Month: June 2020

A bubble of despair sits on my chest. It’s heavy and it’s making its presence known. If someone looks at me sideways – or doesn’t – it’s going to explode into rivulets of tears down my face. This bubble welled up out of nowhere, I’ve already had one explosion today. In my bedroom, dark and deep, where no one could hear or see it. But apparently my grief and fears want an audience because it’s back, and larger than ever.

My husband sits down with me on the couch and just like that the bubble pops. Baby Girl doesn’t know what to do when this happens, she wants to cuddle and pat my arm but she is shooed into the playroom because “Mommy is sad.” Mommy IS sad. It’s the type of sad borne out of an unableness to fix what’s wrong. Mommy is used to fixing what is wrong.

What do you do when you no longer have control? How do you watch your loved one wither and morph into something you don’t recognize, and which doesn’t recognize you? I’m not sure, I tell my brother, that she knows exactly who we are, but she knows we are important to her. She knows she loves us. She knows she wants us there. She does not call me by my name.

She is in the hospital, and I am sitting by her watching her sleep. I have moved a chair so that I can finally hold her hand, after three months of not touching. I rub the soft spot between her thumb and forefinger. The corners of her mouth are turned down and there are tears at the edges of her eyelids. Her chin is a mess of black and blue from where she fell. There is some dried blood around her mouth. I  notice long hairs on her chin and upper lip that I know she would be mortified by if she knew they were there. I am struck by an urge to pluck them for her, but obviously I do not. She has gained weight and her arm is a bit swollen from putting the IV in. She wakes up and looks at me briefly. She is calm and for that I am grateful.

My mom has been in the ER and then in a hospital room since Wednesday night at 11 pm. It is now Friday at 8 am. I talked to the ENT that transported her to the hospital and was assured the hospital had all my information and would call me. I hear nothing further all night long. When I called the facility where she lives at 9 am Thursday morning I am assured she’s in her room, resting. I am relieved and go on about my day. Thursday afternoon at 4 pm a phone call tells me she has been admitted to the hospital. From …. where? I ask. From her room? What is going on? No, she was never brought back to the facility. She was in the ER until 1 or 2 pm today when they finally admitted her.

SHE WAS IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM ALL ALONE FOR 16 HOURS?! Horrified, I immediately call the ER she was taken to and the person that answers was actually my mom’s nurse. What on earth? I ask. Why did no one call me? I had no idea she was there by herself! The ER nurse said that they did not have any phone numbers. And you couldn’t call the facility and GET my number? “No,” he said. “I didn’t bother to do that.”

Y’all. Have you ever felt so enraged that you could jump down that phone line and rip someone’s F&(#$&% balls off?

You didn’t bother? I slowly state, just to clarify what he said. “No,” he said, and “I can see this conversation isn’t going anywhere so can I just transfer you to the third floor where she is now?”

I get that he was probably pretty busy but seriously WTF. She has Alzheimer’s – I am SURE the ENT told them she has advanced dementia. She was all alone in a place she did not recognize, could not speak for herself, and did not have anyone to advocate for her. She must have been absolutely terrified. That nurse took advantage of the situation and knew that my mom could not understand, and could not speak for herself and HE decided she would not remember and therefore was not AN ACTUAL PERSON who needed a family member. To top it all off, I also found out that one visitor per person is actually now allowed at that hospital so I could have been there with my mom the entire time. Actually physically present.

I. Can’t. Even.

I called my brother. He promised me that he would “do what he does.” Heads will roll and if that nurse isn’t fired I will be surprised (and pissed off.) I am usually all about forgiveness, and making mistakes and people being people and screwing up. NOT THIS TIME. In no way does that nurse NOT deserve to be fired. He clearly did not care about his patient. Her emotional needs were not considered. He did not care when he was speaking to me, he simply wanted to pass me along and get me off his back.

There are so many things that are wrong here. Mom is finally back in her room, with her cat, whom she does know is named Margaret. I believe she is probably doing as well as she can be. She was not actually injured from either her fall, or her prolonged stay in the emergency room. She doesn’t actually know what happened – she insisted that she “didn’t do it.” Whatever IT was in her mind – she was sure she wasn’t at fault. I can hear her, in my mind, and I know she was scared.

There is so much more I could say about being with her in the hospital, and how she was, and what my thoughts were. About how we finagled the system and got my Dad to meet us in the lobby so he could see her and hold her hand for five minutes before I took her “home.” I have so much to say. There is so much that I feel. But grief is the top emotion, and grief is what causes the bubble of despair. I am supposed to be my mom’s advocate. I was denied the opportunity to be there for her, and I am filled with anger.

So today I am a mushroom – hiding in the dark and hopefully gaining a little strength by being alone so that next time, next time, I can be there for her in all the ways that matter. I am her advocate. I am her daughter. She is not alone, no matter what that ER nurse thought. She has people. SHE HAS ME.

We are at the zoo, Baby Girl is having a screaming fit in the souvenir shop. She’s clutching a blue and white striped stuffed zebra and weeping, wailing and moaning that she wants a decoupage owl as well. She knows she only has twenty dollars to spend – her birthday money. She knows the two items together are way over her budget and she has been told she has to choose.

We spent time discussing how much money she would have and what she could expect to buy with it in the car on the way to the zoo. She has been looking forward to going for a week, every day asking if it’s the right day yet. I do everything I can to prepare her for the day. I tell her we will do the water park part of the zoo if there is time, but that we are going to see the animals first. She insists on giraffes (of course) and zebras and a snowcone. She wants to ride the train. I pay $8 for a two minute train ride. We do everything she wants to do.

Then we get to the water park and look at our watches. There really isn’t time to enjoy it and with COVID they are only letting a certain number of people in at a time, so there is no way to tell how long the wait will be. It does NOT seem that they applied this same theory to the zoo itself, though, as it was crowded and plenty of people in my six foot space bubble at any given time.

Baby Girl sees the picture of the water park – she points and yells for us to look! She’s excited beyond measure. She’s also exhausted. She only slept eight hours last night and she always needs at least ten. There are two reasons she doesn’t get enough sleep – one is that if I have lessons or we do anything out of the ordinary she will not go to sleep on time. She has classic FOMO syndrome – Fear of Missing Out. She fights sleep like a two penguins fighting for the same rock. She’s NOT GIVING IN. She gives me a hard time every single night over every single thing. And it makes me tired, and angry. I don’t understand her willingness to piss me off just to play up and be silly at bedtime. She definitely doesn’t take the easy, compliant road. Melatonin is our best friend. Her sleepy pill wins the day every single night. 99% of the time she falls asleep right beside me and I end up moving her to her pallet on the floor.

The second reason is that she wakes up too early. I wake up early every day. Usually it’s because of the cat yowling at me. The cat is 14 – surely they don’t live much longer right? But if Baby Girl senses that I am awake she jumps up and follows me. She will not lay back down – she will not relax and go back to sleep. Therefore, more often than not, she does not get enough sleep.

So back to the water park. I lean down to explain that we will save the water park for another day. You can imagine the response. Eyes roll back, crocodile tears well up and she is bawling – noooooo I wanna swimmmmm….. – I try explaining every which way I can and end up just turning and walking away. Which is very hard to do when you know that she clearly has a fear of being left and also when you have a fear of her being snatched. But I safely walk away and she does dry it up and follow me. Yay I think – crisis mostly averted!

Which brings us to the prize shop…… I am standing there completely bewildered. I know why she is acting this way. I also know that I am embarrassed and that I am not very sure what to do. She screams loudly when I grab her arm to tell her to cut that shit out. Anytime you grab her arm she screams and tries desperately to free herself – at home, at the store, in the damn zoo shop. It’s the worst possible thing she can do to me. I am certain someone is going to think I am abusing her, or worse, kidnapping her. I make her pay for the zebra and we’re out.

We leave the gates and she tells me she has to pee. SERIOUSLY KID?!?!?!? I know she’s going to fall asleep the instant we get in the car (she does) and before I can find a bathroom. I drive in peace for thirty minutes. Then she starts to cry. She starts to cry before she wakes up. She then wakes up fully and is crying even louder. She has to pee. I know!!! I know, Baby Girl, I am working on it! It takes me twenty minutes to find a bathroom – y’all know the stretch of I-35W where there is absolutely nothing for miles? That’s where she woke up.

At any rate we finally do find a bathroom and some doritos and we drive the rest of the way home. I turn the TV on for her and lay down on my bed – I pass out for thirty minutes.  I often feel like most Mama’s would be able to handle all of this way better than I do. I often feel weary and inept. I tell myself most Mama’s must have more patience, or more alcohol, or something. I cannot deal with Baby Girl’s temper. It frustrates me at the best of times. She is also always wanting MORE. Do I chalk this up to wanting to explore life at a record pace? Do I indulge her passions? Do I think wow this kid wants to learn and do and I should encourage that?

Yeah… no I don’t think any of those things. I think how exhausting she is. I think about how she is never satisfied. I think how do I make her more grateful? I think how do I make her SLOW DOWN?! I think when can I just relax?!

Have a moment with me, mama’s. Life is hard and passionate children make it harder. I pray that someday all this drama and persistence will turn into something positive for her and into a nice shady front porch with a drink in my hand for me.