You’re the end of the rainbow, my pot of gold, you’re daddy’s little girl, to have and to hold. You’re sugar, you’re spice, you’re everything nice, and you’re daddy’s little girl! ~ lyrics written by Burke & Gerlach ***but not their exact words, just the ones my ‘rents mashed together…
April 3, 2010 I Love You, Dad
A daddy’s girl is something I could never, would never, deny being. I adore my dad and while I absolutely know he does not and never did know everything about everything, deep down inside I still believe that he does, always has, and always will. Contradicting that ancient child belief of mine in his omnipotence is his current state, the result of a life time of smoking and his accompanying refusal to do what it will take to maintain even the gravely compromised state of health he has. He will not use his oxygen as he should; we are talking about a man who hasn’t worn short sleeves in decades because he doesn’t like the way his arms look, and you think he’ll cart an oxygen tank around? Not gonna happen. And he will not do the nebulizer four times a day preferring to wait until he “needs” it which is when he is hunched over, literally gasping for breath. This is very hard for this daddy’s girl to watch. And yet loving him as I do and so wanting him to do it his way, I have to (try to) respect his choices in this. He’s also not using the portable tank because he is and always has been truly, madly, and deeply cheap as fuck, so cheap it’s astounding. If he uses it, you see, then he’ll have to pay to get it refilled. His last bill for all of the oxygen equipment he now has (a lot) was around 45 bucks. He has many, many times that in his checking account and many more times that in his savings account. ARRRRGGGGG. He’s a Scotsman’s grandson alright, as well as a child of the depression. Ultimately, I cannot and will not force him to do anything, in large part because I haven’t got the will, the energy, or the desire to do so. This inertia, maybe we can call it that – inertia, is compounded by my certain knowledge that he is ambivalent about life, period, as in is it worth living for him right now, particularly as it narrows. He will be getting his lunch time meal delivered to his home; he has given up bowling and he will only get take out from his favorite breakfast haunt, because sitting there in public with his tank is not an option. And, he risks heart failure every time he leaves the house (to pick up his take-out coffee and bagel, to walk his dog) without it. Prayer helps. I trust the process of life, I trust the process of life, I trust the process of life. I surrender my dear, sweet, funny and profoundly cheap father to you, mother father God. He is such a good egg and such a good person. I am ready to let him go if reluctant, devastated, grief-stricken, and blinded by tears at the thought of just how much of a loss his passing will be. This morning I stopped by his house on my way to work in beauteous Bovina (I wasn’t going to, but couldn’t not do so) and found him in a bit of a state, unable to use the nebulizer because he had misplaced a part of it. I could not find it, called Lincare and they should be there any minute. Oh yes and I have to remember to breathe through this as well. In…one two three four…out…one two three four five six seven eight. I love you dad.
April 6, 2010 Thoughts on Care-giving
Here are my thoughts on care giving: it sucks, it’s hard, it’s guilt and anger inducing, it fills one with tears and resentment, deep love and cold indifference (depending on the moment) and more than anything else, it’s exhausting… Sunday morning my father called me sounding as if he were breathing his last breath, which he was not, yet I burst into tears (it was 6:35 and I had just been deeply, blissfully asleep) and, after ascertaining what was going on (his dog needed walking and he was just too weak) I got myself up and out of bed, walked and fed my dogs, then drove the 3.5 miles to his house to walk his. I called Invisible Fence today because more than anything we want to keep my dad in his home (we being me, my dad, and my brother) and he loves that dog so much, any other alternative is untenable. So, I walked the dog for him throughout the day Sunday as well as several times yesterday, all the while asking around for paid or volunteer help on the doggie walking front, preferably young, female, buxom, and vivacious. My father is not well and although his G.P. is unwilling to make a definite prognosis for him, she was willing to tell me that while he can certainly prolong his life by being on oxygen 24/7 (something he has only been doing for 72 hours despite her having prescribed it three months ago) his lung function is not going to get better. This is a progressive disease; my father’s CO2 levels are going up indicating that his ability to process the oxygen he is getting is going down. This is not good (and since we aspire to educate, normal healthy blood CO2 levels are around 25, his are now at 67). How long it will take for his lungs and heart to shut down completely is any one’s guess. I am also concerned that he will stop the oxygen because he is feeling better, better being extremely relative as he was knee deep in the grave for most of the past week. We shall see and part of that is doing whatever I can to take care of the momentary needs he has as well as being vigilant about treating myself well so I can continue to do so – help him – with, mostly, a good and generous disposition. To that end I have scheduled a massage and a hair cut this week, and a weekend away at a yoga retreat toward the end of the month. Additionally, I have informed my father that he is paying for my booze during this time; he signed a blank check this morning made out to the local liquor store where I will, later today, purchase a case of wine and a bottle of tequila. The good news is that if signing and handing over to me a blank check didn’t kill him, he may have more life left in him than we know.
If everyone – every U.S. citizen, I mean – waited on tables for six months, minimum, I think the people in this country would be in a better place, be more grateful, for example. If everyone spent six months or a year working in a nursing home, in a pre-school or grade school, maybe, just maybe, we’d see people change their opinions and choices around life, death, and everything in-between, including exercise, diet, smoking, hospice care and euthanasia, as well as contraception and abortion. Maybe. It could happen, and regardless it wouldn’t hurt. If everyone in the U.S. chambermaid-ed (a word that is gendered, and therefore suspect right out of the gate) for two summers during a good old-fashioned tourist season in a hot or even just slightly warm spot (the spot I did it in was tepid, at best), I believe the world would also be improved. It suddenly occurs to me that in both seasons of White Lotus, we don’t see that segment of the help, the invisible chambermaids who clean up the messes in bathroom and bedroom, make the beds, change the sheets and towels weekly or daily, empty the trash cans, and pick up room service trays – all for minimum wage, and tips! And for tips, if they’re lucky. Hm. Those invisible, essential workers, invariably women.
Yes. Yes, I did. I waited tables on and off for almost a decade, and chambermaid-ed for two whole summers and a part of another, before and between my years of college, and yes, both of these jobs were also an education. Did it make me a better human per my opening statement? I think so. I like to think so, anyway, but then I would, wouldn’t I? Substitute teaching is another job everyone would benefit from doing – especially those who criticize teachers and like to talk about those ‘long summers off’. As far as I could tell during my seven years filling various positions at the local K-12, those long ‘free as a bird’ summers are only long if you’re a parent waiting impatiently for school to start again. I did that too, I substitute taught, and my respect for teachers took a lovely leap upward, although they were already high, with a few individual exceptions. Just as in every profession, I encountered a handful of people in the education business who had zero business being there. Ah, humanity. So sublime, and so horrid. And, everything in-between.
I stopped having waitressing nightmares only a handful of years ago after thirty-plus years of having quit that biz, the anxiety of too many tables, endless demand, not enough servers and customers who were demanding and selfish bubbling up in my consciousness. Caffé Pertutti. Hanratty’s. West Side Story. Arno’s. Big Nick’s. Shakespeare’s Tavern and Playhouse. When I finally decided never again, never, ever again would I do that, wait tables for a living, I stuck to it. I was twenty-eight, and never will I ever not be grateful for the women and even a few men I met and befriended during those days, but never will I ever cease wondering at the vagaries of people (the customers) and their food. Good lord. What a lesson in humanity, and everyone would benefit from that, eh? Whatever happened to Segundo, I wonder, my favorite ever busboy, a real gentleman, such a hard worker, and so sweet. Never did he ever hit on me or make crude gestures as we passed, never did he ever show resentment toward me for being both a lot taller than he was, and speaking English better. Hell, he spoke English and Spanish, so of the two of us, he was the more linguistically gifted. What a mensch. Segundo for the second of his mother’s sons. Working with people whose backgrounds are very different from ours is a very good thing, and the restaurant industry is chock full of that mind and heart-broadening opportunity.
Helping out in my dad’s store, as a kid, was also an education; I learned that rubbers were not only rainy-day foot wear, for example. I knew we had Dr. Scholl’s sandals, which of course I loved (red leather straps, always), but rubbers? ‘I don’t think so. You could maybe try the department store across the street. Hold on,’ I shouted, ‘Dad! Do we have rubbers?!’ My dad, helping someone else, rolled his eyes, laughing, and came right over. We did, it turns out, have rubbers, stowed behind the door of the back room, where many odd, mysterious and even dangerous things were kept. My dad took the blushing twenty-something man in his capable and compassionate hands, leading him to where he was able to discreetly make his choice of a product very much not in the footwear line. Oops.
Observing people, many people, people I knew in our small town, beg, plead, cajole and even vaguely threaten my dad to refill their prescriptions days or weeks or months ahead of schedule, was an education of a whole other kind. It made me certain I would never, ever do drugs, ever – and would do my damnedest to avoid ever taking prescription drugs. Okay, well, I did do recreational drugs, in college mainly, and might’ve done more, but as a pharmacist’s daughter, there was something I objected to in having to pay for it. Pay for it? Hell no. And while it was clear that there were others ways I could have access to drugs as a comely young thing, that wasn’t ever gonna happen either. Hell no. It was fun while it lasted, I’m glad I had those experiences, and thankful I had zero addictive inclinations, but no.
Oby Atkin (Obediah, I guess?), who owned an antique store in town, came in every other Saturday or Sunday when I was a teenager and bought a hundred or two-hundred dollars’ worth of porn magazines. I always felt embarrassed and awkward when I ran into his wife in town, but she didn’t seem to get out much. Doc Ferraro, the dentist, wrote script after script for his much younger wife, tried to charm me, and my dad, distracting us with banter while scratching his Rx pad. And he was charming, but everyone in town knew something was off, especially after his wife drove into a friend’s house one night. I don’t mean drove into their driveway, I mean she drove into the actual front of the house, crash, bang, boom, so they had to get a new porch and front door. You see a lot, know a lot, living in a small town, serving John and Jane Q. Public over the years. And, no matter what, my dad was discreet; he might hear the gossip, be told people’s secrets in that same backroom, but he didn’t share, ever, even about those calls, the ones that came in late at night because someone he’d known his whole life had swallowed a bottle of pills, drunk a fifth of scotch, and reached out to him because they’d changed their minds, and knew Dick wouldn’t judge, would only help, which he did.
My last waitressing job was at a schmancy steak house on the lower west side. I can never remember the name of the place, which is indicative of how much I hated it there. The customers were Gordon Gecko wanna-bes who treated the wait staff horribly or with a niceness that stunk of noblesse oblige, all of it depending on how the markets had been that day or week, bullish to bearish. The brothers who owned the place were very different, as in one was mostly absent and nice when present, and the other was ever present and presented as what he was: a short, fat hateful pig. He liked to humiliate the old guy waiters, especially in front of younger female employees like me. It clearly got him off, screaming at sixty and seventy-year old men, immigrants who need the work, and who as union members were within several months or years of being able to retire after decades on their feet, having built new lives in America. He’d shoot me sidelong glances as he strutted his stuff in the kitchen, having said his worst to these men, men who were always kind to me, the new kid on the block. What a schmuck. At that job, if you weren’t busy, you were required to stand with your back up against the wall, hands behind your back. This little shit of a human being, who was several inches shorter than I was, liked to push his belly and pelvis up against me as I stood there motionless, and – if not helpless – stuck for the moment, peering over his head. Oh, how I would love to rip the smirk off his face for all the young women I’m sure he did that to, over the years. Maybe I could send a copy of this to him? I do remember his name, if not the name of the restaurant. Yick.
Two full seasons of chambermaiding at the Mathes Hotel in Fleischmanns, New York, May – September rounded out my time making up beds and cleaning up after strangers. It was an early twentieth century hotel that had been updated in ‘50s and neglected ever since. My days there were in the late seventies. The Mathes was closed all winter, spring and fall, had minimal maintenance on a daily or annual basis, with entire facilities and wings shut down because the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Mathes, didn’t have or didn’t want to spend the money to get them up on running, or to make needed repairs. It was a strange place, faded and hollow, filled with returning long-time customers who were, like the Hotel itself, on their last legs. Both my younger sister and I had residents die on us that first summer, as in we were the ones who discovered their bodies in their rooms when we went in to clean. Then, after reporting the unsettling news, Mrs. Mathes shooed us away, bustling in to go through the individual’s personal effects. The woman whose cabin-ette I cleaned, the one who I discovered dead in her bed, was shipped back to New York City or New Jersey with all arrangements made by Mrs. Mathes. No one in her family bothered to make the trip, which seem hard, and tragic. She had always tipped me well, and was palpably, painfully lonely. I had made conversation with her, but I was on the clock and Mrs. M didn’t like us to dawdle, ever.
Twice that summer Mr. Mathes cornered me, or tried to, in the upstairs hallway, attempting to cop a feel. He had to have been in his sixties or seventies. I was eighteen. I told Mrs. Mathes after his second attempt, and she looked at me for a long moment, silently, finally telling me to get back to work. He was easy to outrun, so I let it go, and he never tried it again so maybe she said something to him? Mrs. Mathes was short and stout and efficient. They accepted cash only, and it was clear she was the one in charge of the money and reservations, the business side. It appeared to me that she and the Mister were fading away in concert with friends, albeit paying friends, all together in that place where, twenty and thirty years prior, they’d had experienced real enjoyment after the war. Many of them lost family in the Holocaust, but Mrs. Mathes didn’t talk about the past, none of the guests did either, at least not to me.
Cleaning is simply not that much fun, in my opinion, except the part where you’re done and it looks great and feels like an accomplishment. And, chambermaiding was – not too awful, just not a job you want, long-term. Nice to be done by 11a.m. most days, not nice to find dead people, nice to get decent tips occasionally and not nice to clean up other people’s messes. The Mathes Hotel had a cook who firmly believed in a daily dose of stewed prunes with breakfast, and that created problems for us, the cleaner-uppers, more than once. I remember standing on the front lawn as I crossed from the laundry back toward the hotel proper, watching almost as if in slow motion as a poor man tried his best to get down the long front porch and inside to the bathroom before crapping in his pants, and on the floor. He got about half-way. I begged and pleaded with my sister to clean it up, and in exchange I did the room on the 2nd floor, the one with the woman who had regular problems of a related kind, but I’m pretty sure my sister got the short end of the stick. I was just happy we made it through that summer without any more deaths.
Maybe the real lesson of all the different jobs I had, waiting table, clerking for my dad, chambermaiding, was to see humanity at its best and worst and everywhere in-between, to prepare me for life out in the world, outside my fan-dam-ly. I was also able to see who and what I didn’t want to be, or how I didn’t want to be. I already knew I never wanted to make people feel like shit, although life has taught me that is almost inevitable, because there are those who already feel like it, are constantly look for confirmation, and are impossible to avoid. I knew I didn’t want my dad’s business, or job (neither did he, as it happened), or my mom’s, as a teacher. I didn’t want to wait tables or open a restaurant, own a hotel or manage one. I also didn’t want to manage a disco or move up through the ranks at any of the many places I worked as a teen and twenty-something, including a stint at the MTA as an information operator, one of those people attached to a phone headset who gave out train information, now, I believe, all automated. What a dead-end that was, for me. For me. Not for others, who had and have different needs and ambitions.
If you have talent or talents, and intelligence, drive and desire, and are interested in many things the possibilities are – potentially – endless. I once loved a very handsome man who told me his life was largely defined by all the women, and men, he’d said ‘no’ to, and it’s like that, in a way (he really was so, so gorgeous). But – it’s getting to yes that matters, getting to yes and a place of purpose and meaning – if you’re lucky, that is, and don’t have to make a living right now to feed kids or whatever meter is ticking regardless of ‘purpose’, or doing something that is deemed a contribution to society. All work is a contribution of some kind or another, even if it’s solely about putting food on a plate, yours or the plate of someone you love.
Maybe none of these jobs made me a better person, a better citizen, after all, but they did allow me time and experiences I would not have had otherwise, time to grow up and find out what I wanted to do, which ultimately was rather simple and, wonder of wonders, right back where I started as a child. Why is it the simplest answers so often elude us? Not that I didn’t know what I wanted, I just wasn’t sure how to get back there, get back there through the maze of expectation and projection, safe, sound and solvent, never having once again to wait tables or do any job that was a test of endurance and generosity of spirit. And what I wanted, all along? To read, write, talk to and be with friends, grow shit, watch good content, and absorb all the political news I can stomach. That’s it. And speaking of stomachs, I also wanted to eat good food cooked by myself, and, on occasion, by others (bless them), served by others (ohmigawd, thank you, and may your waitressing nightmares be few), paid for by me without a scintilla of financial agita, including a nice fat tip. Simple pimple.
*Lloyd Dobler, from the great flick, Say Anything, written by Cameron Crowe
My dad is home and now instead of wanting to live, period, he wants to live “on his terms”, which statement I took to mean (since he removed his oxygen the moment after my sister, the nurse, left his house) that he wants to live unencumbered and free of both oxygen and a need to give up smoking. Whatever. I am exhausted and feeling blue because this is the beginning of what could be the end of the release and relief I felt after my mom’s death: release from being the decision-maker and caregiver who filled out paperwork and went to the status meetings with the staff at the nursing home, relief because care-giving my parents was, as of her death in ’07, an already eight-year-long process.
The hardest part is negotiating boundaries. What will my father allow me to do for him and to require of him, if he expects me to do so much, as in get him to the doctors and the specialists and make sure his oxygen equipment is kept clean, although it was my nurse sister who called to give me those instructions, thank you very much. Every three days some part has to be thoroughly cleaned – don’t ask me which one – I was at work and quite frankly I wasn’t in the mood to take instructions from afar regarding my dad’s care from someone who has, for years now, had minimal contact with my parents. Don’t. Get. Me. Started. I love my dad and this will all be worked out I am sure but if he chooses to begin smoking again, I may just lose it. I won’t take care of someone who won’t do that one thing for himself. I know it’s not a small thing, but rather a g.d. addiction, but Jesus H. Christ come on. I have three siblings he can call for help and there are services he can make use of, services for people like himself who are functional but need some extra looking after. I am much too tired to be making decisions and even thinking about all of this, yet I am unable to think of much else. Tonight, I will take a long hot bath, watch Project Runway (ah, escapist TV, how I love ya!) and contemplate how best to do nothing at all except love my self. I did my work-out this a.m. which I skipped yesterday due to running around to get pop back home. Oh oh oh – it’s a gorgeous sunny day and all I can think of is how much I long to be asleep in my wee bed. Only 11 more hours of awake to go……
February 9, 2010 A Drama Queen
Yes. I am a drama queen, especially when tired and stressed, both of which I have been of late. Last night I slept well and long and as a result life looks much better this morning. I have had my long walk, started a fire in the wood stove and set-up a time for lunch with a good friend I have not seen in several months; all of which are life affirming actions. And, I have taken innumerable deep breaths in the process. I was also better able to sleep because I had a talk last night with my father about some of the issues I have with my being his primary caregiver, the one who does for him because I want to, but also because I can, and because it’s the right thing to do and I just want you to know, daddy, that sometimes doing the right thing SUCKS. And he acknowledged me and all that I’ve been doing and have done this morning (admittedly in his very understated way but still…), an acknowledgement that went a long way toward making it a lot better. And yesterday afternoon I wrote. I worked on a creative writing project I have had on my desk for about a year – a project I have neglected far too often. I had dropped it in the midst of the crisis, and as I had not sat down to write for two whole days it was eating at me, adding to my sense of anger at my poor old pop, who is certainly not responsible for my lack of discipline when it comes to my writing. Hard to write when I’m a wreck, and all I really want to do is watch mind-numbing TV, but it can be done. Another deep breath. I equate writing, especially on the bigger projects, with diving in, immersing myself in another, imagined world. It takes some time and space and a lot of commitment to go there. And writing is lonely. Suck it up, drama queen, and get down to it. I shall, once I am done here, promise. My dad keeps taking his O2 off and has a follow-up appointment with his doc next week. We’ll see how his blood oxygen levels are. Maybe, drama queen, he won’t need it for ever and ever, especially if he can stay away from cigarettes. Anyway, I am not responsible for his choices, but as I reminded him last eve I do tend to get most of the picking up of the pieces when both he and I pay for the bad ones he makes. Still and all, it’s all good. I slept. I dreamt I was in love with The Office actor Jon Krasinski and we were planning a fun day and night to celebrate his birthday. Hilarious. I also told my dad that I love him. Always a good thing to know and say, drama queen.
*TURKEY SOUP… below, the continuing saga of my caregiving days from the archive, because instead of writing yesterday, I made turkey soup and turkey salad, and dang they’re good…
March 30, 2010 Flat Tires and Other Irritants
Yes, it happened again, I got a flat. I have these swanky German tires and rims (is that what they’re called??) and a general ignorance of things car (I should be checking my tire pressure regularly – as if!!!) and so yes, once again I rode on a flat until even I had to acknowledge there was something wrong. As I was on my way to my FWB’s house this was not a tragic occurrence; he loves performing manly tasks and set to almost immediately. Was it wrong to have chortled, to myself, of course, when he was unable to get the danged tire off the car? Not at all……but when a nearby friend with a t-bar and breaker bar (previously unknown technical terms I picked up last night) came by and was also unable to get the tire off you could say I was hoist with my own chortle. Sigh. Finally we surrendered and AAA was called. They sent a very nice gentleman from Hancock, N.Y., who arrived at approx. 11:30p.m. not surprising as Hancock is at least 50 miles away, and who was able to put the spare on and make me ready for my day today. Phew! I stood by looking decorative throughout, drinking my wine and mulling over my general good fortune and the ability to spare myself any hard work that might, horror of horrors, break one of my flashily painted nails. I’m going through a spring girlie-girl phase, and am enjoying it very much, thank you for asking. But darn it because of this I had to spend the morning, and a good chunk of cold hard cash, at a local tire service, a place chock full of manly men I honestly enjoy chatting up even in less than stellar circumstances. But, yeah, right, my a.m. routine got blown: writing, a long-ish slow breakfast, weights, walking or running a minimum of 35 minutes, and missing all that makes me a wee bit grouchy. And tomorrow in the early morning, take off time 8a.m., I must get my papa back to Albany Med where he will undergo more tests – stress and echo-cardiogram (did you know they can do stress tests with chemicals? I didn’t. Am I alone in being a bit creeped out by this?) – and so I think I will try to get out of bed by 5:30 and get my exercise and journal writing in so as to avoid more grouchiness. And my pot of tea, so necessary. My father seems to be making the necessary adjustments to using his oxygen. I’d like to credit myself for scaring the crap out of him by saying, “If you are not going to use the O2 and your nebulizer as instructed, we should get your affairs in order,” but I think being seriously short of breath on more than one occasion this week may have done the trick. We can only hope so. I’m feeling grouchy. Pout, pout, pout. And I’m hungry, waaaaaaaaa. Nothing edible is available in the rural hamlet I work in as the local librarian on Tuesdays, and unless I raid the larder in a local home or call and beg for grub from a very well-placed and generous feeling patron, which I just can’t do (it simply isn’t done!), I’m stuck. Arg. Flat tires stink. My next car is going to have the most boring tires and rims ever known to man!
March 31, 2010 Oy Vey!
Hello again. Life is good, although I am still running an energy deficit from Monday into Tuesday’s tire debacle. I did, however, just notice that there is no school this Friday and that means no rehearsal for the play I am directing, which blessedly means no teenagers from 7:30 p.m. Thursday until 5:00p.m. Monday night: there is a God!! When I am running an energy deficit I find adolescents very trying. They are like blood sucking vampires and, regards anything but themselves and their high octane lives (and accompanying drama-rama), rather indifferent to the rest of the planet including their long-suffering director. Gosh, talking about a drama-rama and drama queens, I definitely sound like one…..when I am running a deficit of energy I tend toward the over-dramatic. At such times I also find it hard to deal with my sisters, especially when the sister in question is being hostile. This morning I drove my papa to Niskyuna (a ‘burb of Schenectady, N.Y.), my younger sister’s home, as he is having a stress test and echo-cardiogram this afternoon at Albany Med. He insisted on not taking his oxygen along and added that he was not to have any nebulizer treatments until after the testing. Okay, fine, it’s your life although yes, tbh, I did have some concerns about him corpsing up in the car on the way there…several times nudging him to make sure he was breathing, period, only to find he was merely sleeping…. Upon arrival I was met at the door by my most excellent younger sister who is a nurse and mother of four (or should I rather have said that she is a wife and mother of four who happens also to be a nurse…you decide…) There was a frisson of tension in the air (what TF did I do, I just fucking got here!?) and after making sure my dad was in the house I got ready to make my goodbyes, “You didn’t insist on his bringing his oxygen?!”, “No, I did not; I am not in the business of holding a gun to his head.” I could have added, and did when describing the scene to my brother, “Call me if he dies and I need to pick up the corpse but please don’t let it get cold or I won’t be able to get him in my car…”. I’m a sentimental fool, aren’t I? I love my dad and yes, my sister was right when she said his going without oxygen is not just an issue for him when he is in her company all day but, and, however as the child who has been taking care of my mother (now 2 years deceased) and father for the last decade, I find it hard to sympathize. She can, in other words, deal with it and as a trained professional, who better should a crisis arise – and I doubt it will. My father made a joke about how he had to give us something to worry about and sister said “I have plenty to worry about, thank you” to him and “just go” to me and so I did, I just went. I think one or more of her children might be giving her a cause to worry as children seem to do that. I wouldn’t know for sure, not having any for which I alternately give the deepest, most heartfelt thanks and otherwise, on very rare occasions, weep with a some regret. But still I felt guilty until I got almost out of Schoharie County on my way back home. Thank goodness for my bro who, champ that he is, said – when I told him dad refused to take his O2 and Peg was angry “How is that your problem?” Exactly. I love my brother. I love my sisters too, only – they require more work.
My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked, a song that’s spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself. – Maya Angelou
N.B.: I started this piece inway back 2004, when I put my mother in a nursing home,working on it for the following 4 years until her death in 2007,and it’s a hot mess, but! here we are, and to quote Cheryl Strayed among others, ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good’. Ironically or how perfectly perfect is the fact that I do, now, have an IRA – I inherited it from my dad, my pater.
Every time my brother asks me if I’ve made an annual contribution to my IRA, I choke with laughter as well as frustrated anger and incredulity. Who the hell does he think I am, anyway, does he not know me, my life circumstances, at all? Is he clueless, or just sweetly complacent in his own settled, deeply conventional, and financially comfortable life? Have I failed so completely in communicating to my brother the very real challenges, financial and otherwise, I have faced over the last twenty-plus years out in the world on my own? Or, perhaps, it’s a combination of all of the above.
The first time I heard the term IRA I thought the speaker was talking about the Irish Republican Army and later, once I got they were actually talking banking, I figured it was a kind of savings account established to pay off the IRS or maybe a weird Irish charity, close to my original thought. Yet now when my brother asks me about “my IRA”, I merely smile tightly and say “Of course”. I mean what the what? It easier by far for me to discuss who I’m fucking, but don’t you dare ask me about money, bro. But here’s my real answer: I don’t have an IRA. Why would I have an IRA? Who do you think I am that I would be socking away money in an IRA, whatever the hell IRA really means as I refuse to look it up, or read the fliers at my bank? I don’t plan for the future; I’ve never planned for the future because until relatively recently I didn’t plan on having one. I mean, what’s the point of saving for your retirement or your eightieth birthday (that is the basic idea, right?) if you’re not going to live to have either one, you get my drift?
So here I am, in my mid-forties, not knowing really how I managed to make it here alive (luck, endurance, humor), completely baffled by tax exemptions, tax shelters, and IRAs, not to mention health insurance, retirement planning, stocks, bonds, and social security issues, all of which I gather are real things, good things? Important, even? Oh, and let’s not forget the most baffling and complicated thing of all: the grim specter of aging itself. I didn’t think I’d have to deal with that one, ever.
I’ve been thinking about killing myself since I was fourteen or to be honest, for as long as I can remember, since early childhood, and while it’s obvious I never did it there were days I came as close to it as a fat man’s right thigh is to his left on a hot, humid day waiting for the subway after a long slow hard climb down multiple flights of steep concrete stairs to a platform that reeks of piss, sweat and rat shit. That close, that rubbed raw, that clammy, and that much in pain, that aware of the edge of the platform. Other days (happier ones?) I merely let the mantra of my childhood roar through my brain as if it were the passing train itself (I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead), and I the fat man watching it go by without leaping in front of it. Its passage, the endless, roaring train, leaves me on the platform wilted, defeated, hopeless in the airless and dripping, stinking heat, alone with my too large, stuffed with emotion, body full of pain (I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead).
And it’s odd but, that thought – like the sound of my own heartbeat it was so familiar a voice in my head, day after day, year after year – no longer even enters my brain. Okay, okay, not nearly as often, as I want us to be honest, for once, with one another, shall we? Not nearly as often. Have I been saved by love, by Jesus, by Gaia? None of the above – and not by therapy or travel or spontaneous combustion, either. Time, persistence, intelligence (keep guns out of the house, don’t go to doctors, thereby restricting access to any prescription drugs), eccentricity (ten years a macrobiotic vegetarian, walking on the shady side of every street in NYC to avoid skin cancer, among other weird-ass choices), exercising daily like a mother-fucker if and only if – it comes and goes in waves – despair hasn’t suceeded in shutting me down, sending me back to bed, and, finally, more than anything a sense of humor, admittedly a very dark sense of humor, has kept me alive. Hallelujah, amen, praise whoever! I do believe that laughter is the cure!
Once (only once? many, many times) when I was very, very deeply into a long period of suicidal ideation – ideation, ideation, what a word – I was asked, “Have you had moments of suicidal ideation?” This was long ago by one of several relatively ineffectual therapists. Suidical ideation?Suicidal ideation? Hello – are you asking me if I have thought of killing myself as well as a way to do it? When have I not is more to the point, and by the way, if that’s what you’re asking, then say so bitch.
But, of course I didn’t say that, instead I lied through my teeth, parsing the word she used, breaking it down, always the language teacher’s daughter. Ideation, ideation – idea and creation. But the answer is no, it’s no – which lie may explain why she, and a flock of other therapists, were so ineffectual. Jesus H. Christ – do you really expect me to honestly tell you that?Admit that out loud, like a bubble of dialogue in the air we both breathe? No. Not gonna happen. Ask me about my sex life instead, okay? Another disaster but hell yeah, a lot more interesting. And I can make jokes about that. Easy peasy. Let’s keep it light. Ask me about money, and we can talk in generalities, as in I have none, which you know because I am only here by the grace of the sliding scale, and your status as a cheap-ass trainee therapist. But that’s it. Admit I am suicidal, on a daily basis? Never. That’s not how I get through.
Humor. Humor is how I survive. And so, there I was, not for the first time by far, in a deep, deep funk, deep funk, Barry White’s basso profundo couldn’t be more funky than I was that particular day into night, alone in my apartment (when have I not been alone, hello!?). I was hitting myself (I don’t recommend this, not very fun, or particularly effective) crying, sobbing unable to stop, crying jag is the term, I believe, hitting bottom again, again, again, finding new places to dig and this hole I’d found was so deep and I was so committed to it (also not recommended, though in general I do believe commitment to one’s goals is a good thing), digging as far as the darkness inside and all around me would allow – but no drugs or alcohol in me, I swear, because in my personal very screwy belief system, suicide is a chicken shit way out, a mistake, and a bad, wrong choice if you’re high or drunk or strung out. Conversely, committing self-murder is a brave, very brave, and even noble choice if, if, you’re dry, un-high and simply, understandably, natually at your real true honest to goodness organically achieved and completely drug or substance-free end of the fucking rope. Forgetting, conveniently, that brain chemistry, emotions, and thoughts are in themselves a kind of drug. Whatever. So there I was hitting the bottom of the half-empty (always half-empty, never half full) barrel, scraping it with my fingernails while the central theme of my life yet again kept me pressed under the dirty bilge water of my own desire for self-destruction for the umpteenth time: “You are not wanted here. Nobody wants you; you are not loved. You will never be loved or experience love. You will always, always be alone. Life is pain, life has always been pain. How much longer can you do this? How much longer should you do this? Why are you doing this? Wouldn’t it be better, much better, to end this unbearable pain?”
And in that room that night where I was hitting myself and crying and trying very hard to resist banging my head against the wall (I didn’t want to disturb the neighbors) trying to figure out how I would kill myself this time (pills, when I was a kid, my mother’s shelf full of them: Fiorinal, Demerol, Percocet, Valium, Darvon, Tylenol with codeine) and wanting very much to do it right, get it done, which meant slashing my wrists in the tub while running water helped draw the blood out and down the drain, except I couldn’t get past what a waste of water that would be, because it could be, probably is, from my childhood home in the Catskills. And I can’t wake the neighbors by shooting msyelf with a gun I don’t even own! I can’t be a bother – to EMS or EMTs, the cops, whoever might respond, because that’s thoughtless, a problem (more of one than I am already!), as well as a waste of resources not to mention of space (unloved, unlovable!). Jesus H. Christ no wonder I wanted to off myself! But then in the midst of beating myself and crying and generally wailing (quietly, quietly, remember the neighbors!) I found myself on the floor of my bedroom, with a heavy electrical cord in my hand. This, this will work! I can tie this strong cord around my neck and leverage myself into a strangulation configuration with the iron rail of my bedstead and somehow – wait – what does this cord go to anyway, this oddly heavy cord?? Is this to my lamp, because I don’t remember it being this heavy? It’s not an extension cord is it? I followed it with my eyes, and then my hands, as it was very dark, 3a.m., to its conclusion. Aha! My vibrator. My vibrator. Even I, at my very worst and lowest, couldn’t kill myself with the cord of my vibrator. My vibrator. I laughed so hard I stopped – I finally, actually stopped – crying. And so, once again, I was saved by laughter.
I got up off that floor and sat on the side of my bed, laughing so hard, laughing more and more, escaping – evicting – my despair as, for a moment, I imagined the pot-bellied cop or wasted, wired EMT picking the cord up and away from my neck, following it to the same conclusion: laughter, incredulity, sharing it with the rest of the crew to general hilarity, a lightening of whatever mood my corpse had crushed. And of course it would have come on somewhere within my death throes – slightly thrumming still, bbbzzzzzzzzzzzz, bbbzzzzzzzzz, sending my final Con Ed bill sky high – another thing for my dad to freak out over, covering his actual emotion, ‘Goddamned kid can’t even shut the appliances off; doesn’t she know this is why we’re dependent on foreign oil?!’
I crouch and cower, still, in the shadow of the preoccupations my parents, depression-era babies, shoved at me, preoccupations tightly wound together with the baby-boomer’s so-called sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s: don’t you forget to turn off the lights in a room when you leave it and don’t you dare screw around like those awful kids a generation older than yourself. Fuck all you baby-boomers anyway, the selfish generation, we younger tween gens follow in your entrails, we wade through the shit you leave behind, you self-absorbed, narcissistic assholes, waiting with anticipatory glee for the day when you are all incapacitated, drooling, demented, wallowing in your own excrement in a nursing home where the orderlies (social security and Medicaid were killed by the excesses of your generation, thanks!!) are paid very little and therefore do very little. Oh and by the way, you raised your kids to be selfish spoilt little shits, just like your goddamned selves; they never visit.
Why do I say such things? Why do I think such things? I am such a bad person (I once would have thought); I should kill myself (I once would have concluded). Simply debating myself over life and death, playing whack-a-mole with my mantra, I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead, debating every single day between good (deserves to live) and bad (evil bad sinful hell-bound no reason to live) me, was exhausting, and death was where I would find rest, blessed rest.
In grade school I stepped on every crack, every day on the way home and yet still, there she’d be – mother – waiting to mete out tonight’s cruelties or, schizophrenic, momentary fondness, depending on her mood and in what way she imagined daddy had betrayed or ignored her and favored me that day, that week, me being the chosen extension and reflection of his wrongs, and her competition for his affection. Why did she have to pick me, why say he loves me more than you, mother, and has from the moment I was born, why make me your rival and enemy, why me? Why do you tell me I will one day sleep with my own father when I am just nine and ten and twelve years old, taking your place in the ‘marriage bed’? Why? Stupid unanswerable questions – but perhaps just as simple as the mountain being climbed: because it’s there, asshole, thus, because you were there. And although a piece of my unformed child’s brain knows it’s not me, the real me deep down inside, who she designates as her cross to bear, the ruination of her life, the mistake, the unwanted child, still, I live through it and yes, I take it personally as in I take it into my person. I take it into my person. And for this and for other reasons I begin to want to die – to make her better, to make it better. I am four, five and six years old and I fear my mother and her hatred of me. I crave her love. I crave her approval, the imprimatur of her positive attention, giving me permission to write my story in something other than my own blood, draining away.
I fantasize winning a prize big enough to win her over, to transform her view of me to that of my older sister, golden child (married to the Doctor’s son), or older brother, the son and heir (the one with the IRAs, the stocks and bonds), or younger sister, the baby, the pet, the savior (thank you Jay-sus, no more kids after that one, just a yes, please, free me now, free at last, blessed hysterectomy). I fantasize multiple scenarios and various schemes in which magically my secret and secretly damaged self will be transformed into loveable, undamaged, pure. Loved. Wanted.
But. In all my years of excellence in school, in sports, in band, chorus, drama club, Honor Society, Cheerleading, audio visual club – you name it – all that excellence, an excellence she found baffling, I could never do it, never win her love, her approval. And there were things that happened, to me, as a child – not your fault mother, but I feared that if I said anything, showed any vulnerability – no. I can’t. Secrets. Toxicity. More to hide, more to hate.
Turns out she knew, at least about some of it. Sexual abuse at the hospital by person or persons unknown, when I was there alone, eighteen months old, sick with pneumonia. My mother was home recovering from her hysterectomy, with a 6 week-old baby, as well as her 4 and 5 year old children to look after. My dad was working seven days a week, but came to spend the nights in the hospital with me, but not the days, not the evenings. They had a woman, a nurse’s aide, helping at our house on Main Steet, Nancy A., who stayed with my mom overnight, and during the day, but she had a young family, too. The family doctor had always been worried about me, he said, the summer after my mother died, because even as young as I was, even though they all believed I was too young to remember the act, the acts, my mother seemed to believe it was my fault. Mom. Some random person (staff? fellow patient?) inserting self or sticking things (a constant nightmare of my childhood, reliving what was unpronouncable) into her 18-month old’s vagina.
As a teenager I began to hate my mother as much as I hated myself, always, always, however, with my eye on her, waiting for some sign that I was really ok, that this had just been a test of my resolve, and of my character. She always said suffering was good for the soul, my tarnished Catholic soul. Maybe she was just playing with me.
Here is my IRA, brother, on this page. Here I will deposit my truths and record my losses, which are many. Here too I will record a number of gains, among them the saving of my own life. Because you told me I was worthless, mother, and a mistake, I made mistakes, accepted less than I was worth. Because you told me I would never marry, mother, I didn’t, although I could have, many times. Defiance works in weird ways, when you are as twisted as I made myself for you, as I made myself to hide myself, who I was, from you, from others, from myself. Because you told me I would never have a child, I didn’t, yet more than you saying that, I am okay with childlessness because I knew I didn’t want to do to a child what you did to me. I would not bring life forth while I was white knuckling my own. Because you told me I would never find a man who would love me, that I was wrong and bad and flawed – too strong for a man, too smart for a man, not beautiful like my sisters, too much, too much, too much, and all of it bad – I avoided intimacy and craved affirmation of all that was worthless in me, that which you called out, you, who knew me better than anyone else. Or so I used to believe.
Mother, mater, madre, maw, momma, mammacita. And more, those things large and small that happened to me that I never shared while you were alive, afraid it would only confirm and affirm what you thought about me, said about me, dirty bad horrid unnatural girl, my father’s second wife, his future lover.
Patrominy is what we inherit, including our names, from our fathers. Matrimony is marriage, the act of, the celebration of. How rich! I reclaim and define matrimony anew, as that which we inherit from our mothers, including the eggs all women, all girls, are born with; me a potential life as an egg inside her, and as a baby, she inside my grandmother. How crazy is that? Then my eggs, in me, when she gave me life. Her brilliance, her darkness, all mine, until I decide, I parse and choose, I let it go.
I saved and saved and saved images of my childhood and of you, mother, and of you, father, and of my siblings, and the things you said and I made myself survive on humor and the slim hope that one day it (me? life?) would get better and y’know what? It did. You slowly lost your mind, momster, and you lost your power, and I got clear, stronger, better; you lost your mind mother, and then you died, you died, and my life got a lot better. No self-death, no suicide, no train running me over – just you, made into ash, six feet under. I struggle with forgiving you every day. I struggle with forgiving myself for wasting so much of my life, and for denying myself love and the possibility of a family of my own for all these years, terrified someone would see in me what you saw, terrified I’d do to an innocent child what was done to me. Not just by you, but. By you, too, mother.
I struggle too with forgiving my brother for not having a clue about my life and me and what a world of difference there was in the way in which we were raised. He is a good man, I know this, and he won’t know what I won’t tell him. Will I tell him? All of it? Including the things, the events, the deaths in life, I haven’t even admitted to myself? How lucky he was, being born a boy. Yes, we all have our struggles, men and boys, women and girls, but some are challenged it seems merely by the choice of which well-lit, broad, and tree-lined street to walk down, while others are faced with having to walk down what turns out to be a very dark, narrow, and unsafe street, alone. No one ever said life was fair.
Dear brother, I thought about killing myself every day from the time I was fourteen (and earlier, much earlier, truthful, now, at last – from the time I was 6 and 7 and 8) until I was almost forty, and I struggle to let it go and have faith that all will be well and all will be very well. And it is a struggle, not every day, not all days, not even most days – nowadays. But there are times I have to hide and work hard to stay in the moment, letting go of the past, being thankful right here and now, even if I’ve lost sight of what there is to be thankful for, right here and now.
Surviving. I am grateful I survived my own idea creation, my ideation, of self-murder. I have saved myself, at least, even if I have no IRA, no savings, no 401k, no children of my own, no husband or ex-husband, no other long time up close (God no!) witness to the person that is me. I do have hope. I am being truthful, now, which means I may just finally move on, grow, surrender to curiousity and possibility. Let the past go. It’s over. Mother is dead. Anything is possible. Anything. Life itself. Love. Who knows?
“Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.”- Carl Jung
