I Am, They Are

16 Oct 2022 2 Comments

by Denise in Alzheimer, anger, Family, loneliness Tags: , , , , ,

During the summer my brother and I, after speaking with my mother’s doctors, took her car away. There was no choice in this. She is 90 and has Alzheimer’s. She was getting lost driving to places she’d been going for years, she would park her car and forget where it was. That was the least of it. Driving is deadly dangerous for her and anyone who might come in contact with her. And though we needed no proof, when my brother pulled her car out of the garage the driver’s side fender was bashed in from something she hit, and hit hard. The other side of the fender was also banged up. When asked, my mother didn’t know how it happened.

Back then I was enlisting the help of Uncle M. At 88, he is her younger brother, one of two who remain alive. My mom worked for him for years and he had been giving her $1500 a month for a long time, money that went a long way toward supplementing her social security and the small pension left to her since my dad died nine years ago. Uncle M was also the only uncle I felt close to. For years I’d dreamt of what my life would have been like if only he’d been my dad. When we had to take my mom’s car away, I told him we’d set up car service and Uber on her phone, asked if he’d help out, maybe take her to her weekly hair appointment on Fridays. Of course I will, he said.

Except that a few days later he called to say that my mother is an excellent driver, and really, we shouldn’t take her car away. I explained – again – that there wasn’t a choice. We had it on her doctors’ authority, but common sense alone dictated. This only agitated my uncle who insisted that if we take her car away, we were going to kill her. “She will be dead if you do this,” he said. He went on to say that he wouldn’t have to take her to hair appointment because if we took her car away, she would be dead by the time Friday rolled around. My last shot was to explain that she could not only hurt herself if she kept driving, she could hurt, maybe kill, other people. “That is not my concern,” he informed me. “My sister is my concern. And if you take her car away, you will kill her.”

It was after that that he stopped giving her money. I can make no sense of this except that he is angry at both my brother and me, so he stopped giving money to my mom…to spite us? Since the summer, we have had to find an aide to go to my mom’s house as she needs company and she needs help getting around now that she has no car. My mother has to pay for this aide. I tried to appeal to my uncle to keep giving her that money as things are very tight for her without it. His answer was that she should spend all the money she has and then we will talk. “All the money she has?” My mom has next to nothing. There’s a reverse mortgage on her house which is mostly spent. There’s a small amount in her savings which isn’t going to stave off much of anything. I wasn’t asking anything of my uncle except to keep doing what he’d been doing. And I would add that my uncle is a wealthy, single man with no children.

I would like to say I see how sick my uncle is – I have seen this for years, but never had it directed at me. I would like to say that, seeing him as sick, I treated him with empathy. But that would be a lie. I told him exactly what I thought about this craziness and then some. I said things to him that others could not believe I said when I repeated the conversation. Nothing that wasn’t true, but things designed to hit below the belt. Things that, according to any 12-step program, I should be making amends for, because my intent was to hurt, to wound, to scar.

I have taken a good look at all this. I have written about my resentments, I have tried to see my part (it always takes two), I have spoken about this to others. I have asked Philip to help me let go of this damn resentment because it only hurts me. Then last week I found out my uncle took my mom out to dinner and I had a moment of grace. Because instead of seeing my uncle as the enemy, I saw two elderly people going out for an early dinner. I wondered what they talked about, what they were thinking about. I wondered if my uncle was watching my mother, who’d taken care of him in so many ways since he was a child, slipping away. My uncle is a recluse, does not have many people in his life. He’s gone from five brothers to now only one – the one he doesn’t get along with – and my mom is just not who she was. My heart hurt for all of it, for inevitability and what often seems the impossibility of life. And I decided I’d rather my heart break than live in rage and resentment. 

Which lasted a couple days until my sister-in-law called to tell me that my uncle had my mother drive to dinner. He what? Your mother told me, she said. He had her drive to dinner and back. Re-enter eye-popping, jaw-clenching, stomach-churning outrage.

My impulse was to call him and chew him out, or call my cousin Maria to have her chew him out. Get her on my side, once and for all. My uncle calls Maria when he wants to know about my mom. I have asked her multiple times to tell him to call either me or my brother (he is angry at both of us) if he wants information. And I have believed my cousin would do that. Except that over the summer, I was there when my uncle called her for just that reason. Her phone rang, her eyes widened when she who it was, she looked at me, looked back at the phone, back at me and said in a strangled voice, “It’s him.” I’m right here, I told her. If he asks about my mom, tell him I’m here and I’ll speak with him. 

Except she couldn’t. She stuttered and mumbled, and wound up saying that I was there but I was in the other room, did he want her to get me? His answer was shouted loud enough for me to hear. I could not understand – how could she betray me, how could she let him off the hook? Are you afraid of him, I asked when she hung up? She shrugged. No – he just yells and yells and then I can ’t think straight.

I have to wonder how long I will continue to look for love and acceptance where it cannot be found, why I have not yet learned that no matter how hard I squeeze a stone not a single drop of blood will flow. As furious as I was, that was the moment the shift began. My anger, my sense of “betrayal” was born of my refusal to open my eyes to who I was dealing with, something I should have learned a long, long time ago. Insisting anyone behave the way I want is exercising a control I do not have. Being smart about someone is knowing who they are and understanding what to expect. It is not only smart, it’s the only way to take care of myself. I was raised in a family prone to outrage and drama. I have distanced myself from them. Yet when I’m with them, there go I. Just because I indulge less does not absolve me from behavior I abhor in others.

I have suffered this. I have reeked of self-pity. I have seesawed between believing I am “better” than they to being unfit to grace the bottom of their shoes. And I am lonely because they all get along, don’t see as I do, and I feel invisible. It’s past time to get my head on straight. In truth I haven’t much in common with any of them. I have a romantic notion of how it was growing up in this big, loud, boisterous Italian family with our every-Sunday dinners and wasn’t it wonderful to have all of us together? But it wasn’t always so wonderful. Even then I didn’t feel I belonged and since I didn’t yet have the ability to reason why, I blamed a big part of it on my dad. All my cousins had the same last name, but since my mom was the only female, she changed her name when she married, black-and-white proof of my difference.

Truth is, I am, they are. Given my mother’s condition, there will be times I’m forced to deal with my family. Like when I found out Uncle M let my mom drive. Something had to be done, no? So I did it. I breathed, then I breathed some more. I spoke to my sister-in-law, to my brother. We agreed there was nothing we could do about it, that screaming at my Uncle would upset us and probably satisfy him.  I cannot control this. I cannot make my Uncle see the danger, I cannot make my mother understand. And I sure as hell can’t sit and seethe with resentment over something I can do nothing about. 

© 2022 Denise Smyth

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Covid 19 – Addiction Part 5

19 Aug 2020 3 Comments

by Denise in Addiction, alcoholism, Corona Virus, Covid-19, Death, Death of a Child, Grief, loneliness Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Covid-19 or not, there are people looking to hire. Sometimes I’ll send out a resume. The job has to be fairly close so the drive isn’t long, salary somewhat close to mine because much as I bitch about work I’m paid well for what I do, no insistence on Powerpoint or advanced proficiency in Word and Excel because I’m more basic proficiency when it comes to those. Go learn Power Point, everyone says. It’s easy. Sure. Easy. I spent over $300 taking advanced Word and Excel classes. The Adult School I went to does not allow handouts, so we were being taught complicated formulas without notes to refer back to. Plus nothing we learned is anything I needed to use when I was working and when it comes to software, use it or lose it. I could’ve taken that money and bought a lovely pair of shoes and at least I’d have had something to show for it.

But I do need a job. My boss hired me back after initially laying me off due to Covid, but business didn’t pick up so its back to unemployment and serious job hunting. This feels surreal. In part I feel protected because with unemployment I’ll have about three more months of income. But that’s it – the reality is I need a job and I am terrified. The idea of presenting myself to someone…who would want me? What do I have to offer? This year my age has come into play. I am 62. I have long felt that my age doesn’t matter – I look younger than I am, I’m in good health, I have a lot of energy. But faced with job hunting I feel old. Who wants to hire someone close to retirement age? What I know is that all of this is a racket in my head that I should ignore and just look for a job. My heart and my head are at war.

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July 2019. I was suffering the loss of my girlfriend and tired of smoking weed. So I stopped. And there it was – the space in my life I didn’t know how to fill, still don’t know how to. Over and over I told myself it was up to me, but I couldn’t come up with what I wanted to do. I was lonely and grieving the end of a relationship and all I did was sit around hating myself because there was  a whole world out there and I couldn’t join in. I was living in a world I didn’t belong in and I didn’t know how to be okay with my life. I told myself to travel, take yoga classes, go for a walk, call someone , figure out how to get out there and do it. I was – I am – paralyzed.

Before my lay off, I had a long talk with my boss. He told me his history of drinking and how he got himself under control. How every three months or so he and his girlfriend call up their friends, get in an Uber, go to the city and have a blast. Most of the time when I’m listening to someone I’m deciding who is living the better life and I am always the loser. Not that I need to go have a “blast” but just the idea of wanting to do something and having enough friends to do it with. I am never part of a crowd. I don’t have a group – I have a friend here and a friend there and no matter how many here-and-theres it is never enough. I am lonely but I don’t reach out.

AA seemed a solution. It’s a spiritual program and people make friends there. People love it there. People are always talking about their gratitude about being sober and of all the friends they’ve made along the way. If I say that like it’s a bad thing, I don’t mean it that way. It’s more of a foreign thing. I don’t get how to become part of it. Maybe it’s more accurate to say I don’t want to do the things to be more part of it. I could join a group, take a commitment, go to their business meeting, call people. Now that there are Zoom meetings instead of live meetings it makes it even harder. I resist.

I went back to AA last September. In March the pandemic hit. Much as I’ve been faithfully Zooming in on meetings through it all, I never stop wondering what I’m doing there. I try to pay attention but I don’t feel like these people do. At least the ones who are sharing. I’m often in meetings of upward of 50 people, and maybe 15 of them share in any given meeting. Surely there are people who feel disconnected, who are uncomfortable with others’ depiction of how God works in their lives because much as AA teaches to find your own conception of a higher power, most people buy the one where God’s directing your life and you have to sit back and accept the ride. I actually don’t have too much argument about that. At least the acceptance part. I don’t believe in a God that’s involved in the minutiae of my life, but I do believe life is a force greater than me. I can’t control it, I can only stop resisting it.

And that includes Philip’s death. Lately I feel crushed when I think of him – how in the world am I supposed to go on when he will never again come through my door? It’s been seven-and-a-half years and I am still deeply lonely for him. I yearn for him. So how do I hold my grief yet try to live? The loneliness in living is coupled with my grief and what I need to learn is how to hold two things together. Grieving him yet learning to live. It’s not a betrayal but it feels like one. I thought I was past this but grief is a spiral, not a straight line. As is life. I still struggle with wanting to live. It feels easier to give in to the grief, to let it suck the life out of me…is this an excuse? Do I use his death as a reason not to live? My grief is real, yet is it honest?

I go to meetings because I am trying to find something that eludes me. I drank because it made me feel better. By the third drink there was a “click” – I was home. Life was okay. I could talk to people, I could connect, temporary as it was. That’s what I ‘m looking for – that “click.” There are people in meetings who have clearly clicked. Their earnestness fascinates me. How did they get there? How are they not consumed by their darkness? Am I that unique that it can’t be me? That can’t be so, yet here I am stuck and waiting, waiting for my click.