On the Up

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

This morning my mother, aunt and I moved my grandmother into the dementia unit at Ruth's House in Longmeadow, MA. It's been a long, exhausting process and I honestly feel I'm older now for having been through it, but now that everything is settled I'm just SO excited for my grandmother. They'll be keeping her busy while she's awake with lots of varied activities so that she doesn't have to sit on her love seat all day watching a tv she can't even hear. She's not Jewish, but since Jewish Geriatric Services, Inc. runs Ruth's House she'll be eating kosher now and that will help with her dietary problems. She rooms with an adorable little Irish lady who rarely speaks that everyone calls Froggie. I just think it will do her so much good to be in a place where she can go outside for a walk in the garden if she wants to (actual sunshine! No more artificial light!) or sit on the big patio reading in the shade.

I have my fingers crossed for her, although I admit it was nerve wracking watching her wheel away into the big crowd of strangers that will now be her every day companions. I felt like I was watching my child wander off toward his first day of kindergarten. Will they be nice to her? Will she make friends? Will she be lonely and hate it? Did we do the right thing? My grandmother is so brave, though. Even though she worried herself sick the entire drive over, she introduced herself to everyone. By the time lunch was being served she'd made so many friends that she was sitting with them all at the head of the biggest table in the dining room! She seriously blows my mind.

Now that she's settled somewhere safe, David and I can start living our lives for ourselves again again. We're staying in my grandmothers house (upping the number of generations of my family to have lived here at various times to FOUR!) and are now facing the daunting task of changing the house around to better suit us and the baby. It's a big job, but I'm actually looking forward to it more than I expected. I must be doing some serious nesting. The room we chose for the baby used to be my mothers room when she was small, and we're moving the giant antique mahogany record player into the dining room so that we can listen to our records while we eat. When the weather gets a little bit warmer we'll be putting in a new fence and planting an herb garden in the backyard. If anyone nearby feels like getting their hands dirty soon, I'll be doing a lot of painting in the coming weeks (before I get too pregnant). If you've ever visited my grandmother's house and are concerned, don't worry- her amazing psychedelic yellow and orange floral wallpaper in the kitchen is STAYING. I would NEVER be able to find anything more wonderful and I know it.

With all the fuss and turmoil lately, it completely slipped my mind that my 26th birthday is in EIGHT DAYS. I have the baby shower coming up in June, so it doesn't really make sense for me to have a big party or anything. If I had a housewarming/birthday dinner here or something, though, would anyone come? It won't exactly be last years crazy Manhattan extravaganza (understatement), but it'd still be nice to see everyone and to show off my new home once it's done.

I just had this incredibly insane thought- do I actually have EVERYTHING I could possibly ask for right now? My grandmother is safe and getting the care she needs, my family has been brought closer together because of it, I'm having a baby (who, in utero at least, has an appreciation for the theremin) with a person I love and adore, we live in our own house. Wow, just wow.

If you need me, I'll be upstairs blissing on that for a little while.

fuck

Monday, March 17, 2008

I don't want to start every single blog post with an apology, but I feel like I should. Things have been SO crazy here. I've been trying my best not to talk about family related things in too much detail just because I don't think my family would appreciate it, but honestly I need to get some of this OUT. Just when I think things are going to start getting better, they somehow seem to get worse. Everyone (other members of my family, the various medical professionals who are in and out) keeps telling me that they're aware of my grandmother's dementia and that they don't take anything she says about me to heart, but it's still crippling to hear her telling people I'm trying to poison her food or that I'm abusing her when all I do is bend over backwards to give her everything that she needs.

Last Thursday morning she woke up with crippling stomach pains, and was moaning and yelling so loudly that David could hear her in the basement. She couldn't sit up in bed and was clutching her abdomen. She'd been having some mysterious bleeding in her underwear and I was afraid the two might be connected. I called my mother (at 6am) and she told me to call 911, which I did. At that point my grandmother completely lost her mind and targeted all of her fear and anger at me by telling me she was going to "kill me" and I was "going to pay" for all the "terrible things" I've "done to her." She said I was pathetic and should be ashamed of myself for taking everything so seriously. She accused me of trying to put her back into a nursing home so that I could take her house away from her. The EMT's strapped her to a gurney chair and she was scratching at the walls and pulling at her straps as they wheeled her away to the ambulance. It was horrifying and I felt terrible.

Needless to say, for various bullshit reasons that actually caused me to have a pretty serious panic attack later that day, she came back instead of being admitted (which she should have been, I have no doubt in my mind) and is now living with me again. It was terribly traumatic for everyone involved, and because of that incident (and my grandmother's disposition toward me afterwards) my family is now paying for 24 hour/7 day a week care by home health aides until we can find an assisted living facility for her.

At first it seemed like this was going to work out, for a lot of reasons. The women who were coming in to care for my grandmother day and night were wonderful, compassionate people who truly knew their work. They were kind to my grandmother and I was thankful for that. I would go upstairs to cook food or use the bathroom and pop in for 15 or so minutes at a time just to say hi. But now it looks like my grandmother won't be able to get into assisted living for months, and we can't afford to do the 24 hour care any longer after this coming Thursday.

My grandmother has "profound" dementia that has been slowly escalating for years. Every doctor, nurse and family member I've talked to assures me that she doesn't mean the things she says. That's all well and good for them to say, except that after these "episodes" pass her opinion of me stays changed. It's not as though when she's in a better mood she changes her mind or forgets that she ever called me names or threatened my life. Her moods go back to normal and her mental state becomes clear, but even then I'm still a thief and liar who's plotting to kill her. She denies her outburst to her doctors, my mother and my aunt, but remembers them and brings them up when she gets me alone. She has literally turned me into a demon scapegoat and that opinion doesn't change even as all of her other symptoms subside and cease. The doctors/nurses/family also aren't here with her as much as I am, and don't know what it's like to be at the brunt of all of these attacks. Her agitation isn't constant, so that not too many people (especially doctors who only see her for a half hour to an hour at a time) see how bad it can be.

I can hear her upstairs right now telling her afternoon health aide about how evil I am and about all of my "plots," and that women doesn't know me at all. She just met my grandmother and I today for the first time. Documented dementia or not, who would you tend to believe? A helpless, frail old lady or her 25 year old granddaughter living in the basement rent free? The fact that the suspicion is there at all completely unnerves me, and makes me feel like I have to hide in the basement all day long. I also have to face the fact that (again, dementia or no dementia) my grandmother's opinion of me will be negative and volatile until her death, regardless of how much I love her or try to help her, and that completely breaks my heart.


So now it looks like it's going to be more of the same for me, for months and months into the future, just when I was really starting to think things would change. I wish to God that my posts here could be about the baby, or interesting music, or things I'm happy or excited about. I have three months left before the baby is born and am facing the possibility that I might need to care for both the baby and my grandmother at the same time, depending on how long the waiting list is for the facility we want to put her in. I don't know what I'm going to do. I've been doing my very best to put a brave face forward and roll with every punch as it comes, but I don't know how much more of this I can take.

"Are the stars out tonight?"

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Seriously guys, I'm sorry my entries lately have been so short or otherwise non-existent. Living here with my grandmother has been so much more draining to me than I thought it would be. She needs so much care and attention, but because of her own notoriously strong-willed personality it's virtually impossible to give it to her. We've had a lot of really bad, scary nights because of her dementia, and I was starting to think that I'd gotten myself in over my head. But I've been opening up to a lot of her visiting nurses and therapists about my own feelings and thankfully they're working toward getting BOTH of us the help we need, and soon. I won't get too into it, but the possibility of her ever being able to live alone again is slim to none. I've been trying my best not to dwell too much on death and being elderly, since I SHOULD be focusing on babies and new beginnings, but it's hard sometimes. I'll just say that I hope when it's my time to go that I just get hit by a bus the day after my 70th birthday- anything quick, painless, and dignified.

I also need to say how in awe I am of people who can devote their lives to taking care of older people. Every single person who's been here to see my grandmother, whether it's her home health aide, her physical therapist, her dementia nurse, etc, has been absolutely amazing with her. I don't know how they do the work they do every day and still have hearts un-broken enough to love their own families with at the end of the day. One of her nurses (my favorite) even takes care of her own elderly mother with Alzheimer's in her home when she's done taking care of everyone else's! Thank god for them, thank god.

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Aside from that, not too much has been going on that's terribly report-worthy. My baby belly is finally significant enough that I don't just feel like a giant trucker/blob anymore, and the idea of going out in public is starting to seem more appealing to me than it has in months. My mother is taking me out this weekend to buy some spring weather maternity clothes and I'm actually excited about it. It's hard to find maternity clothes I like, though, especially since it's hard for me to find clothes I really like in stores anyway. But my mind is open! Hopefully in the sea of shapeless black sacks I'll be able to find something colorful and flowing.

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I've been working on a mix for the lovely Miss Erica, a mix I've been tweaking and perfecting for nearly a year now. It's a story mix, or a mix that acts as sort of a stand alone soundtrack to a very specific time in my life, with the story told in the lyrics of the songs I choose. I'm notorious for getting caught up in story mixes for months and sometimes years at a time, "perfecting" them beyond perfection like some kind of mad scientist. I spent a good deal of time on it yesterday and I think it actually might be finished, or, you know, as finished as it will ever be. I should just burn and mail it before I have the chance to change anything else; finally getting all of that painful negativity out of me and into someone else's objective hands will do me nothing but good, I'm sure.

One of the songs on the mix is "I Only Have Eyes But You" by the Flamingos, and every time I listen to that song I'm overcome with the urge to write about how much I fucking love it. One of the main reasons for my obsession with doowop in general is my preoccupation with how every doowop recording itself is a record of a musical event. Back then every instrument (including vocals) was recorded all at once, in one room, so when you listen to an old soul or doowop record you're hearing a true musical moment caught on tape. "I Only Have Eyes For You," when you listen to it thinking about that, is an absolutely mind blowing song. I'd love to cover it, but I know I would never be able to do it's original naive dreaminess any justice.

Another reason to give doowop a shot: there's literally nothing better to put on in the background on summer nights, when everyone's just hanging around having beers and talking. Doowop IS the sound of summer nights. Try it and you'll see exactly what I mean.

Family; David and I move in

Monday, February 25, 2008

Apologies for the lack of updates- there's been some major changes in my life lately (what's new?) that have been dominating my time. David and I, after living in her house for a few weeks, officially moved into my grandmothers basement now that she's home from the rehab hospital she was in for a fall she had about a month ago. She moved back in upstairs; David works his new job in Northampton every day and I take care of my grandmother since it would be impossible for her to live here alone. As a family we collectively wanted her home and out of the hospital as quickly as possible, and David and I's moving in downstairs was the only way. I listen to her all day on a baby monitor in case she falls or gets confused, and she also wears a gym teacher-like whistle around her neck to blow on in case she needs me. It's been slightly bizarre and sometimes exhausting, but as of this moment I think everything is going to be alright.

David is amazing- I really can't stress it enough. Even though he had to be up at 7 for work, when my grandmother was furiously blowing her emergency whistle at 5am this morning for no concievable reason he wasn't just understanding about it but SUPPORTIVE of ME before and after- asking how I was feeling, telling me to slow down, making sure I wasn't taking too much on at once. He cooks elaborate old Irish lady dinners for her and sits with she and I in the den when Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy are on. I can't imagine a lot of people making the sacrifices he's made for me and my family after only having been a part of our lives for 9 short (but intense) months. We're a tight-knit group; it's almost impossible to endear yourself to us as an outsider (ESPECIALLY as a boyfriend of one of the only two girl cousins- you should hear some of the "I brought my boyfriend home for Christmas" horror stories that Erin and I have) but David's baptism by fire over the past week has won him a firm place. There's no question about it for any of us- he's a part of our family now.

I've noticed something interesting about my family in all of this, and it's not necessarily good or bad: even though we're all devoted to each other in an almost unhealthy way (we all live within 15 minutes of each other and readily lay down our time, effort, money, etc. without any hesitation at all if a family member needs us), at the same time not one of us will allow any other member of the family to DEPEND on us or vice versa; independence and self reliance have been bred into me as law since birth. We're to receive help resistantly until we don't need it anymore and then pull back again. So here I am living with my 77 year old grandmother, doling out her pills, cooking her meals, helping her to and from the bathroom, but all the while there's this... strangeness about it. Apart from how strange it is to take care of someone in this way who was a respected authority figure your entire life anyway, there's another element to it. Her medical outlook isn't exactly the brightest, but we both (and everyone else too, really) expect her to eventually do all of these things herself again and so we both treat the care-taking in this sort of blase, all-business way. I wish I knew a better way to explain it. Not being able to take care of ourselves is almost a fate worse than death, and if the time ever comes when we can't (in any way- medically, emotionally, financially) we're to take the smallest amount of help we need, regardless of the onslaught that will inevitably be offered, and then get back on our feet ASAP. If not, you pay by losing respect- not just from the family but for yourself as well, by some magic of massive internal guilt.

Also (for those of you on the astrology tip) I think the abundance of major planets in Aquarius and Capricorn (sun or moon in 7 of us, all of the main clan except my Aunt Beth and cousin Erin) within my family can't be overlooked either, or the fact that my (usually less than welcoming) grandmother warmed up so quickly to David, who shares a Cancer moon with her deceased (and sorely missed) husband, my grandfather.

Every once in a while, when I have the time to think about it, it really dawns on me how completely different my life is from how it was just a year ago. Every single thing is completely different, down to what I want out of life AND how I'm going about it. It's been hard but I feel like I'm really working toward something now, you know? I know who I am. No matter how much harder things get from here on out, and I expect them to, I have that now- and knowing that seems to make a lot of things a hell of a lot easier.