Where are you Ma?

I don’t remember ever actively thinking about what kind of old lady my mom would be. But I think I always liked the idea of a Maxine. A feisty old lady who finding herself free late in life – would be embracing it exploring it and reveling in that phase of life. And finally – enjoying being free to do what SHE wants to do.

When did my mom get old? Not old like she wears sensible shoes and tells stories about walking to school 5 miles in the snow. Not old like she says whatever she wants because she doesn’t care what anybody thinks anymore. Not red hat lady old.

Old like being irrationally afraid of being home alone. Old like being terrified when the phone service goes out for a little while and old like pushing the button she wears around her neck frequently and when the voice asks if she needs help saying “just testing”. And old like – she insists she needs to live with a man in the house just in case “something happens.”

And when did the guilt crowd in because I’m disappointed my mom is not growing old and feisty, but old and timid and fearful instead? Guilt because she lives with my brother because he’s a “man”, even though we did try having her live with me for a while. And guilt because I find it so difficult to talk to her because she is SO not herself anymore.

Disappointment. That’s not an emotion indicative of understanding, sympathy, or empathy. It suggests I care more about how it feels to me – than how it feels to her. The emotions are in layers. Feelings for my mom when I was a kid, a whole separate layer just for the teen years. A layer for my married with small children years and a layer for when Ma became kind of lost to us.

She knows who she is, who we are, she has those faculties about her. But this layer muffles the parts of her personality that made her – Ma. Nothing she loved in the past, oil painting, sewing, crafting of all kinds – interests her anymore. She busies herself with a few household tasks and taking naps.

This layer is stifling and suffocating and yet – at times - there are gauzy openings in it when the light shines through and Ma is there for a while, not quite so confused. Not quite so fearful. A little take-charge for a bit, and not so clingy and dependent.

But she doesn’t stay.

And it’s all so hard to watch. Harder to accept.

Catnip makes it all better

I needed to take my crabby old man cat Riley, to the vet today. I take him to a cat clinic so there are no run-ins with dogs or ferrets or any other manner of pets in the waiting room. Other cats are bad enough. Turns out he’s older than I thought. I thought he was 13 years old but according to the records at the vet, he’s 15 years old. “He is?” I asked.

*blink blink*

“That’s what it says here on his chart.”

*blink blink*

“Oh.” Long pause … “Um, okay.”

There are things in my life that I figure out the timing of by how it correlates to when I was divorced. BD (before divorce) and AD (after divorce). Except there is a difference between when my now ex-husband moved out – and when we were actually divorced.

Apparently though, I don’t delve too deeply into anything from around that time of my life. I’ve blocked things out. When I was going to a therapist in the midst of it all - I had a lot of confusion about the timing of things. My therapist said it was because I was “emotionally divorced” long before I was ever legally divorced.

I’m also one of those people who moves the time on my alarm clock forward because it fools me in the morning when I am just waking up. But I digress.

Here I was thinking my cat was 13 years old because I got him the year I got divorced. But really he’s 15 because I brought him home the year my ex actually moved out of the house. It’s funny the way people protect themselves emotionally like that but sometimes I find it unnerving. It never bothers me for long though because I just shove it in the back of my mind and move on.

Instead, I worry about the cat and his slight heart murmur, his weight loss and his constant hunger. The doctor took blood and urine and we will find out what’s going on in a few days.

Waiting to pay my bill I grabbed a little catnip toy they were selling, pulled the tag off and tossed it inside the carrier with Riley. Nobody even noticed, I could have just walked out with my $1.99 freebie. But, I gave the tag to the girl behind the counter and paid for it. It kept Riley happy and quiet on the ride home.

When we got home I set the carrier down and opened the door. I love how the other cats looked at Riley like he was a stranger because he had been out of the house for an hour. He stepped out of the carrier with his little heart-shaped catnip toy in his mouth and proceeded to lick it and roll on it for at least 45 minutes after we got home. Now he is sleeping next to the soggy mess.

He’s happy. He doesn’t care if he’s 13 or 15 or if I knew which it was. He doesn’t know why I brought him to that place that smells like hundreds of other cats, he only knows that I brought him back home and I gave him a new toy. Ah-h-h, to be a cat.