An e-mail from my niece, Kelly, reminded me that I still have a blog, despite the lack of attention I've given it over the past eight months. I realized it was time to get back on the horse, and stop feeling lost because I was no longer in the intolerable situation that I faced for almost four years. I'm sorry to admit that the attention I gave to my mother (since my father passed in '09) was done entirely out of duty. At some point, very shortly after Dad passed, she changed, and it wasn't for the better.
Mom had a tendency to be hyper-critical, in case you've never really met her. She could (and would) go on and on about how "this" wasn't right, or "that" wasn't the way they did it in her day. When we were kids, our rooms were never clean unless she cleaned them, in which case we had to stand and watch her go through all of our stuff, and put it back her way, and her bitching up a storm about how we didn't appreciate things, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, the whole time.
She'd buy our school clothes, and complain about how we wore them. It was worse than the Navy; at least in the Navy we only got inspected once a month, or so. With Mom it was anytime, anywhere, some times for no reason. Don't get me wrong, I love my Mom, but she made you work to get anything in return; the same with Dad. I'm convinced it's generational; their generation went through a very hard time, and arrived on the other side determined that that wouldn't happen to their kids.
She was FOR-EVER on my dad's case about getting fat. At his biggest, he packed about 230 on a 5'10" medium build. Yeah, he had a belly, but the inmates at CMF didn't mess with him for a number of reasons. Once, I put my hand through a piece of paneling in our family room, rather than smack her for a comment that got a little too personal, even for my mom. She gave me that, "Wait 'til your father gets home...", and let me stew on it. When he got home, she screamed at him, and he came out to meet me in the backyard.
He was furious, even for him. His nostrils were flaring, his face red. I stepped towards him, my hands outstretched, palms out, saying, "Wait a minute Da...". The next thing I knew, he was in the house, and Mom was outside bending over me saying, "...might have really hurt him." To this day, I have no idea of what he did, where it came from, or what it hit. When I literally "came to," everything hurt, and I was having trouble catching my breath. It was the first time he'd done anything physical to me in maybe five years.
Getting back to Mom, she would get on him to the very end, counting every calorie, and going on about how he had to take better care of himself "because of his diabetes". Seriously, towards the end, my dad expressed a death wish several times. It wasn't any thing serious; he wasn't contemplating suicide, he's ask why God wanted him to go on, hurting as much as he did, and her bitching at him constantly, crazier all the time.
Then it was my turn. I decided to stop looking for work, to look after my mother. To drive her to all of her doctor appointments, fitness classes, weekly hair-do's, and anything else she wanted. I started after Mary and I got back from our planned trip to Hawaii, my sister Pat stayed and helped out while we were gone. From that point on, I was on my own. She developed a very bad habit of not telling me about an appointment until five minutes after the appointment time. I HATE TO BE LATE! Ever since I was one minute late, and had to go all the way up the chain-of-command to the Executive Officer, before it got dismissed. All it was was a hassle. It took me off the day's work, which pissed off my friends and co-workers, and they were more than generous in sharing it all with me at the end of the day. I HATE TO BE LATE!
She didn't care. She had a routine, and a bad habit of spacing-out until I got there, 30 minutes before an appointment in Fairfield. The routine never varied, but it took longer and longer to do with each iteration. I tried everything, calling 20 minutes before, and telling her to get started; when I got there, she was still on the couch, still holding the phone in her hand. What scared me is I think I came up with a reasonable defense for elder abuse (as there is no "sarcasm" font, I'll defend myself here). What hurts is that there's a bit of truth in that, too.
Sometime between Dad's death, and their 70th wedding anniversary, my mom checked out. I don't know who this "new" person was, but she was not my mom. She was angry at first, and got angrier daily, until she snapped. I scheduled my life around her schedule, until I could get her to combine trips, I was going broke carting her around that first year. I don't know when it was, but we finally got to the point where she would fill my car every-other-week, on her credit card, which was almost fair. If I got the better of it, you can call it a below-minimum-wage salary. And still I could never do it right, no matter how hard I tried.
I hate to say it, but my health has improved since Mom passed. My back treatments last longer, I have a lot more energy, and I'm enjoying the heck out of my grandson. My parents, for all their faults, provided for their children fairly well in the end. I'd trade it all for a hug when I was eight, or nine.
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