We really had few options, but having Mom live in our house was obviously not going to work. She was driving us nuts. She would wring her hands, pace the floor, and hover around us in our too-small, cluttered house. Someone was always on the verge of tripping. She would startle at the slightest disturbance, if we entered a room, if we spoke her name. “Oooh!” she would exclaim and throw her hands up in surprise. And we would apologize for yanking her so abruptly from her thoughts.

It wasn’t just having moved twice in two months, of completely changing her life – again – or of feeling suddenly tossed from hope to despair. Having no sense of place at this time in her life was only part of it.  No, what was most disturbing was this sudden awareness of falling. The images of recent events reeling skyward in a blur.  It made her stomach lurch upward in her throat at the thought of it.

My strategy was to keep her busy. Grounded. I put her to work helping me in the garden. She always loved gardening. Losing my medicinal herbs, which admittedly looked like weeds, was a small price to pay. The blueberry bush was also sacrificed. Things happen. At least she wasn’t being pummeled by asphalt roofing.

But the nervous fidgeting and fretting was the least of it. Mom could neither live in the present nor look to the future. She was stuck in the past. And deep scars from the past just wouldn’t go away.  She was like an old dog with a sore on his leg who can’t stop licking it, over and over, not letting it heal, just gnawing on it like an old bone, and it keeps getting worse, until he gnaws it right off. She was mentally crippling herself.

She couldn’t help it. The bad movie of her life just kept playing over and over. John the con man: how could she have let herself be so swept away? Her ex husband: it was so goddamned easy to leave her stranded on a beach. Her son: he had hated her since his teens and called her every once in awhile to tell her so; boy, had she screwed up his life, and he knew just how to make her pay. And then there was her rebellious headstrong opinionated daughter whom she was now forced to live with.  She thought of losing her freedom, of being dependent, of not being able to take care of herself – however you described it, it still meant the same thing: losing control – and worse – being controlled by others.

How she hated controlling people. Her father had been a raging controlling alcoholic. She had worked for arrogant controlling demanding physicians. Her husbands – 1, 2, 3, and almost 4 – each of them controlling, although the first, her true first love, maybe not so much – the failure of that marriage was her own fault – so many misunderstandings – so many things unresolved. And then there was the last – one last stab at happiness – an absolute manic controlling maniac. How could she have trusted so blindly? She had picked some real doozies in men. She thought of people who had hurt her deeply – people she loved – people who betrayed her – people who took advantage of her – people who didn’t appreciate how hard she had tried to make things right. 

She sat on our porch steps, her knees pulled up, her back and hands aching from the incessant gardening, and she hugged her little maltese, Lambchop, whom she had loved for nearly 20 years, and cried. He was her only friend – the only one who really understood. She clung to this little frail old man of a dog like he was the only thing that was constant and true. And he probably was.