Today I said good bye to my mother. Today I said good bye to today´s mother. To my mother of today, not of 3 years ago when I left, not the one of January next year when I will be back. The today one, the one I just 20 minutes ago said good bye to, she is the one who has been so so gently kissing my cheek all day, telling me how much she loves me and looking at me so tenderly. She is the one that finally understands that I am her little girl even though she still has no recollection of having raised me. She is the one that understands that she doesnt understand and so she just tucks my arm into her arm and leans on me. She knows that her friends came to have pizza at her house tonight and that they are all talking to eachother because she doesnt know how to talk to them. She knows.

She has a new toy, a small duck on a keychain that has a tiny button that makes the duck go "cuac!" when she presses it. She can never find the button and just presses it´s head instead and gets frustrated. We have been working on remembering where the "cuac" button is for the last two days and luckily now she mostly remembers. So, when her friends were eating pizza in her house and she was so happy to have them here but wasn´t part of the conversations, she would say "oh yeah, well..." and push the duck button. "oh yeah, well cuac!...that´s what I think about that!" and this will crack her up. And her friends will laught too, sort of nervously and she will feel like they are all laughing at her joke. But I think she knows this too. There is an expression that passes quickly at the end of the other expressions that tells me that she knows she has just done something very rediculous because she can`t. She can`t do what they do. Because she has always been brave this way. She throws her ego out the window in order to enjoy herself. She doesn`t give a shit what you think.

This is the mother I said good bye to today. I dont know who the mother I will say hello to in January will be. She may not remember my name, she will definatly be using words even less acuratly than she does now. But she has been so happy and sweet lately, not half as worried or tense as the mother I met again in February for the first time in 2 years. This mother will feel very lonley when she finds herself spending her days alone again. How will that lonliness shape her? Why am I leaving?

I found this painting today in a pile of magazines, scrap paper and old mail. I have no idea when she painted it, but it is not very old. It blows my mind. I think she must feel like that fish laying on top of the water instead of in it with the rest of us. She will never admit vocally that something is wrong. But sometimes I know she knows and it breaks my heart.

Strangest thing. Going to see my mom sort of centers me now. In all this uncertainty, cell phone charger in the warehouse I am staying in SF, bike and flip-flops in a friend´s house in Oakland, my negatives and photo paper in El Cerrito, not-really-boyfriends away on trips, work that isn’t my work and pays badly.

Today I took a nap and awoke panicked and anxious, convinced that I needed to join the marching band in Rio or learn the piano as soon as possible or I would certainly go my own degree of nuts. That I had to have a heart-to-heart with someone and tell them how much they meant to me. With my best Oaktown girlfriend who hasn’t been able to see that her eccentricities are her superpower. With that secret boyfriend I had 4, 5 years ago. Tell him that even though we needlessly kept it from everyone at the time, and even though we see each other every week now and pretend it never happened, that our year together wasn’t nothing. That it happened, and that it made a permanent mark on me.

Then I stopped by mom´s to pick up my negatives and to spend a little time. I sat down next to her and she put her arm around me. We were both completely concentrated with that gesture, into the point of a pin. I realized this was the best form of communication I have with anyone right now. That this moment was the most useful and true one I´ve had in at least 48 hours.

How could this thing, this bizarre illness that continues to twist and turn my mother´s mind, that has been the source of all above mentioned instability, that has caused me to give up everything I worked for, that has caused me so much sadness; how could sitting with her be what gives me the most peace?

Beats me.

Today I took my mom to a movie in Berkeley. We went on BART. I think I traumatized us both. I have to put the ticket in the turnstile machine for her and have to tell her urgently to GO when before the gate closes while I process my own ticket at the same time. Then we go up a smelly concrete hallway and escalator and wait on an equally concrete platform with strangers and a big chasm in front of us until a big metal train starts coming towards us.

“Whoa! They are trying to kill me!”
This is a phrase she uses as kind of a joke when something seems dangerous to her. I think it is the kind of humor that shows how brave she is. And it’s pretty funny the way she says it.

Then we get on a car that smells like the alcohol that comes out of the huge man playing gangsta rap on his cell phone behind us. I try to hold her hand the whole time but she always ends up taking mine, cupping it really, folding my fingers in onto my palm and enveloping it in her two soft, skin and bones hands. They always tremble just a tiny bit and I remember that some dementia patients develop Parkinson’s.

She is like a teenager, both terrified and exhilarated by the unfamiliarity and the vulnerability she feels here. I hope she is not more terrified.

Once outside, on Shattuck Ave., five blocks from the real estate office she worked only a few years ago, she looks around and says
“This is just a whole other world!”

I think maybe she is right. Maybe worlds are only divided by time and memory, not space or matter.

A walk down the street brings us past nuts talking to themselves (“that guy is really not happy.”), homeless guys shouting guilt-trip pan handles. She searches her pockets for change that isn’t there every time. Once we get stuck next to one at a red light. She tries to explain to him earnestly why we haven´t given him any money. He talks to her aggressively, I shoot him a dirty look, drag her across the street and distract her with pleasantries about the old buildings. Why have I brought her here? I feel guilty and irresponsible.

There is a conflict at the popcorn counter. I am paying for everything and the matinee ticket is much more expensive than I expected. So I order a medium popcorn for us to share. Once I pay, she says she needs to have a drink too. I tell her the prices are ridiculous, we´ll do without. She says she´ll pay for it, I remind her she has no money with her, she points to my wallet and says “you do.”

I heard her away like a dog sniffing at something on the street and we get half way up the stairs before I realize just how fucking insignificant the $4 are and how petty I have been and we go back for a drink. Now there are two people in line ahead of us. The probably brilliant 20-year-old CAL student selling popcorn is getting treated like he probably doesn’t know how to count to ten by a blonde mother my age. My mom doesn’t understand why we are waiting and keeps telling me to ask the guy for a drink. We finally get up, I order one small coke and she says “two”. I say “One.” And tell her she can drink the whole thing. We resemble each other so much, it must be obvious that we are mother and daughter. The poor popcorn kid must think I am a monster.

Other times we get warm fuzzy looks from strangers and I feel like I am getting undue credit. That if she didn’t have dementia, we wouldn’t be walking down the street hand in hand but instead we would probably be arguing. She might be espousing advice that I condescendingly disregard. Instead we are walking down the BART tracks in El Cerrito on a Saturday evening and she comments that the weed-overgrown gutter on the side of the trail is “really creepy.” That she loves that tree but she doesn´t like them big because then it´s all dark and also, again, creepy.

A woman is coming our direction on a bicycle and I gently pull my mom to me by her elbow so the woman can pass. She gives us a long, steady, smiling “how sweet” look because she thinks she has just witnessed a moment of divine tenderness between an adult mother and daughter. She doesn’t know that if my mother weren’t half-vegetable at age 53 that I would probably have yelled “Mom! What are you doing? Get out of the way!”

I don´t know why I am writting this. Why you have read it. I don´t even know if she liked the movie.

I don´t know what the moral of the story is.

Quotes and tid-bits:

" Sometime it seems like you are afraid of Joel."

"Only some people can do it for you, you know, when you need stuff. I used to have this boyfriend who I liked a lot. But there was something a little off about him. And then I just couldn´t do it anymore. He got really upset when I told him."
(I think she is talking about this guy Rob here. I remember when she broke up with him. I was about 6 and eating Cheeri-o´s in the kitchen and he was yelling as usual. He started to stomp his feet and the floor shook so much, I got under the table thinking it was an earthquake.)

"We are eachothers´mothers."

One day she started to try and tell a story about me in third person. It didn´t make any sense but I think it came from some comment Joel made to her about me. She didn´t realize that she was talking to the person she was talking about. She started to say that sometimes Joel is not so sure about "her". And then some more stuff I didn´t understand. I asked her to explain more and I guess I revealed in my tone that I was the one she was talking about. And she said "Oops!" and kind of laughed, tried to back track and changed the subject completely. This cracks me up.

drawing by Janice Maupin (my mom)

I want to convince my mom that I am her daughter. I don´t know how. It´s not that she doesnt recognize me exactly. We are not at that point yet and I would like to prolong it. In my last few months in Córdoba, every time that I talked to her on the phone, she always said the same thing: "It´s time for you to come home now. I´m your mom. You are my little girl."

Now back, I found the house full of old photos that she has been taking out of boxes. There are a lot of me at all ages and she looks at them and shows them to me affectionatly. But I don´t know if she knows that I, standing next to her, am the same person as the one in the photos.

For a while now, usually when we are sitting together on the couch watching tv, she askes me "What was your mom like?" At first I laughed at said "YOU are my mom!" and pretended that it was obvious that she knew that and that she just got confused. "Oh yeah, I know that." she would say. But she keeps asking me every couple of days and I began to wonder why this question keeps coming up.

Last week, we were walking down the street and she saw a tree and remembered that she had one just like it in the house that we lived in before this one. It was the house where she raised me during her 10 years as a single mom. I told her that yes, we had that kind of tree at the Sheldon St. house. She said "Oh! So you were at that house too?" "Yeah, we lived there together when I was little. You fed me, made me do my homework, we played in the backyard and you sang me to sleep at night. You dont remember that?" "No," incredulously. "Well, they were really good years. It is a beautiful house and you were my mom. Like you are now."
"How nice!"

It´s incredible how her lucidity changes from one day to the next or with her emotional state or where she is. There are days when you hardly notice something is wrong. That she draws and laughs and waters the plants and talks about the weather. And even other deeper commentaries about her husband and thier life together. She has noticed, for example, that he is a bit depressed and that he has been for a long time now. But she had no idea why this would be. She also asks me if I miss my friends in Córdoba. She draws incredibly. I mention all this so that you know she is not completely gone. Just sometimes and more and more often.

Yesterday I had kind of a meltdown. Stress and worry culminated in a terrible mood. I didnt have any more patience for her and we got into a tiff. I ended up walking away and leaving her in the garage. I came into the house and I threw things, yelled that I couldnt do this anymore that I hated her and I cried as if I were 15 again. Oh man, how we faught when I was 15! But then, 15 minutes later, she came upstairs, into my bedroom and said she was sorry and took me in her arms. Now reconciled, we layed down on my bed and she stroked my hair. I was shocked that this scenario from before still worked, and was thinking that maybe she was not as far gone as I had thought. That maybe I could be more emotionally candid with her....and then she asked me again;

"What was your mom like?"

This time I was determined to convince her that it was her.
"You are my mom. Do you remember when you were pregnant and that you had a baby, a long time ago?"
"Yes."
"Well, that baby was me. And now I´m all grown up. I don´t look like your little girl anymore but we are still mother and daughter. Does that make sense?"
"Hmmm... no."

Ah, fuck it, maybe it doesn´t matter. Because when when we sit together, I still feel in her touch that she is my mother and I am her daughter. I think she feels it too. Even if she doesn´t understand it.

(originally written and posted in the spanish version of this blog April 29. 2007)

She seems better when she is outside, in fresh air. Her anxieties dissolve and she loses herself in the visual and sonoral. She loves the sound an airplane makes when it passes overhead. But it frustrates her that she can almost never find it in the sky. She always says

"I LOVE that sound!"

For mother's day, I brought her to Angel Island. To get there, we had to take one of those ferry boats that looks like a sea bus. I explained to her many times what were going to do, step by step, so that she didn't feel lost.

We had a great time hiking around the island which was full of spring flowers. She said constantly how beautiful everything was and took the same picture every 5 minutes.

When we got back, I discovered that she had not understood that we had already been on the island. She was still waiting for us to arrive and she was very disappointed. She spoke for two days about a memory of when she was a kid...that she expected our outing was going to be more like that. I never was able to understand very well what she expected and why she was so disappointed. It's that she can't really use language to explain things so that another mind understands them anymore.
One of the sadder affects of her condition is that you become more and more apathetic, thier passions disappear. Something that she was never short on; that defined her personality. So, it was nice to see how this memory inspired her try to communicate it to me so intently.

We go out to parks and on walks at least 2 or 3 times a week now. I think I prefer my time with her this way too. The heat of the sun from above and of her arm, from below. I could point out those airplanes in the sky with my finger all fucking day if it makes her happy.