Before moving in with my parents, on my visits to them in Texas I would leave the guest room door ajar, hopeful for some entertaining nighttime songs. I never heard a single note. Hearing Dad belt out every precise word to all the verses of “In Your Easter Bonnet” in perfect pitch, as Mom persistently claimed, would have indeed been fascinating. As far as I know, my dad had never sung or even whistled one line of any song in his entire life, especially not “In Your Easter Bonnet.”
Curious, I kept telling Mom to wake me up when she heard him singing. One night while I was sitting up in bed reading, she appeared ghostlike in the door of the guest bedroom. Leaning against the doorframe in a crumpled white nightgown with large, loose breasts sagging to her waist, her expression was a little scary.
“He’s singing his head off in there if you want to hear him,” she growled in a self-righteous tone.
I quickly got up and slipped on a robe, meeting Mom in the hallway. With ease we cracked open Dad’s door and peered in, Mom hovering unsteadily behind me.
“He’s singing ‘Jesus Loves Me,’” she whispered gruffly, “and I wish he’d shut up!”
Dad breathed heavily, occasionally snoring. We stood there listening, watching the reclining lump of Dad’s body rising and falling, illuminated by an outside street light slipping through the slats of the wooden blinds.
I slipped my arm around Mom and said, “Let me help you back to bed, Mom.”
I quietly closed Dad’s bedroom door and guided her frail, humped body back into her pink bedroom, pulling the lacy, floral bedspread over her with care as she obediently curled into bed. I wondered what could be going on in her brain, softly patting her head and stroking her hair until she fell back to sleep.
SNOW GEESE
December, 2010 (age 58)—Whitesboro, Texas
“You’re a good girl,” my eighty-seven-year-old Dad mumbles as he shifts and settles in his seat. “Why’s that?” I question, genuinely curious at such an unfamiliar proclamation. I stop and look at Dad before starting the car.
“For taking me out. It feels good to get out.”
When Mom and Paula backed out of the driveway for a trip to the Dollar Store, I impulsively went into the living room, interrupted Dad’s nap, and asked if he would like to go for a drive. I had seen the snow geese just a few days prior when I took a drive at Hagerman’s Wildlife Refuge and thought he might like to see them too. Snow geese follow the same routes in migration, and the north Texas fields of Hagerman’s offer plenty for feeding and foraging. Dad used to be fond of the birdlife on his land in Cleburne and often encouraged me to take close notice during my visits there.
The unusual declaration Dad just uttered continues to roll through my head as we head north. Something about being called “a good girl” feels both confusing and nurturing to me here at fifty-eight years old. I remember how as a young girl I always wanted Dad to think I was a good girl, then upon getting older realized that sometimes what I did to prompt him to say I was good was not really good at all. And it was impossible for me to forget that time in my twenties when he angrily called me a filthy slut and a whore.
Driving onto the refuge, I immediately point out to Dad some flocks that are bobbing on the lake. As we pull over to look more closely, the waterfowl suddenly rise into the air like a billowing cloud, noisily flying directly over our car before descending in graceful swirls just to the right of us. Both in flight and on the ground, the snow geese make high-pitched quacks mixed with hoarse honks. There is such a mixed clamor of sounds it is almost impossible to believe this is just one bird species.
I pass Dad my binoculars for a better look, but his hands are too shaky to grip them. I try to hold them for him, but the arrangement is awkward. I set the binoculars down, and we enjoy what we are able to see with our naked eyes. Dad cranes his neck as more geese fly over us, keeping a strained but steady gaze for minutes. The refuge has planted grains specifically to attract hungry, migrating birds. The crisp green fields beneath an ultra-blue sky accentuate the pure white of the snow geese. It is a breathtaking sight to behold.
With reverence, I drive slowly. We creep along quietly observing birdlife from the comfort of a car. Great blue herons gallantly step through shallow waters on long, spindly legs. A red-tail hawk, its broad brown and white wings outlined against the blue, squeals keeyahh as it circles and soars above. Northern shoveler ducks paddle in circles calling thook-thook as they push and scoop up who knows what with their spoon-like bills. Dad nods and looks carefully as I quietly direct his gaze toward the different birds. He takes it all in: the colors, the calls, the swish of wings, the openness of the fields and sky.
In the silence, our breaths deepen.
We roll on through the refuge, gradually arriving on the highway that will take us back home.
Turning off Highway 82, I suggest a chocolate shake at the Sonic Drive-in just in front of us. Dad’s eyes light up; this is his favorite treat. We pull into a parking slot, order on the loudspeaker, and are soon loudly sucking our straws as the cold sugary chocolate slides down our throats. Common house sparrows fuss, chirp, and chatter as they forage through wadded wrappers discarded around the tables. Dad and I watch, unspeaking, entertained by this spark of life here in a fast-food picnic area.
We drive home without a word. As we pull into the driveway, I click off the car. Looking straight ahead, Dad says, “Thank you, Patricia,” in an uncharacteristically clear and steady voice.
Smiling, I glance his direction, but he has already turned away.
DING DONG BLUES
January, 2011 (age 58)—Whitesboro, Texas
“Rinse off your ding-dong!”
“My what?”
“Your ding-dong!!”
The baby monitor crackles as Mom hollers. She is helping Dad take a shower while Bill and I keep tuned in via this Panasonic apparatus in our bedroom. We bought this sound monitor and put it in Dad’s room, so we could hear him in case he fell.
“Don’t use the washcloth you’ve just wiped your butt with on your face!”
The bitterness of sixty-seven years of an abusive marriage comes out in Mom’s voice. It’s ugly, but so have been most of their years together. Living with them now reminds me of how miserable it was to live with them when growing up, especially the two and a half years after both of my sisters had moved out.
Plenty of pent-up anger and resentment lace Mom’s sharp tone. Although she says she wants to help Dad with his sit-down shower, her sharp, sassy directives come out sounding more like the cracks of a leather whip. Bill and I exchange pathetic looks as we eavesdrop, an occasional chuckle slipping out. The whole scene feels like something out of Saturday Night Live. Only it’s not. These are my parents, this is my husband, and this is our life.
Earlier in the day, Mom had shuffled into the living room where Dad sits all day in a leather recliner, mostly dozing in front of the TV. She held up a nasty pair of boxers in front of him, stained yellow and brown with sprinkles of blood around the fly.
“Hey!” she screeched, jolting him awake. “Are you bleeding down there?” she pointed at his zipper.
Dad, drowsy from recliner slumber, looked down at his legs.
“Down where?” he asked in a shaky voice.
“In your crotch!” Mom yelled, like he’s the dumbest sum-bitch on the planet, pointing at his crotch.
“I don’t know,” he answered hesitantly, not sure what any of this could mean.
I listened and peeked around the corner, realizing Mom could not say the word “penis.” A Bonanza rerun played in the background, Hoss and Little Joe conferring about something on the front porch of the Ponderosa. I wondered how they might feel about being in the background of this family scene.
Mom was dressed in bright whites, prepared, as she announced this morning, for “bleaching” which includes washing all whites and Dad’s blood-stained boxers in Clorox. Her obsession with cleanliness and pure white are long-held habits, perhaps carried over from Dad’s m
ilitary days. Her color of preference has been stark white for herself, and lily white for her daughters when we were young. Blinding whites to mask any inappropriate sexual behavior going on in our house.
She gave up trying to get an explanation from Dad, returning to the bleaching bowls and buckets in her bathroom. Clorox vapors wafted powerfully through the house, so strongly that my eyes watered and a strange taste settled in my mouth. I headed back to Dad’s bathroom to finish cleaning a toilet and a rug where he had dribbled shit while standing to wipe. Better to not breathe through my nose this morning, I thought. Dad’s been complaining that he can’t reach around to wipe when on the toilet because of the bars Bill and I installed. But he needed something to push down on in order to ease himself onto the toilet, then to push on to stand up, and to keep him from falling. Cleaning the resulting messes are easier than having Bill or me accompany him for every trip to the toilet.
With his bathroom tidied, I returned to vacuuming, holding my breath as I vacuumed past the Clorox buckets in Mom’s bathroom. Dingy wall-to-wall carpeting pads this home and serves as a doormat for this family’s soles. Exhaling, I pushed and pulled the heavy, beat-up Kenmore down the hallway. Clorox fumes billowing between the walls made the used and aging carpet somehow seem fresher, as well as, perhaps, our lives.
INTO THE PETRI DISH
March, 2011 (age 58)—Whitesboro &
Bonham, Texas
Several months after the Whitesboro police and EMT took Dad away from where we were all living together, I found a small slip of paper on the floor behind the polished desk in his room. This was after his jealousy triggered the incident over which Dad had been taken first to the hospital, then to a psychiatric ward, then thankfully, to the Veterans Home. Mom had needed to move a chair, so she could set up her ironing board near where Dad was sitting so they could “be together,” something she learned to do periodically so Dad would feel acknowledged. Bill insisted on moving the chair for Mom, and then setting up the ironing board. When she expressed her appreciation in a gracious way, Dad’s jealousy flared. He sulked and stayed quiet until six hours later, fuming, he hit Mom and pushed her over a chair, then turned for a full, robust swing at my head with his cane just as Bill grabbed it.
On the crumpled piece of paper I found behind his desk, a column of figures had been shakily tallied in pencil. Dad carefully made note of the amounts of money he had in different investment and bank accounts. The last item in the column was thirty dollars’ worth of collector quarters with the names of the states on the backs that he had stashed in his desk drawer. The coins allowed the math to top out at just the amount he wanted. Here, in shaky pencil lead, he could see what he had made, saved, and invested. Dad had worked hard, always saved carefully, and invested well. This was one area of his life where he had succeeded and found much comfort.
“Do I have to stay here the rest of my life?” Dad wails. He is at the Veterans Home almost one hour east of where Bill and I are now living with Mom. I can’t tell how aware of his surroundings he is these days or, really, how I even feel about what’s happening to him. I believe I care about my Dad, or that I want to, but mostly I feel numb. As I go through the moves of caregiving, I do what I think is the right thing to do.
One night a few years earlier, when I had come to visit from Denver, there were loud noises coming from Dad’s room, shouts and furniture being pushed over. Rushing in, I found Dad yelling and throwing punches in the air. I dodged his fists until he fell into a piece of furniture and began screaming in pain. Breaking his collarbone woke him up. I sat on the floor next to him as he came to. He told me he was fighting the Japs. I knew Dad had been on an aircraft carrier in the war, and that it had gotten pretty ugly, but where it was that he might have been in physical fights is a part of his war history I have never heard about. But this much I know: being in a war from age eighteen to twenty-one must have been horrible, then returning home battle-weary and emotionally scarred after three long years on the USS Enterprise. He was most definitely suffering from PTSD, although the now all-too-familiar label didn’t exist when he served. They called it shell-shocked.
“Really, we just called ‘em crazy and sent ‘em home,” the local Director of Veterans Services explained to me when I went seeking guidance for how to get Dad into the Veterans Home. “There was a lot of damage done though, believe me,” he added compassionately. I believe him. Dad’s war has become my war. The damage done to him became part of the damages done to me—the choices I made, and the woman I am still becoming.
At the Veterans Home, Dad is now choosing to eat most of his meals alone in his room, much to the staff’s relief since he walloped one nurse hard between the shoulder blades after she sat him next to someone he didn’t like. He is used to getting what he wants after stubbornly and ruthlessly controlling his home environment for the sixty-seven years he’s been married to Mom. She learned, as did his three daughters, to do what he wanted so he wouldn’t “be mean,” words that came to signify significantly different things in our lives. Dad insisted that food be prepared the way he wished, and that volumes of voices be kept barely audible so he could study, sleep, or watch TV. We were on guard for whatever might invoke his ire on a whim: the wind slamming a door, a dog barking, the phone ringing, any chatter during the news, an unexpected visitor, a late supper.
Now he’s going for it at the Veterans Home, charging into his demands in the first couple of weeks. First came the outburst at dinner, then the pounding whack on a nurse’s back. Next began the phone calls home, where he used the receiver like a megaphone to rant at Mom about how he’d been dumped, and how she and his daughters have pushed him aside in order to steal all his money. After he threw the phone across the room, barely missing someone’s head, those calls stopped.
Recently Dad was moved from the Veterans Home to the psychiatric hospital in Paris, Texas, after another solid punch to someone else, this time breaking some small bones in Dad’s hand and probably in the other person’s face. Dad may be old, but he’s strong. The hospital is going to try to adjust medications to help prevent further aggression. With Dad away, Mom sits in her rocker in the living room, staring out the window. She broods about Dad’s circumstances, but admits that he has long been combative, probably from the war, she says.
Years of depression and this practice of worry and guilt have now narrowed Mom’s most common moods to sad, oppressed, depressed, and often downright bitchy. I encourage her to choose something more uplifting than worry or guilt; after all, life is pretty good these days with Dad receiving excellent care at the Veterans Home and Bill and I living here taking care of her. When Mom isn’t caught up in the lasso of abuse and control that Dad has managed to hold her in for the length of their marriage, she smiles, laughs, jokes, and sometimes even shows a little affection, though this is rare.
Mom now perches in the living room in the same spot where Dad used to sit, hands behind her ears in attempts to better hear whatever show she is watching on TV, or she just gazes out the window contemplating her “worry-of-the-day.” If we don’t knock quietly on entering, she jumps in alarm, so I knock gently on the wall in the evening when coming in to say good night, stooping over to give her a kiss or a light touch on the shoulder.
“I love you, Mom,” I offer, sometimes unsure how to energize this love.
“Okay,” Mom responds, without looking away from the TV.
I am gradually understanding why Mom withholds her affections from me, but it still hurts. As she regresses with her Lewy body dementia, yet appears to remember details from the years she, Dad, and I lived together in the late sixties after both my sisters had moved out, I am reminded of a jealousy and disgust she used to exhibit toward me during that time. I needed my mom to look at the truth and admit she didn’t protect me as a child, but instead I received blame and shame, and developed a strong sense of self-loathing. Developing a pattern of being extremely hard on myself became normal, and a way of validating that I could never be goo
d enough.
After almost nine months of living here and caring for my parents, I have become well aware of the immense complexity of this arrangement. Bill reminded me the other evening of that old Zen adage: “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your parents.”
Only we have come to live with mine.
DIABETIC COMA
May, 2011 (age 58)—Whitesboro &
Bonham, Texas
Friday, May 13th, and Dad’s eighty-eighth birthday. The day is breezy beautiful, not unbearably humid, and comfortably cool for this time of year due to recent heavy thunderstorms. Last week I suggested a picnic at nearby Bonham State Park, only fifteen minutes from where Dad lives at the Veterans Home. My sisters, Bill, Mom, and I will check Dad out of the facility and all spend some time with him outdoors.
It was a perfectly good idea until Mom began to worry obsessively about every detail.
First, she went shopping, alone. David’s grocery store is only a few blocks down from our house, and I thought it might be good for her cantankerous spirits of late to drive three blocks, park, and shop. Besides, there was no stopping her. The employees of David’s know her and help her around. She loves the attention. On her return she’ll mention, as she has had the habit of doing for years with everybody from caregivers to grocery clerks, “They just love me.”
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