Tag: intimacy

Ma has an active social life, in her sleep. The line between sleep and waking is porous; she can spend a day waiting on someone that can never show up, like an eight-year-old waiting up for Santa.

When I don’t know where I’m going, it’s best to start, not at the beginning, but where I am. Except, for someone with dementia or caregiving for a loved one with dementia, where you are is a moving target.

Q: What do alcoholics and addicts say all the time? / A: Leave me alone, I’m not hurting anyone but myself.

Even after thirty years of twelve steps, I’d been underestimating the impact I had on her life. Then our lives were thrown against a wall of dementia like a handful of spaghetti, and I got to see what stuck.

Aimless. With no clear plan of going somewhere, no “there” to get to, there is also no clear plan on how to get home.

There are words that make me sad: Ma looks me in the eye, “You’re really so good to me.” Sometimes followed by an “I love you.” Does she, or are those words part of her survival plan?

There is no aide today, only Big E & me. Tomorrow is our anniversary, Ma and me living together for the last two years. Both still alive, older and tireder than when we started. Outside, there’s a raging pandemic & it’s 90-hell-degrees. Inside, we have each other.

Today is Day 7 of working from home (WFH), of  online meetings, of no one else to be there for her other than me. Social distancing is the new normal. I’d always considered myself her sole caregiver, but it’s become very apparent that that was not exactly accurate. There were aides, therapists, social workers, random alter kakers. Now, it’s all me. And the occasional phone call from someone she loves but cannot remember.

Big Edie Benjamin Buttons along, forgetting all the every-day things I’d learned from her, the things that make up a life, she  tries to re-learn living, from me. What’s lost will never come back. I can’t fix it or slow it down. Instead, I honor our lessons, reminding her who taught me to read a recipe & cook; clean a house properly; put on lipstick and that it’s okay to enjoy sex.

In a life where nothing is certain, I am an anchor. I’d envisioned lots problems, becoming one half of conjoined twins–attached at the heart–wasn’t one of them. She’s losing/has lost the ability to think of things she’d like to do without prompting. Everything you thinks of as your life up to this moment? Imagine that, but gone.

Everyone needs something to live for. My mother lives for the day she will die. The innate right to choose your own time and method of death is a part of who we were as a family, one of the few things all three of us agreed on.

I’d lived alone—and happy—for forty years. Then,in July 2018, my mother moved in. We knew there’d be an adjustment period, but figured any friction would come from 60 years of mother/daughter emotional baggage having to share a single bathroom. That was the easy stuff.

I say I want to live in a small town. No, he says, you don’t….

Menopause was the best thing that could have happened to me. The vodka haze & hormone fog lifted, and if I wasn’t that hyper-sexual being, I’d have to redefine myself. (Previously published, October 2015, O, The Oprah Magazine)

A friend of mine died this week. The older I get, the more often I’m…

Big Edie: I feel sorry for the men in your life. You take the nice ones and twist their minds, and you take the crazy ones and push them right over the edge.

Keep your sun-drenched days and well-oiled bodies. When the wind rips limbs off trees. Pushes…

When I was a girl we lived across from a parking lot. On the other…

It was a lovely wedding in a neighborhood church that welcomes all possibilities of love….

I’m a shelter dog at heart. It’s not even well hidden. If you’ve never been…

No matter how old you are when you lose that second parent, you’re an orphan. It’s not the same as when you’re 5 or even 15, but when you’re 50ish it’s lonely.

It’s so easy to see crazy when someone else is wearing it. I watched a…

What? How was I supposed to know? One minute I’m playing with a perfectly fine…

Tommy died of old age, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We’re supposed…

I got a chance to read some of the dirtygirl story in public last night…