I should have been a bad boy

When I was a baby, Mommy had a really hard time keeping me still, and one day I did a backflip and slipped out of her arms and landed head first on a silver box. The doctor said it was fine. The box, however, was not, which is a testament to the hardness of my head.

I was also a sleepwalker. My Indian name was Walks with Diapers (kidding) but one night when my parents were sleeping I managed to get out of bed, open the front door and walk off the property in just my nappies, I made my way to the main street where I would have been. a Gerber hit-and-run if my psychic mom hadn’t woken up and screamed, “The baby’s outside!” Luckily they found me in time, but they woke me up scared and the diapers did the trick.

So you can imagine how traumatic it can be for a little jumping bean to get caught in the spinning teacup from Alice in Wonderland with his mom, trapped in the dark, rising structure, the Mad Hatter jumping up and down like a maniac during every painful and horrible. minute. Eventually they had park staff come up and carefully guide each of us out of the canopies and back onto dry land. Disneyland was never my cup of tea after that.

He also had a predilection for strange and wild animals. He was clumsy and I fell over a lot, and he was obsessed with kids in kindergarten. Other than that, from what I heard, he was a pretty good guy. For some reason, I must have had George W’s blood in my veins (Washington, not Bush) because I couldn’t tell a lie. If I broke it or did it, I told myself.

The adage is that if you’re a pain in the ass as a kid, your parents will get you back later. Maybe it’s some kind of ancestral curse and it usually develops in your own children, but I never had one. But sometimes it manifests in your parents.

So it was time to start thinking about selling Mom’s house and moving her to an adult community where she could enjoy life and not have to worry about the maintenance of a fifty-seven year old house, a big yard, cleaning and kitchen. She was hot and cold with the idea, but she seemed to start to accept it. That is, until it was really time to take the plunge.

“I’m not ready,” she said. “I have to go through all this stuff.” She reminded me of when my parents had tried to get me to go to bed at night. I was the negotiator. Revenge, I thought. “Five more minutes, Dad,” she begged. And the minutes turned into an hour, sometimes more.

Those things included unidentifiable bits of things that once worked, old cough drops, unused clothes, safety pins, cassette tapes, dead bugs, lonely jelly beans (she liked the black licorice ones, but couldn’t make out the seeds). from bugs), broken clothespins that he still used to hang his things outside on the clothesline in his backyard, items handed down from siblings who had passed away, food that was past its expiration date, dust, and lots of memorabilia. Understood. For me, as I got older, the simpler the better. To her, all these things were her life and we were about to take it apart and rearrange it in a new way.

Mom’s delays became a year, and then three. But her memory was beginning to give him trouble and she knew it.

“Maybe it’s time,” she said one day. And while holding back tears, I accepted. Sometimes daughters know more and there’s that tipping point when father becomes son, but this was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, harder than even walking away from a romantic relationship.

So I went out and bought points, lots of them. Red dots. I told her she could put them in all the things she couldn’t live without at all and we’d take them to her new home and she could come back whenever she wanted to check out the rest of the stuff, and we’d sell, donate, or throw away whatever else she wanted. I would not. It seemed like a great idea to me, but for her it was like losing control of her life.

And the long ordeal began. We found a place, the best and most recommended in the area. It was so nice that I was ready to move. Three places a day and a housekeeper? Sign me up.

Mom loved my little apartment, so I set up her new place the same way and was all set when she walked in. Lights, candles, action. She loved it that first night, but soon after, things changed. “When can I go home?” she asked. “Mom, you live here now. We’re going to sell the house, remember?” I said. She frowned at me and her mouth turned into a straight line. He was scared. “You told me I could go back there. I don’t like it here. These people are all sick and old and I’m BORED.” When I was taken off the bottle as a baby, Mom said I did very well with the transition. “Run out of the bottle, mommy!” I proudly proclaimed.

But I only had my bottle for a few years and she had her house for fifty-seven, and I realized there was no comparison. She had moved me eighteen times over those years, so she was obviously grateful for the change, but the change scared her and made her angry. Damn crazy. So angry that I began to wonder if there was a daughter protection program.

And I began to doubt myself in the same way that I used to get to that point in my relationships with men when it was time for a change, but my little voice was telling me that this was the right thing to do. do. She needed to be safe, and she needed qualified and available medical care.

Mom might have been losing her memory, but she still had her superpowers. She convinced an unsuspecting old man who still had his driver’s license and fell under her spell to take her for a ride in his fastback Mustang, a ride back to his house that we just happened to be dismantling at the time. It looked like I was about to explode, but luckily I had a handsome friend helping me at the time and he fell under her spell for a few hours, and we sent Mr. Mustang packing while we did the same.

There were times when I would return to the house alone during this process and as I walked through the rooms, dusty memories ran through my mind. I saw the holes in my dad’s tie holder and remembered all the times he had ripped it off in anger, disappearing for two or three days until he calmed down, until the last time, which was the last time. He never came back. Mom said she was coming back, but she ended up dying at the young age of forty-four.

Tears began to stream down my face and mixed with the dust of fifty-seven years. “I miss you, daddy,” I cried. “I wish you were here.” Now I know why she had been so resistant to leaving the house. The walls spoke to me now, the same way I’m sure they spoke to her every night for all those years. Then suddenly I felt the urge to turn my head and my eyes fell on a drawer in the living room closet. It must have been that little voice of mine (or his), but I opened it up and pulled out a manila envelope that was marked “Personal” but wasn’t handwritten by either of my parents.

I didn’t even look, but reached in blindly, not knowing what I might find. And when I opened my eyes, my heart skipped a beat. It was a card from my dad, an Easter card he’d written when the Beatles were my favorite band. “Happy Easter to Robyn Beatle from Daddy Beatle. I will always love you.” That card had to be hidden for over forty years, in fact, I don’t remember ever seeing it. And suddenly I was enveloped in indescribable heat and I cried for two hours straight. I could feel it. He was there with me. I also found a little card that I had given to mom the day I was born that said, “I’m glad she’s a girl!” She had always asked me about that too.

I suddenly felt stronger and as I went through more drawers and more boxes, I started to get to know my mom again. I found self-help books from years gone by, incense, candles we’d made together and recipes I wished she could still make for me, exercise videos, knitting projects, goofy family photos and beautiful portraits, old Sinatra records, pay stubs. of works. that she had, and more. That was what was bothering her now. All of this represented her passion and her purpose and now she had to leave it all behind.

I started to feel like this was a rite of passage for both of us and I thanked God that I was able to find pieces of my mom’s life while she was still alive and she was able to talk about it with me. There was no way he would have been able to do this if she had passed away. Compassion flooded my heart and soul. At first it was a lot like pain, but I feel pain in my stomach and sometimes I bend over to try to stop it. Compassion hurts good and I felt it in my heart as it tore at the seams of my psyche. This was cathartic.

So when mom tells me her bed isn’t her bed and her clothes aren’t her clothes and everyone is taking her stuff (because she can’t find it), I realize maybe she’s stuck in the cups. of her own reality now, and I know that somehow, someday, someone will gently escort her back to safe, solid ground like they did me that day among the candy and the bugs and the Beatles.