On edge
picture by darkmatter
This post was partly inspired by an entry on Ali Clifford’s photographic blog Twenty-Ten when she featured a candid portrait of her mother. I was moved by the image and by the title: she brought me here. If only my feelings for my mother were so pure and so simple.
My mother has come to stay. She arrived yesterday and will be with us for three weeks while the hubby is away on a business trip. I love her dearly, but there is … history … and much that goes unspoken between us. I have tried to discuss said history with my mother. Many times. But she cannot bear the confrontation. Either she shuts down, or she blows up. And neither situation is easy to endure. Especially for three weeks under one roof.
So here we are on day one and already I need an outlet for my frustration. How can one person push so many of my buttons at once? I’ve done a lot of work, a lot of healing, over the past six or seven years and I truly thought I was at peace with the past. I truly thought I had let go of Mum and all her petty stuff. I had evolved enough to have her come and stay for longer than we’ve spent together since I was a teenager coming home for uni holidays. I truly thought I was now above it all. And as far as she is aware, I am.
Oh, but what would I give for her to be different to who she is! What if she was relaxed and open and able to talk about anything with me? What if she could rationalise her experiences and trust her memories and express her love freely? What if she could be free from pain and relieved of the weight of her anxiety and depression? What would she be like then?
But it is futile to wish her different. She is who she is. Our relationship is what it is. The only aspect of this situation I control is my own. So I will try, very hard, to have a pleasant three weeks with my mother, to give her happy memories with her grandchildren, to avoid any conflict or unpleasantness that may arise, to keep building the precarious bridge between her world and mine.
But it won’t take much to push me over the edge.
February 10th, 2010 - Posted in personal growth, nostalgia, grandparents, grief, love, self-care | | 3 Comments
Out with the old
picture by *Sally M*
I guess I would call 2009 a transition year. It began with us looking down the long tunnel of my mother-in-law’s dementia. There was no knowing what the day would hold. Since she lived with us, all other concerns were pushed aside to accommodate her needs, including the needs of our four children. I actually can’t recall their first day of school for the year, though I know I took pictures at the time. This Xmas brought back a lot of memories of her as I recalled how she’d managed to choose appropriate presents for the children, and socialise with her family at Xmas lunch. Though her illness was evident to us all, none of us could have known we wouldn’t spend another Xmas together like that.
Her decline was swift and by April she was hospitalised, never to return home. Her absence was felt for a long time, still is, though we’ve moved on from the stressful intensity of caring for her. The piano lessons Miss Nine and I began as a comfort to her have continued. Her roses, which I reluctantly planted outside her kitchen window, are thriving. And we relax in the knowledge that she is being cared for as adequately as we might have managed ourselves, in a hospice run by the Alzheimer’s Association. It is located far across town, however, so we visit her when we can. It isn’t ideal, but it is what it is. Life goes on, as it must.
The silver lining is that my time became freer and I decided, somewhat on a whim, to return to uni and do a Masters in creative writing. It’s funny how childhood fantasies find a way of becoming a reality, but here I am, finally doing what I perhaps should have done too many years ago. I am enjoying myself, without getting hung up on what will come next. And I’m relishing the extra time with family too, though I berate myself for not getting out in the garden as much as I should. Somehow, it has managed to thrive despite my neglect.
And so have the children. Master Nine and Miss Eight both earned awards in their classes for their willingness to take responsibility and help others. I suppose they have their grandmother to thank for that. Master Six has developed quality friendships in his prep class and is profoundly ready for Year One.
And thanks to my studies, Miss Four will begin daycare this new year, which I expect she will love. The local centre operates using a Montesorri foundation which is familiar and acceptable to us. But as she starts prep next year (2011!) I feel compelled to make the most of my time with her. The freight train of life barrels along at its own speed, and, as usual, I’m running to keep up.
On the plus side, hubby and I have already decided how we will spend his 2011 long service leave. We have always wanted to do a trip around Australia as a family and this may be our only opportunity to realise the dream. It gives us something to plan and look forward to as we journey through the year ahead.
As for me, I intend for 2010 to be the year I get back to me. And in doing so, get back to the basics of family, friends, house and garden. I’ll keep banging the piano, and writing and blogging. I’ll read more, spend more time in the garden and simplify, simplify, simplify as the wise man Thoreau once advised. I’m generally not one for making resolutions, but there is no better time for change than a brand new year.
So here’s to change, and the eternal challenge of keeping up with it.
January 3rd, 2010 - Posted in personal growth, gratitude, nostalgia, grandparents, duty of care, grief, wisdom, health | | 2 Comments
The dying of the light #3
picture by vernon_dutton
Mother-in-law is not yet settled in her Alzeimers nursing home but I suppose it’s safe to say the next stage has arrived. I feel a confusing mixture of relief and disappointment over her placement, but anything has to be better than the old wing of the hospital that contained the extended care unit she has called ‘home’ for the past several months. The inconvenience of commuting to the inner-city, the expensive parking fees, negotiating the internal maze of buildings, is all now, thankfully, a thing of the past!
“This is my home now,” she said to me yesterday in a moment of clarity.
“Yes, it is,” I replied, but her use of home brought to mind the institutional meaning of the word, not the comforting, familial home that I had always imagined would be hers until the end of her days.
I looked at all the residents in the dining room. Many needed assistance to eat, making reflexive noises or displaying some sort of behavioural tic. Some wore head protection for the event of a fall. Others used mobility aids or were completely immobile in wheel chairs or bed chairs, relying on staff to change their environment for them. MIL looked so normal beside them, so capable and whole. I thought, what is she doing here? How did she come to this?
It will take us all a few more weeks to get used to the change. We anticipate MIL will make everyone’s life hell until that time comes, like she did before. It’s all so confusing, and disappointing, and unimaginably depressing. I don’t blame her for feeling angry and disempowered and there’s a small part of me that thinks, why should you be co-operative and ‘nice’? You go girl!
Go ahead and RAGE at all of us!
June 17th, 2009 - Posted in grandparents, community, duty of care, grief, love, health | | 4 Comments
Ritual
picture by Lawrence OP
Sad to say, but I attended a funeral with my husband today. My mother-in-law’s sister died suddenly from an asthma attack and a small gathering of family and friends attended a Catholic ceremony in her parish church.
It has been many years since I’ve willingly attended a mass (oh, say … twenty!) and my inner-atheist thought she’d left her Catholic past well and truly behind her. But I surprised myself by being able to sing the hymns in tune and being able to give ritual responses at the appropriate times. That’s how deeply ingrained the culture of Catholicism is for me. My faith may have waned, but my ability to participate in the ritual of the church still remains.
I was taken aback by how evocative certain hymns and prayers were for me, and the smell of that unique incense they use (for whatever reason I now can’t recall): how it immediately brought my emotions to the surface as I remembered all the grief I’d ever experienced in my life and all the funerals I’d ever attended. Despite my determined restraint, the tears began to flow.
And while it felt somewhat hypocritical to say The Lord’s Prayer out loud with everyone else, I knew that Aunt Rita would have appreciated our being there for her ceremony. And I wanted to be there for her ceremony, to say goodbye in some official way. I realised what power ritual has in our lives and how letting go of religion can leave our lives devoid of ritual and communal culture.
June 10th, 2009 - Posted in personal growth, nostalgia, grandparents, ritual, grief, beliefs | | 4 Comments
Introducing Emilia Liz
picture by Caveman 9223
On Being Scandinavian
One day last December I was shopping at Toronto’s Kensington Market and saw a car with a sticker of the Danish flag on the back. As I stopped to look more closely, a young mulatto girl came up to me and asked, “Can I help you?”
Curious to know what her connection to Denmark might be, I said, “I noticed you have a sticker of the Danish flag on the back of your car.”
“My mom’s Danish,” she replied.
“Oh, I’m of Norwegian descent. Our flag is just like yours except that it has a blue cross.” (Denmark’s flag is red with a white cross, Norway’s red with a blue cross outlined in white.)
Just then an older White woman who had apparently been listening to the conversation walked over, smiled, and started talking to me in what must have been Danish (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are so similar they’re often called the dialects of the Scandinavian language). I apologized and told her I didn’t speak Norwegian.
I wished a Merry Christmas to the mother and daughter, and we parted ways. I felt somewhat ashamed of myself for automatically presuming that the girl was NOT Danish. After all, thanks to some Italian and Irish ancestry I’m hardly the typical blond-haired blue-eyed Scandinavian. But as I pondered the matter further, I realized there were a number of mixed-race Scandinavians in my midst. A children’s group to which I once brought my daughter included a small and very pretty mulatto girl with a Swedish mother. My best friend on a summer exchange program to Quebec was a young woman whose mother was from Sweden and father from Egypt (for the purpose of this essay, I’ll go by the Canadian government’s current classification of Arabs as non-White, even if some of them are physically indistinguishable from Greeks or Southern Italians). My family is no stranger to interracial relationships either. A cousin of mine married a Black American man and has two biracial sons. My own daughter is part Native American on her Nicaraguan father’s side, though like most Latin Americans he has Spanish ancestry as well.
Scandinavia boasts several well-known individuals of mixed heritage in its ranks. Among them are singer Nenah Cherry (Swedish mother, African father), Kersti Bowser (a Black-Swedish model who joked she went to tanning salons to “keep her Swedish side in check”); and Rikke Roenholt (Danish mother, Ghanaian father), a runner who will be representing Denmark in the 2008 Olympics. Famous White Scandinavians who have been involved in interracial unions include Icelandic singer Bjork (had a relationship with a Black man named Goldie which caused an anti-miscegenation fan of hers to commit suicide on videotape), Swedish actress May Britt (wife of musician Sammy Davis Jr.), Swedish actor Dolph Lundgren (ex-lover of Grace Jones), and Denmark’s Prince Joachim (formerly married to a woman of Austrian and Chinese descent).
Any discussion on mixed-race Scandinavians would be incomplete without a mention of Greenland. An overseas territory of Denmark, Greenland was colonized by that nation in the 1700s. Most Greenlanders are of mixed Danish and Inuit descent. Recent genetic studies have shown that as with Latin America, Greenland’s present population resulted from unions of European men with native women. However, while colonization in Latin America led to an almost complete Westernization of that region (most Latin American mestizos, like my daughter’s father, speak Spanish as their first language and don’t identify at all as Indian), Greenlanders have kept much more of their original culture. For example, Greenlandic, an Inuit language, is the mother tongue of most Greenlanders, though many know Danish too. On the other hand, the bulk of Greenland’s population belongs to the Lutheran Church, as does Denmark’s.
At an individual level, the degree to which mixed-race Scandinavians retain their culture varies. My above-mentioned friend in Quebec, for instance, spent long periods of time as a child in Sweden and spoke fluent Swedish. In contrast, my grandmother, whose family came from Norway, married a non-Scandinavian man and didn’t teach Norwegian to my mother, so I am unfortunately unable to pass the language on to my daughter and any other children I may have in future.
One “marker” of Scandinavian heritage is Lutheranism, even if not all Scandinavians are Lutheran and many of those who are are not particularly religious. Here again, families differ. Though her father was Muslim, my Swedish-Egyptian friend was raised Lutheran. However, a Finnish-Canadian colleague married to a Filipino woman was bringing up his children in his wife’s Catholic faith. I myself have had my daughter baptized in the Lutheran Church. While the principal reason for doing so is to share my personal faith with her, an added bonus is the “link” it provides to her Scandinavian ancestors.
On my kitchen wall is a picture of a girl in traditional Norwegian dress. My mother remarked that she might make a similar costume so that my daughter could be a “little Norwegian girl” for Halloween.
“But she’s already a little Norwegian girl!” I protested.
“With those big brown eyes [courtesy of her father]?” my mom responded, and we both laughed.
May 21st, 2009 - Posted in gratitude, partnership, parenthood, nostalgia, grandparents, beliefs, love | | 1 Comments
