The chronic malcontent is stuck in one long slow pratfall

My life is punctuated by drafts of proposals and dissertations that magically appear in my email inbox, demanding my editing skills. Compensation is predetermined (too low). Deadlines are often severe. I immerse myself in each paper like a scuba diver slipping gingerly into mucky water. Eeww. I add Oxford commas and snarky comments exhorting the authors to embrace Word styles instead of manually typing their tables of contents.

In between editing jobs, I fret about my mother and try to keep my nose above the surface of my anticipatory grief. (Yes, there's apparently a name for it.) It's almost two and a half years since I lost my teaching job and two years since I finished my dissertation and earned my degree. In between editing jobs and fretting over my mother, I have time to reflect on the current state of my life. Sadly, I seem to have lost my funnybone, and the loss has manifested in fewer blog posts.

Back when all I had to fret about was resenting my job at the career college and finishing my massive wretched tome of a dissertation, I didn't know how lucky I was. Pre-vertigo, pre-dementia, pre-summer of carlessness... ah, the good old days. My attention was riveted on the PhD and the job. As I steamed and stewed in my self-righteous messy little bog, I could always find something funny in the experience. Students! Ha, ha! Dissertation chair! Har har! The jokes were low-hanging, shiny baubles just above my head. So I picked them. Who wouldn't? I didn't name names; nobody was hurt in the making of this blog.

I mean, admit it, it's hilarious when someone does a pratfall into a hole in the sidewalk (especially when they are texting). Come on, don't tell me you haven't laughed at someone else's misfortune, as long as they were only humiliated and not hurt. That's how I felt most of the time, back in 2013, like I was watching myself taking one long slowmo pratfall. So funny, look at her clutch and cling to her expectations and resentments—what could be more comical? ROFLMAO.

So what's the problem? Thanks for asking. Lately, the jokes seem to be harder to find. I'm sure they are still there, somewhere, peeking out from under my scowl. I feel so weary. Who knew a 90-pound, 86-year-old scrawny twig of an old lady could be so heavy?

Maybe I'm caring too much. Everything seems overly complicated. I fear I'm descending into dementia along with my mother; we'll probably end up roommates in the same adult foster care home, yelling at each other and drooling on our bibs.

Hey! That joke snuck up on me! It's not a great one, I know, but it has potential. It's a chuckle, not a guffaw. But I bet there's more where that came from. There's not much funnier than demented old people who don't know how funny they are. I imagine a sitcom about a mother stuck in adult daycare and her recalcitrant, unwilling, resentful caregiver of a daughter. Well, maybe that's a little close to home. Still, there's a joke in here somewhere. I could go in after it, but maybe it's better to just let it gently percolate to the surface, like a stinky gas bubble.

The chronic malcontent comes up for air

Humble apologies to all four of my blog readers, who all reached out to me to find out if I was getting ready to jump off a bridge. We have a lot of bridges here in Portland, so their concern was not entirely unfounded. If I had to choose the bridge of my demise, I think I would choose the St. Johns Bridge. It's tall enough that odds are I'd die upon impact, so no chance of slow drowning. Plus it's in an area some distance from the main city waterfront, so I wouldn't upset tourists, and bicyclists and joggers wouldn't feel compelled to stop and watch me flail. (I'm not much of a swimmer.) And what's more, I hate to be cold and wet (I know, why am I in Portland?) So a quick exit would be the best for me. But I'm not planning on doing that, jumping, exiting, or swimming. You all can simmer down: I'm hunkered in the Love Shack, getting on with life.

The bane of my trouble, the source of all that is, of course, is the maternal parental unit, who has gone somewhat mentally offline in recent months. I fear her double move over the summer gummed up her mental gears. This once vibrant and energetic dynamo (her nickname used to be “Mighty Mouse”) is now a shadow, physically and mentally. She's a fragile twig, tottering on tiny Merrell-encased feet. Indoors or out, she bundles in previously worn fleece jackets, usually bright red, which are pockmarked down the front with cigarette ash burns. (It's a wonder she hasn't spontaneously combusted.) Things fall out of her pockets. She carries her cellphone in a little case attached to a wrist bracelet, like an oversized life alert. It's painful to see her like this. Sometime over the summer, she lost her mojo.

She is well aware that her mind is failing. She is anxious about it, but growing resigned to the muddle. Her world is shrinking. Yesterday some estate sale people came to wrap up and remove decades of collected china, glassware, dishes, and knickknacks. Some of the stuff was probably 100 years old. What do you do with all that stuff, if your adult children don't want it? Dump it on the solitary grandchild, who has her own life and family in Sacramento? Mom is detaching from life, and that means, for her, emptying the china cabinet is a victory. One more thing to check off the checklist.

My victory came when (after a long overdue flurry of tears), I realized that this transition, rather than being a tragedy, could be an opportunity to welcome in a hurricane of love.

Mom had four kids. In essence, she created a small troop of willing and stalwart (but somewhat unskilled) laborers, and we lift and tote and schlep and reassure as best we can—four hearts and minds to support her as she eases out of this world. What else are children for? She and my father apparently did a good job parenting us, if we are all willing to hang around and help her. That is, if caring for the aging parent is the job of the children.

That question is the bug up my dark place, as you may have guessed. As Bravadita pointed out, the logical next step would be for me to offer to give up my apartment and move in with my mother. (Not going to happen.) If I had a big home with a sunny spare room, I'd invite her to live with me, no hesitation, well, not much hesitation. But I live in the Love Shack, which is barely big enough for me, the cat, and a thousand or so books. Steps. Uneven rugs. Cat toys. Dust. Detritus. Squalor. Nobody should be living here in these conditions, not even me. There's definitely no way Mom could move in here.

Mom's condo is a dark cave, darker even than the Love Shack. Only one window faces east, and she keeps that barricaded against the light. The living room window faces west, receiving golden sunsets in the summer, but not much light in the winter, thanks to the angle of the sun and the corner of her garage. Being the hothouse flower that I am, I would not survive long in that cave. However, long before I withered from lack of light, she (being an energy vampire, aka an extravert) would have sucked the life from my bones and tossed my desiccated carcass into the spare bedroom. No, moving in with my mother would not be a good idea for either one of us.

The alternatives are two: move someone else into the condo to live with her, or move her out to someplace else.

I can feel the will to live draining away as I write this. Hokay. Maybe this is enough for today. Now I need to find some ironic yet poignant silly drawing to go with this half-baked post. The world is crumbling. I should stop whining. Eventually I will, but not today.

Untethered

For the past three years or so, I turned to this blog for comfort and solace, the way desperate people siphon the will to go on from therapists, counselors, and friends. I could almost always find the rain cloud of black humor floating above my head, even in my darkest moments. Rarely was I at a loss for words. However, over the past year, as my focus has dissipated, my reading audience has dwindled to a handful of stalwart fans and some spammers who slap me with encouraging comments (keep up the good work!) as they squat and deposit stinky links leading back to their nefarious products. For the first time ever, I removed some comments! I don't know what that signifies. I don't really care. I'm depressed.

I'm in free fall. Slo mo free fall. I'm detached from everything except my distaste for life. I know things are bad when I take myself so seriously I can't find the joke. I've lost my mojo and now it's slow mo free fall to an as yet unknown destination that probably resembles something flat like a sidewalk. Ugh. Too messy. No, I'm not suicidal, but I definitely want out of this messy bog.

I feel like I'm on yet another annoying precarious edge overlooking yet another stupid abyss. I'm cranky as hell. Why? Thanks for asking. My friend Bravadita is fighting breast cancer, battling insurance companies and doctors with her bare hands. My brilliant sister is on the verge of financial ruin, even as she treads the rues of Paris. My mother is disintegrating, shedding her sense of self, a few memory cells at a time. I can't fix any of it.

I'm trapped in self-centered fear. My inability to earn enough to cover my expenses makes the last 20 years of recovery seem like a stupid pointless mirage. I suspect I should have turned left (into finance and accounting or maybe computer programming) instead of right (into art and teaching). That crossroads came and went years ago, no use in whining now, I know. Alas, alackaday.

To top it all off, it's fall, which always brings me closer to the edge of despair. The slant of the watery sun prods me toward hibernation, as if that were actually a solution. Is it possible to go to ground until spring? Perhaps, through the magic of the Internet and UPS. Everything is harder in winter: the frosty ground, the wind-whipped air, my blue-tinged cuticles, my sluggish blood. Okay, now I'm starting to really wallow. Look at me, I'm rolling in it from side to side. Ahhhhhh.

I admit, I miss this, this self-centered whining. Where else can one say the ridiculously egotistical, embarrassingly selfish things that need to said? I guess it's good my audience has dwindled to mostly auto-bot spammers. I would feel just slightly less inclined to whine if I thought people were reading this drivel. I feel fortunate my mother cannot find her way to this blog.

I was challenged this week to honor my creativity. Somewhere in me an artist still lurks, but she's been hibernating, mostly, for about 15 years. She surfaces now and then, in this blog, for example. She sleepwalked through graduate school. She dreams of days when creating was a compulsion, as essential as food. These days, creativity is a dry-bones memory of a once-verdant shelter. Parched. Hemmed in by clutter and white-knuckled fear.

I'm waiting. Waiting to find out if Bravadita will survive. Waiting to see what solution my sister will conjure out of the rich European ether. Waiting for my mother to decide how she wants to live until she dies. Waiting for spring. Waiting for the miracle to inspire me to stop the self-seeking long enough to feel something besides despair and resignation. Hope is a real thing, I know this in my brain. But my heart is disconnected. Untethered. Falling.