Tag Archives: Mothers

Speaking joy

When my children were learning to talk, I remember finding the process of language acquisition so amazing that I briefly considered going back to college to study it. I have two children about 18 months apart in age; many of my friends had babies the same time I did, so I had a range of small children to listen to and be amazed by. Each child seemed to develop their own method of learning to talk, beyond the general similarities among human beings that many scientists and linguists have studied. I wondered what made those small differences–the way parents spoke to the child or to one another? The temperaments of the children? Exposure to music or grandparents, older siblings, the radio??

I can admit that I was an exhausted young(-ish) mother, but also so intrigued. I wanted to learn as my children were learning. There was such excitement and joy–it seemed as though every new day brought further leaps in communication as my kids discovered pronunciation, verbs, adjectives, vocal stresses, and body language to convey what they were noticing, experiencing, needing, complaining about. As a lifelong learner, autodidact, and amateur researcher, I found myself reading up on language and its acquisition and history.

A few moments stay vividly in my memory. One summer day when we had a sun shower, my barely two-year-old son pointed up to the sky and announced, “Sun out. Rain coming down.”

I think of that with joy every time we get a sun shower. Over 30 years later.

~

Now, I’m trying to find the same fascination, the same learning-endeavor, with my mother’s loss of speech. I want there to be some joy or benefit in this reversal of language, something I can take away from it other than a deep sense of losing the person she was. This has meant reading books about dementia, aphasia, aging, and all the rest. It’s meant trying ways to get her attention and jog her memories when visiting her; talking with her caregivers; and reminiscing with my siblings, as well as conferring with them about her current situation as it evolves.

It’s meant finding some humor in the inevitable mix-ups that happen when communication gets woefully impaired. It has also meant finding peace, or comfort, in just sitting beside my mother in silence, holding her hand in her quiet room. She was always a fairly reflective person–capable of hilarity and chattiness, but more often keeping things to herself. Maybe revealing her thoughts some time later. Now? Who can tell. I find that I return from my visits with her feeling increasingly reflective myself, wondering where she “goes” when her attention seems to wander, wondering what she would say, if she could. I find myself wanting to research, even more than I have, information on neurology and cognition and what happens when the neural synapses that lead us to language begin to get trimmed away.

Not everyone who gets past 90 experiences such neural shut-downs in the language-generating parts of the brain; I know several folks who were, and are, quite fine with speech and thinking into their late 90s! Alas that my mom isn’t one of them. My task is to find joy in whatever her moments of being are at present while she is still physically among us. Not always an easy task, it sometimes saddens me. But joy tempers sorrow, just as sorrow so often tempers joy.

Momma. If you could only read this, or understand me when I say it: I love you.

Untethering

I’ve read many memoirs and non-fiction books about cognitive decline and living with a beloved person who has a neurodegenerative condition; from Oliver Sacks to the recent biography of Terry Pratchett and many of the books we’ve read in my “morbid book group,” information in these texts connects with the personal emotions involved in deeply complicated human ways. There are also quite a few poetry collections themed around this type of loss, and I ought to compile a list one of these days, because poetry has been helpful to me as my family and I contend with elders dealing with forms of dementia (and there are many forms). That fact has led me to wonder whether readers even need another poetry collection centered around cognitive loss. Since so many of my poems during the past four or five years intersect with or explore that topic, I have considered making a manuscript of them. I hesitate. Too much sadness?

Yet while the circumstances that evoke such poems are usually sad, the disease progression differs, as do the personalities of the persons with cognition loss and the personalities of their loved ones. Perspectives on the persons and the diseases also vary a great deal. Similarities exist–enough to make a reader feel recognized–but situations and value systems mean there are as many ways to write about dementia as there are to write about anything else. My mother-in-law and my mother both were diagnosed with the same thing, vascular dementia, but their living situations, support, and the ways they responded to the aphasia and the cognitive effects create two different stories about the disease.

These days, my mother sometimes seems unmoored from the present moment, but not absorbed in memory either–just kind of lost in the ozone. Self, language, memory…sometimes they slip away from her physical body. In this process, though, she has things to teach me. Just as my hospice patients do, and as their families do, by helping me to widen my understanding of human beings and how we get by in the world. Or how we flounder differently from one another. Or how we rescue one another.

Adiamo unmoored photo: Thane Grauel, 2023

I take this gradual loss into myself–that’s what most of us do–and it’s hard, it’s painful to keep myself open to learning and love when what I first notice is untethering and loss. But yesterday when visiting my mother I noticed she has a cobbled-together notebook in which she sometimes writes (in tiny, indecipherable script). Some pages she had divided into three columns, some have scraps of letters or newspaper clippings stapled to them. Are her pages a record, or a practice? She cannot tell me. Yet it was kind of amazing to realize she does this with apparent intent. She has her reasons, if not her reason in the classic sense.

For all that visiting with her generally means a slow amble down the hall or sitting beside her while she sighs, eyes closed, drifting–despite the emptying hours–she is a Self, and she interests me. So I grieve the loss of who-she-has-been and anticipate the sorrow I’ll feel when she dies, but not everything either of us experiences is sadness. Of the poems I have read about losing a beloved person to neurodegenerative conditions, the range in scope covers a vast continuum of human existence, from misery and resentment and sorrow to revelation and even joy. Why would I avoid the full experience life offers?

Life-shifts

This week marks one of those “big birthdays”–my mother turns 90. The birthday feels bittersweet; for, in many ways, I have been in the process of “losing” my mother since her diagnosis of vascular dementia in 2017.

Or is it that she is losing? Losing cognition, a sense of time, the words to say…anything at all. She has not yet lost a sense of emotional self, though I know that if her body doesn’t give out first, that will eventually occur. I’ve been through this before, with my mother-in-law. Helping people navigate dementia is a challenging task.

Therefore, as I celebrate her birthday, I also celebrate the goodness of the people (nurses, CNAs) who assist her daily at her skilled-nursing apartment, the social worker who visits with her and brings her mail, the acquaintances who smile and greet her even though they know there cannot be conversation (of any meaningful sort). The doctors and nurse practitioners who find ways to communicate with her about how she feels physically. It cannot be easy, even with someone as even-tempered and pleasant as my mother continues to be.

A funny thing about my mom. When she was my age, we used to tease her and my dad about “getting old.” She’d toss our teasing aside by insisting, “You’re not old ’til you’re 90!” Even with a few health issues, she and my father continued to be curious about the world and the people in it, traveling, going to parties, trying new things (cross-country skiing, Thai cuisine, activities with grandchildren). About 8 years ago, when my dad was ill with cancer and meningitis and going in and out of the ICU, Mom said she felt old. We retorted, “But Mom! You’re not old ’til you’re 90!”

Now she really is 90. Bless her good kind heart. ❤

~

February 26th is just another day, another year–and at this point, my mother has very little sense of time. It is likely that my mother’s life-shifts are in the past, and the next shift (there’s no escaping it) will be death; but who can tell? My mother’s ninetieth feels like a huge shift in my life as her daughter, as an adult, as a mother to grown people, and as a writer in the world. Why this is so, I can’t say. It’s certainly something I’ll be reflecting on often in the coming years, and the reflections emerge in my writing. As I work on revising the poems I’ve drafted in the past 5 years, the topics of aging, mortality, aphasia, and memory keep showing up. Things I can consider myself fortunate, perhaps, to be preoccupied with, rather than being forced into confronting a natural disaster (Pakistan, Turkey, Syria, and others) or war (Ukraine, Syria, and other regions).

Here’s part of a poem I’ve been wrestling with lately.

                       ... --I would untangle
my mother's mind if I could be let access to its
recesses, but those stay hidden like the life in hedge
and meadow, in the woody undergrowth,
unknowns twisted together, impenetrable.
...

How fortunate for me that my mother is not far away, is well-housed and safely cared-for, and has had a long, creative, fruitful life to celebrate this weekend. Nonetheless, the grief inheres. The hardest shift? I miss the person she has been all my life until recently. And yet: here she is. Herself, more impenetrable than ever. And loved.

~

Mom at about my current age–ca. 1998 or ’99.

Getting through somehow

My mother has vascular dementia, which renders her more and more aphasic, though in her case–so far–her “emotional tone” (as philosopher Arne Naess calls it) has remained intact. I visited my mother on a recent occasion when I wasn’t feeling my best and had had a week of less-than-good health. It was not a matter of duty. The time I spend with my mother is beautiful. But it had been a tough week. Let’s leave it at that.

We sat in her apartment in the assisted-living wing and arranged the flowers I’d brought. Then we spent 20 minutes in a kind of conversation, to which I’ve become accustomed, during which she tries to convey information about something she needs to have done. In this case, after much of the usual (really, rather humorous at times) confusion, I deciphered that she wanted some sweaters taken to the dry cleaner.

Such minutia. And yet, so difficult to get across, across that divide of language and cognition. The incredible concentration and effort it takes her just to dial a phone number to call her ailing sister. To tell the nurse aide that she needs more yogurt. Anything.

Then she surprised me. She pointed to my forehead and then to her own. “This,” she said. “Is wrong. For you. What?”

Was she reading a crease in my brow? I told her I had not been feeling great. She wanted to know, so I told her details, the way one tells one’s mother. Even though I am never sure quite how much gets through.

“Lie down. Take off the peaks.” By which she meant shoes. Why not comply? We both took off our shoes and spent the visit relaxing. We even indulged in a glass of wine because she loves to offer wine to her guests. Never mind it was 11 am. My mother has lost that rigid cognitive sense of time that the rest of us spend our lives obsessing over. There’s something valuable in that loss, though it is a loss.

She’s still teaching me things. Other ways to live with loss (my dad, her “normal” brain, mobility, words…).

~~

The next evening, she called me. She wanted to know how I was feeling. I’m 63 years old and my mother is 88, and she’s still worried about me.

I’m feeling loved.


Love is all you need

Punctuation

Semicolons-and-Colons-2_720x370…or lack thereof!

One thing I notice about my draft poems is that I often ignore punctuation. Sometimes that lack remains in the final draft, if I think that the ambiguously run-on approach works for the poem or that line breaks alone serve the purpose; but more often, punctuation is something I work into the revision process. Billy Collins tells an anecdote attributed to Oscar Wilde about proofreading a poem, and how he spent all morning deciding to remove a comma, and then spent the afternoon deciding to put it back in.

I do not devote quite that much time to commas. I do think that punctuation matters as an aspect of poetic craft and can convey more than we realize. The draft below, if I decide it is salvageable, will probably require some punctuation.

~
Down Will Come Cradle

She rocked you to soothing in her
warm young arms
do not forget how young she was
you so new
to the world you felt safe unquestioning
but look back
from yourself as you are now and
think of her
embracing your small body with her fears
and with love
she barely understood herself saying to you
what she’d heard
from her mother until she could confirm
in herself
secure against her novice worries as she
rocked you both
warm and soft and young in the
darkened room
where you now attend to her no longer
young neither
you nor she young but the mutual
comforting
continues the lifetime of strain and slack
you so new
to the process of soothing her how
easily
you rock beside her holding her hands in
your warm hands

~

Today’s eft

muscariSometimes, winter feels long. When the weather fails to provide chances to get into the garden, I feel “antsy.” Something in my operating scheme malfunctions, and I lose focus–even my writing process suffers. I keep thinking of how my mother tells me she likes to get her hands in the earth, dig in the crumbly soil, plant things; and she has never been much of a gardener in the classic sense. Not the way my mother-in-law was: a perfectionist, an expert, a person who liked to plan a symphony of colors and leaf shapes, a progression of bloom times.

My mother just needs to get her hands dirty.

~

Today, the weather turned unseasonably warm, a brief window on a weekend that permitted me my garden escape. So I found myself thinking of these two Beloveds while I dug in the dirt, sowed some carrot and beet seeds, and evaluated the progress of the early lettuce. When I work in the garden, my mind wanders, then empties. It’s good for my writing and good for my soul. I suppose there’s merit in it for my physical body as well, as long as I remember not to overdo things and put out my back! Then, too, I am accompanied by these two women, so many gardening memories and instruction, so much that I’ve learned in the process of growing vegetables and plants.

~

Some of my friends consider me an expert in the garden, but I am merely modestly educated, mostly in the School of Experience. Expertise? I considered enrolling in the Master Gardener certification program; but frankly, I prefer to garden with beginner’s mind. I love what experts have to teach me and, being bookwormish by nature, I learn a great deal by reading books by experts.

Mostly, though, I learn from the garden–or from the hedgerow, the woodlot, the fields, the meadow, the wetlands. I’ve discovered that sometimes, the experts’ methods are not replicable in my yard; but a series of trial-and-error experiments of my own may produce the desired result. I have learned to let go of some of my “desired outcomes,” because the plant world and the weather control my stewardship of the soil more than anything I can attempt to do.

Letting go…well, that is the Zen of landscaping and raising vegetables and putting in a perennial bed. Also there is the constant, tedious maintenance–the tending and nurturing–that requires discipline. The discipline can be mindful, and it can also foster empty mind.

~

And there is, awaiting at every moment, discovery.

Today’s discovery in the garden was an eft. This one was hiding, next to an earthworm (which it resembles when its feet are tucked close), under a slab of slate I’d left out near the strawberry patch.

newt-eft2

Hello! And may you shortly find a body of water in which to live out your amphibian days. And may no predator consume you before you mate and create further newts. And may this fine, warm-soiled spring provide us all many opportunities to dig in the soil and get our hands dirty.

~

[This newt is a salamander in the subfamily Pleurodelinae, and the wiki commons info for the photo, which I have altered slightly, is here].

 

22 years ago this week

Here’s another post from some time back, one I have updated to reflect current experiences: the graduation and the 22nd birthday of the subject of this brief reflection.

azaleas by Ann E. Michael

The morning was hot, and I had not kept up with the gardening. I needed to get the zucchini seeds, etc. in the ground before the weather got too hot and dry. We were a little behind schedule with the garden because we had a 17-month-old, and I was 9 months pregnant. I was sowing and weeding as women have done since the earliest establishment of agriculture, heavy with child, my back aching, working like a woman obsessed.

You know, that “nesting” thing you hear about with mothers-to-be? I was a week overdue and sick of waiting around; and  gardens won’t wait. The weather was perfect for planting the post-frost seeds. The time was–of course–ripe. Eight hours later, I gave birth to a daughter.

A couple of years later, too busy to write much, this set of cinquain stanzas arrived in my mind (published in 2001 in June Cotner’s anthology Mothers & Daughters, A Poetry Celebration).

Now, that infant is a grown woman with a  college degree. Happy Birthday, Daughter.

To My Daughter

Early
morning I had
planted seeds, cucumber,
melon, squash—I pressed them into
warm earth.

The blood
in my body
sang and I listened for
a cry to join my own—straining
to hear.

And there
you were, all pink,
unfolding in our hands,
a blossom opening with a squall:
daughter.

© 1994 Ann E. Michael