigue and frustration. A visitor from the old hallway walks up to her, puts her arms around Willie's bony bird-like shoulders and hugs her. "There you are!" the newcomer cries. "I wondered where you were!"

I meet Willie's gaze as she stares back over her friend's shoulder. She gives me a wry smile. "There you are," the lady says, hugging Willie tighter and repeating the phrase that lingers in my head like a mantra.

"There you are."

Of course. How simple. "Home is where they're always glad to see you." "Home is where the heart is."

Wrapped in her friend's arms, Willie Mae has found her home...at least for the moment.

Moving On...

We are in the apartment of the Eldest Unnamed One. It is the big, final Move In Day and the time has come to say goodbye. He sits in the swivel armchair he’s spent the morning assembling while I lean against the doorframe beside him.

“You know,” he says. “It’s weird. One minute you live at home and the next you’re in some apartment on your own.”

My heart snaps right in two. I can’t help myself. I reach over and pretend to flick a piece of dust from a lock of his hair. I won’t make this any harder than I know it already is- for both of us. After all, this is the brave boy who finally burst into tears on his fifth birthday after I’d said for the millionth time that day, “Now you’re Mama’s Big Boy.”

“I don’t want to be your Big Boy!” he’d sobbed. I want to be who I am!



I realize now it was my adjustment to make- my baby was no longer a toddler. It was time to let go of that phase and begin the next one. I was the one who had to remind myself of that, over and over again, until I could find some peace with losing my treasured baby to a more independent child- the child who marched up the steps of the Kindergarten bus and never once looked back.

I know now how hard that must have been for him, what inner strength my child uses to make those big transitions seem easy. Funny how we learn so much, often in retrospect, from our precious children.

Lately, more so than ever, I try and think what my own father would do- or did do- when faced with one of these life-altering situations. I summon up memory and try to respond as I imagine he would. This one is easy. We had so many goodbyes, so many times, and always he made the parting easy on me.

Once, after I’d moved 800 miles away to live in the South, I asked him how he stood the long times between our visits because I was so homesick.

“Oh,” he said. “I create my Nancy in my head and even when you’re not here, when I miss you, I just summon her up and there’s “my” Nancy. I store up our times together and play them back and it’s like you’re right here.”

I believed him then. I felt much less guilty about having chosen to run off to the far away south. I had more strength to live my new life.

Every single leave-taking was the same, even his dying. He always smiled but he always walked us out to our cars then stood watching until we were out of sight. The last image we would have in our rearview mirrors was always that of him standing there, smiling and waving goodbye.

Later, when the boys were teenagers and I knew how much our visits meant, I would drive around the bend in the road, stop and cry because it was always so hard to leave him.

He would always be sure, at some point in our visits to tell me how proud he was of us, how great it was to watch us becoming the people we were. Dad packed us full of confidence and unconditional love- the sent us back out into our worlds without one string attached.

And we always came back home.

“It’s weird. One minute you live at home and the next you’re in some apartment on your own,” he said.

“I know,” I answered. “It’s gotta feel a little strange but cool, huh? I mean, your first apartment. College. Wow! I am so proud of you. You guys are gonna be fine.”

“I know.”

“Besides,” I can’t help but add. “We’re only an hour away and you know how us moms are, always looking to feed you or maybe even pop in now and then, just to maybe bring you a casserole or something. It’s not like you can get rid of us so easily.”

The Wench Beloved, having just been through all of this with her mom, studies the screen of her laptop with fierce intensity, pretending not to be a part of this conversation but I know her by now. I see the quick blink of her eyes and feel the emotion that sits just on the edge of spilling over.



I stand up; look at the Youngest Unnamed One and Mertis and say, “Well, we’d better get on the road and let these two get settled in.”

“I’ll walk you out,” the Eldest said. There is so much of his grandfather in this child. I love him so very much.

We walk out to the parking lot and he watches us from the top of the fire escape. I remember suddenly all the times he’d ride off to school with his father and I would come running out at the last minute in my bunny slippers and bathrobe, my hair sticking out at all angles and cry, “Bye-bye, Honeycakes!”

“Wait!” I instruct. “Don’t move! I need a picture!” A picture just like every other first day of school, a picture to remember the passing of yet another year. A picture that doesn’t need to be taken because the memories are etched forever in my heart.

Day 2 of Becoming the Woman I am and Not the Bitch I've Become

Day 2: Getting the Love You Want or Wanting the Love You Get...


Well, how about this...I start revving up the old Intention Engine, slipping the gear shift out of Misery and into Drive and look what happens...A check for over $400 arrives unexpectedly in the mail, my kids do what I ask the first time, kind of, and I find myself more present for the rest of the day, more on the planet, awake and paying attention because positive begets positive.

Take Nelda, for example. She's had a miserable life. She's a crabby old woman who was a witch even when she was younger. Now she's confined to a nursing home, paralyzed on her left side and trapped without an exit because not even her children want to be around her. She was about as negative as you could be when I met her.

She'd say the same thing every time I asked her how she was. "Same shit, different day."

And then she got moved to my friend, Alice's hall. Alice won't allow self pity. She insists Nelda do her best. She bullies, coaxes, badgers and loves her patients back to life. But Nelda was not responding. So we poured over her chart, looked for clues and found the most immediate: No one had ever thought to give Nelda an antidepressant!

Now, antidepressants are not wonder drugs. They are designed to help lift the black cloud just enough for you to note the silver lining and begin digging your way back to the real world. Antidepressants are the fart that lifts your butt off your shoulders so you can see all is not as dark as you thought.

So with a giant puff of antidepressant wind, Nelda began to respond. And Alice loved on her. She brought special foods, set up a bird feeder outside Nelda's window, brought her dog, Boomer, to visit and we gave Nelda a teddy bear.

Nelda's up almost daily. She even held my hand a week or two ago and said, "Please don't leave me. I just need someone to love me!"

So today I walk in to talk to her and she is up, dressed and in her wheelchair looking better than I've ever seen her.

"Wow," I said. "You look so pretty!"

Nelda gives me one of her trademark raised eyebrows. "And you're full of bullshit!" she says.

"That may be true," I say. "But it doesn't change the fact that I think you look great today!"

"Well..." Nelda says, thinking it over. "I still think you're full of shit but you can sit down on the bed and talk to me."

That is Nelda-speak for "I like you."

Maybe someone else would see it differently, someone who doesn't know Nelda. But I could see it for what it was.

Which made me wonder, how many other people are trying to tell me they love me? How many times do I blow off someone's attempt to communicate caring because it isn't delivered in a language, a "speak" I understand?

How many times am I like the patients who sit across from me complaining that their spouses don't love them because if they did they would _____ (fill in the blank.) And when I point out things their loved ones are doing that would indicate good will, they shake their heads. "No, that's not love. They should be _____ (fill in another blank.)

Love is being offered, but because it isn't wrapped in the right package, it's tossed aside, unwanted.

Like maybe the husband who works an extra shift on the weekend to buy something the family needs isn't deliberately staying away from his wife, maybe he's showing his love by attempting to make sure they have everything they need.

Maybe looking at what's missing keeps us from seeing the many gifts that others are trying to offer.

Maybe when I see someone I love attempting to do the right thing, I will say thank you, instead of saying "Well, I'm glad you _____, but you forgot to _____."

Maybe I will lighten up on my criticisms of others because they're only indications of my own insecurity. Maybe I will look for and expect the very best of intentions from those I love because not doing so dishonors their attempts to be the wonderful people I love.

And maybe, just maybe, I am full of shit- but it doesn't keep what I'm saying from being true...