Dog days

Now that the maternal parental unit is ensconced in her new digs, I have been waiting for the other shoe to drop. It would be too easy if all the stress was over. Finally, on Wednesday the family grapevine lit up: Mom thinks she's had a stroke. Naturally, my first thought is, after all we've done for you, you go and strokes out? True to form, I can make anything, even someone else's disastrous health problem, all about me.

Being carless, I waited on the phone rather than rushing (which would consist of walking or riding a bus) over to the retirement community, as if my presence would solve anything. It sounded like a crowded bus station through the phone: my brother's wife Deanna, a family friend Shirlene who is a nurse, and in the background, my mother's voice, loud and clear. That is not the voice of a stroke victim, I thought to myself, as Shirlene offered to come get me and drive me over to Mom's. Because somehow it was assumed I would want to be there to add my two cents to the pandemonium.

I declined the ride and walked over after I finished eating my breakfast. You can't tackle old senile mothers on an empty stomach. When I got there, everyone else was gone and Mom was snoozing on the couch. She woke up when I opened the door (I have a key).

“Shirlene said I was dehydrated,” she said with a little smirk.

I did my typical eye roll.

“I'm waiting for the cable guy,” she said. “I've been waiting all afternoon!”

“It's not even 1:00,” I said.

“Wake me up when he comes.” She laid back down on the couch, on her side with one elbow bent and her hand in the air. That can't be comfortable, I thought, but hell, for all I know she usually sleeps standing on her head. This might be a down day for her.

She woke from time to time, whenever there was a noise. The dryer buzzing. A car alarm echoing somewhere across the quad. Each time she was irate to find the cable guy had not yet arrived.

To be fair, she wasn't interested in watching television. She wanted her landline phone. The apartment building uses the cable company for telephone service. She'd been without a proper phone for four days, and she was ready to toss her little pay-as-you-go burner cell phone out the window. No matter how many times I reminded her, she couldn't seem to remember that to hear me talking on the other end, she had to hold the cell phone to her ear. I don't know, you figure it out. Maybe if they made cell phones look like brick-size cordless phones, she would get it.

Eventually the cable guy showed up and installed her phones. When I left, at her bequest, I took her car. Wheels! Zoom, zoom.... but I didn't need anything. Nowhere to go, really, nothing to buy. I drove home and parked it. The car sat on the street outside my apartment all day Thursday.

Friday morning, she called. “Can I have my car back?” she said, just a tiny bit belligerently, as if daring me to keep her key.

“Of course you can have your car back,” I said. I drove the car over and parked it outside the driveway at her building. She was outside on a park bench having a cigarette. I watched her walking toward me, a diminutive stick of a woman bearing no resemblance to the mother I used to know.

She took the car key happily, and didn't offer me a ride home. I didn't ask for one. I walked home under partly sunny skies.

The maternal parental unit goes AWOL

On Saturday, my brothers and I got our 86-year-old mother moved into her new retirement apartment. With an eye on the clock, we scrambled to assemble one disorganized load, drive it four miles, and offload it before 4:00 pm when the truck turned into a pumpkin ($39 for another day).

We filled the big yellow truck with Mom's full-size bed, headboard, and frame; dresser and mirror; rolltop desk; computer desk, chair, computer, and monitor; frenetically flowered multicolored living room rug; flowered (and stained) sofa; wingback chair (also flowered); coffee table; round kitchen table and four chairs; TV stand and TV; plant stand and plants; about a dozen framed photos of my brother's cats and dogs; about a hundred framed photos of my niece and her 2-year-old son; a half-dozen or so acrylic paintings painted by yours truly when I was 18 to 20 years old (neither improved with time); 30 boxes of miscellaneous crap, mostly paper, collected over a lifetime; several armloads of tiny red, fuchsia, turquoise, white, and black polyester knit tops and slacks; a box of dingy white Easy Spirit sneakers; two boxes of half-used lotions and shampoos; a brimming box of vitamins, herbal remedies, and pill bottles; four boxes of paperback books; and a box or two of half-used cleaning sprays, bottles, and cans.

The new building uses the cable company rather than the local phone company for telephone service, so Mom's landline will not work in the new apartment. This means until she gets connected via cable, Mom has only her cell phone to communicate with us. Her cell is a cheap burner phone, fueled by phone cards. And she isn't all that clear on how to use it. (“Mom, hold the phone to your ear!”)

As it turned out, her cell phone skills didn't matter. The morning after the move, my younger brother called me to say that Mom was not answering a knock on her door. Apparently, she had set her cell phone down on a little display ledge outside her new apartment (next to a tiny green frog figurine) and walked away.

“Uh-oh,” I said. With no cell phone, Mom was incommunicado. I pictured my scrawny mother doing a fist-pump in the air, saying to herself, Free at last, finally, free at last! 

My brother searched the dining room: No mother. He went back and pounded on the door: no answer. I texted him: She's probably at the condo. He drove over to her condo and found her packing some kitchen stuff (half-used bottles of condiments and spices). Apparently, she hadn't missed her cell phone at all. Later, when we told her she'd left it outside her apartment door, she said, “That's what everyone keeps saying,” in a skeptical voice that suggested to me that she thought we were all trying to gaslight her.

For the past two days, I've been going over to her place, taking her car to the condo, loading up boxes, and driving stuff to her new place, unloading boxes up the recalcitrant elevator, and parking them in her living room and kitchen. One trip a day is all we can handle. Three trips waiting to go up and down the elevator with my hand-truck precariously loaded with boxes—and dodging scooters, walkers, and shopping carts—has not turned me into a paragon of patience.

I guess I moved some things she didn't want moved (hey, how was I supposed to know!?) Yesterday, we hit our limit. Luckily her neighbor across the hall came over at that moment to introduce herself. Coincidentally, they both have the same first name. I stood by and watched the two pint-sized old ladies move close together so they could see and hear each other. As I gazed down at the top of their heads, I thought, she's bonding. She's making friends with the other kids at boarding school. That's my cue to exit, stage right. I murmured my good-byes. They barely responded. I faded down the hallway, smelling my own freedom just steps away.

Moving the maternal parental unit

Last week I was volunteering at a business conference for a nonprofit group of which I am a member. When you volunteer, you meet the members behind the curtain, the ones that help and the ones that hinder. I hope I did more helping than hindering. I was accused of rolling my eyes. You can interpret that any way you want. Of course, I would bet you would have a similar response if most of the comments you heard from the attendees went something like this: This is a great conference, where's the Diet Coke?

After four days of hospitality hell, I was ready for some downtime. But it's time to move the maternal parental unit into her new apartment at the retirement community. This morning she was supposed to call me when she got up, but she forgot. I called her at 11:00 am. “What are you doing?” I asked as soon as I was sure she knew who was calling her. (Who else but me says “Hello, Mudder” when she answers the phone? I dread the day she doesn't know me.)

“I'm putting things in boxes,” she replied.

“You were supposed to call me when you woke up.”

“I forgot to write it down,” she replied.

“I'm coming over.”

“Let me come get you!”

“No, I need the exercise!”

Now that I am carless, we have this conversation at least once a week. I've stopped trying to explain my actions. My explanations don't stick. Although her memory seems to be selective. Today we met a nice man named Bill who held the elevator for us. Mom told my younger brother about Bill. She apparently remembered everything Bill had told us about himself (moved in last week with his wife, lived in a condo downtown for eleven years, still living out of boxes).

Back to the story. I dressed in lightweight gear, shouldered my backpack, and walked over to her house (roughly a mile and a half) in muggy heat. My plan was to help her pack and take a load over in her old Toyota Camry.

When I arrived, she was gamely stuffing things into boxes with not much care for what was in each box. I watched her for a minute and then pulled her car out of the garage, backed it up to the back patio, and loaded a few boxes into the trunk. When I went back inside, she was in the dim bedroom, peering into a shoe box, muttering something about having shoes she's never seen before. I looked at her shoes. They all looked the same: black leather slip-on loafers from Naturalizer. I opened up a dusty box: well-worn 50s-style black suede pumps.

“I'll never wear those again,” she said firmly, shoving the shoes into the box with the slip-ons.

“Then why are we moving them to your new apartment?” I asked.

“I don't know.”

We drove over to her new place, a few miles away, and she told me where to park. I unloaded the trunk and the back seat. She held the door open. Then she held the inside door. Then Bill showed up and held the elevator door. All the doors started pinging at us for holding them open.

“They ought to have a freight elevator!” my mother said for the millionth time.

“It's unlikely they will put one in now, just for you, Ma,” I said.

She opened the door to her new apartment and found something to hold the door open. I loaded bags and boxes, walking back and forth from the elevator lobby to her apartment. I said hello to two different old ladies who were strolling the hall, one with a wheeled walker and one with a wheeled shopping cart of the smaller variety, the kind I had intended but failed to purchase.

Back in the apartment, I set a couple small shelves in the walk-in closet and started unpacking the sheets that had been stored on them back at the condo, until my mother stopped me.

“Those sheets are for the twin bed,” she said.

“Then why did we move them?” I said. “Your bed is a full-size bed.”

“Well, I still have a twin bed at the condo!”

“Yes, but you are giving that bed to Reggie,” I reminded her. Reggie (not his real name) is my 60-year-old brother, who apparently got dibs on the twin bed in the guest room. I looked at the stack of flowered sheets, pale green and pastel pink, thinking, yes, Reggie will enjoy sleeping on those.

“I'm going to unpack the bathroom stuff,” Mom said, disappearing around the corner.

I repacked the sheets and took the box to the door, along with the boxes we'd emptied.

“I'll sort this all out later,” Mom said as I watched her shovel lotions and bandages and deodorant and toothpaste into cabinet drawers. I turned and admired the perfect white tub.

When she was done with the bathroom, we unloaded the one box of kitchen gear and food she had packed. I set it all on the counter, thinking it was impossible to organize the kitchen with one box of miscellaneous utensils, five half-opened bags of cereal, a can of water chestnuts, and some bread crumbs. As I shoved it against the wall, I realized I had moved all these cans and bags after the mouse meltdown last June. (See a previous blog post.) When the box was empty, we went down the elevator and out to the car.

“Shall we make another trip?” I asked as we were heading away.

“No, I don't think so,” she replied. I drove us to my apartment, and she took my place in the driver's seat. She fiddled with the mirrors, although I'd left everything the way it was.

She blew me a kiss and took off down the gravel road, sideswiping a yellow recycling bin and an empty green yard debris garbage can on wheels. Bam. They rattled but didn't fall over or get dragged, so it's all good, right? She didn't slow down. I'm not sure she realized she'd hit them. I stood watching her go.

“Drive safe,” I muttered to her tail lights. Tomorrow I expect we'll do it again. Hopefully sans recycling bin abuse. Saturday my younger brother plans to rent a truck so we can load up some furniture. Then the fun will really begin. Stay tuned.