Sad Reality

I recognize that being a woman with ‘mom issues’ is cliché. I also recognize that being a woman over 40 who bleaches her hair blond is cliché. But that doesn’t stop me. It is no secret that I was born to people who had no business having children. But, they did. And, I’m glad. They had their problems but, hey, without them as parents I might have had some boring, vanilla upbringing. Or, come to think of it, I wouldn't have had any upbringing at all!

My mother likes to talk about our family as if we were right off the set of Leave it to Beaver. Truthfully, we were a bit more As The World Turns and it still confuses me when she recalls my childhood. I’m fairly certain we lived in different homes. Perhaps her memories are skewed in one direction, mine in another, and somewhere in between is reality. Although, when my siblings and I get together and reminisce, it seems clear that we all grew up in the same environment. Not sure where my mom was. But, therein might lay the problem.

Reality has always been elusive to my mother. Even when she was much younger. Somewhere she picked up the idea that if she just said things were okay, the really would be. I believe in the power of positive thinking but, when the house and cars were being repossessed because my father forgot to stop drinking and go to work, it was a little disconcerting to have my mother saying things were just dandy in our secure, happy world.

I don’t feel the need to rehash childhood memories with my mother. Occasionally she says something so absurd I can’t help but laugh and remind her that what she is saying is complete fantasy. When I do, she sheepishly chuckles and says she guesses I’m right. She follows up with a question that isn’t really a question. She asks if my childhood was really that bad and I say no. What is the point? She can’t change the past. She asks for reassurance and I give it to her.

Being dysfunctional works for us.

These days, though, it is harder to know how to deal with my mother’s lapses in reality. These days the lapses seem less about just not wanting reality to be reality and more about truly not knowing. And that changes my own reality about how to deal with her.

Recently, I had to make a decision about my mother’s care and it ended up being much more difficult than I anticipated. For the past year I have been delivering her prescriptions on a weekly basis but, about once a week she forgets to open the pill box and take the medications I’ve prepared for her. When she forgets, it sets up a cycle that happens quickly and severely. She becomes physically ill, can’t eat, can’t think straight, gets too weak and fatigued to walk and her pulse drops frighteningly low.

I then have to go to her apartment, coax her into taking her pills, persuade her to eat and try and get her back on track. She has trouble thinking and communicating for a few days and just about the time she is back to ‘normal,’ the cycle starts up again. Her physician, the nurse at her retirement community, and my sister have all been encouraging me to set her up on a program to have a nurse deliver her medications throughout the day, every day. I’ve been resisting the decision because I was hoping my mother would make the decision herself.

I was hoping my mother would see how frequently her life is disrupted by not taking her medication. I kept thinking she’d decide on her own to start the program, ensuring that she takes the medications regularly, feels better and ends the cycle.

Maybe lack of reality is hereditary.

She didn’t make the decision on her own and last week I started the process of putting her on the program. She is upset with me about it. This is one more thing to take her independence away. It makes me sad. She’s always been crazy, but that was a crazy of choice. This is different. This is someone who desperately doesn’t want to let go of reality. Even though her reality has always been sketchy, this loss of reality is organic. And she can’t control it. And it scares her.

So, I sadly walk though this phase with her. Her normal lack of reality is annoying. This lack of reality is much harder to watch. Sometimes I can’t tell which is which and then I don’t know how to respond. I have times when it feels like I’m walking through a house of mirrors; not sure what is real and what isn’t.

She’ll get over being angry at me for this decision. She probably won’t stop telling me she is angry about it, but I hope, eventually, she realizes it is for the best. This decision might even slow down some of her movement toward losing touch with reality. The organic kind. Not the fantasy kind.

For years my siblings and I have wished that my mother would stop living in her ridiculous fantasy world and deal with reality. Now though, as I watch her slow decent into dementia, the silly world that she’s always chosen doesn’t seem so bad.