Category Archives: bitching

seeing circles

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The poem below by Billy Collins (one of Jim Culleny’s daily poetry emails) makes me sad and angry and wistful and hungry.
I’m not hungry for sweets. I surely eat enough of those.

Rather it’s a soul-deep hunger for the solitude to watch circles become salt, to reach for and conjure the words that make magic of metaphor.

And so I am angry that with each passing year I have had to move farther and farther from that place where destiny can be designed. And I am sad because those years can never be recovered. And I am wistful, finally, because that is what comes of and with age and the utter exhaustion of being someone else’s keeper.

Design
Billy Collins
I pour a coating of salt on the table
and make a circle in it with my finger.
This is the cycle of life
I say to no one.
This is the wheel of fortune,
the arctic circle.
This is the ring of Kerry
and the white rose of Tralee
I say to the ghosts of my family,
the dead fathers,
the aunt who drowned,
my unborn brothers and sisters,
my unborn children.
This is the sun with its glittering spokes
and the bitter moon.
This is the absolute circle of geometry
I say to the crack in the wall,
to the birds who cross the window.
This is the wheel I just invented
to roll through the rest of my life
I say
touching my finger to my tongue.

is that the way it was done?

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Is that the way it was done before nursing homes and hospices, before miracle drugs and transplants, when old folks died slowly at home, their sons and daughters and grandchildren and cousins all taking turns taking care? The frail old ones, dying only from the final stresses of age and gravity, moved slowly and silently, sleeping through most of those last months, last weeks, last days. Relatives came and went, stayed and shared, while the old ones slept and dreamed and waited, and that was the way it was finally done.
But there are only two of us here to keep watch, to take care. Each day she is more tired, asks to sleep more and more often. Awake, she sits sad and silent, eating slowly in front of the television that she can barely hear anyway. I sometimes still hold her and dance with her late at night, when she’s afraid and won’t sleep. Sometimes I sleep with her to make her feel safe. Sometimes, no matter what we do, she’s up and down all night, wants to eat, wants to go home. “Please, please,” she mutters, unable to tell me what exactly would please her.
Someone cracked my rear passenger side bumper, and I have to go and get an estimate so that I can get it fixed. But then what. My brother would have to get my mother in his car and come with me to drop off (and then pick up) my car from the body shop. It is hard to believe that we know no one around here who can help with that chore so that we wouldn’t have to put my mother through that. I don’t even think that there are taxis in this little town. At least I’ve never seen any. I think I’d better start checking that out.
This is not the way it’s supposed to be done — without friends, without extended family, without a support system. But this is the way my brother insists, and I am too tired to argue any more.
I’d better check the phone book for taxi services.
And I’m still purging and packing and planning. While I cook, and feed, and clean, and sit, and hold, and hope.
ADDENDUM:
Whaddya know. There IS a taxi service right in town! Family or friends would be better, but I’ll settle for a taxi when it comes to getting my car fixed.

signs

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When she flutters her hands in front of her nose, I know that she needs a Kleenex (well, we use Puffs because they’re softer on her nose). When she taps her teeth, I know that she wants her flosser. When she reaches out with her right hand and opens and closes her fist, I know that she wants her cane.
She doesn’t always use her self-devised sign language, but she’s tending to do it more often — especially when she’s tired. And she seems to be tired more and more. The signs are often there. The words are often not.
On a sunny day last week, when I got into my car to go to the drug store, I flipped down the visor mirror to check for any stray chin hairs that my Tweeze might have missed. No chin hair — but what’s that??? Long white hairs in my eyebrows??? Now there’s a sign. Definitely a sign.
I’m not sleeping well, my reflux is acting up, and that contact dermatitis I get on my elbow every once in a while is itching like crazy. I can’t ignore the signs.
Signs that I need a break. I need a couple of days away from here. And so I’m going to my daughter’s from Sunday to Tuesday. It’s my birthday present to myself.
In two years I’ll be 70. It just doesn’t seem real to me.
Maybe it will seem real when my natural hair color finally grows in. Then I will see the most obvious of all signs — the gray signs of being where I am in life.
Each year, on my birthday, I take a photo of myself. Each year, the signs are more obvious — the drooping jaw, the sagging chin. There won’t be much of the gray hair visible when I take this year’s photo. But next year, there will be no denying that sign of this life fading to pale.
If I were able to live my life at the age I am today in the way I would prefer, I wouldn’t be obsessing so much on my age and what I am losing with each day that passes.
But here I am, watching for signs and missing those times when the only sign I looked for was the one that said “dancing until 2 a.m.”

bottom line on Frontline

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Last night’s PBS program on Frontline, called “The Hand of God,” needs to be watched by all of those who hold so fast and so mindlessly to the corporate hypocrisies of the Catholic Church, as well as by the rest of us who are “recovering Catholics” (a phrase the reflects the evil addiction that today’s Catholic hierarchy goes to great lenghts to feed).
You can watch it online here.

“I was inspired by my brother’s strength of spirit in surviving his abuse,” says Joe Cultrera. “His story was unlike any I had seen in the media. I thought a detailed film about his and my family’s experience would prove healing and freeing for others.”
Paul Cultrera and his siblings were raised in an Italian-Catholic family in Salem, Mass., and attended Catholic school from kindergarten through high school. From an early age they were immersed in the beliefs and teachings of the Catholic Church.
“There was the Catholic Church, and everything else was hell,” Paul recalls. “Everyone beyond the bounds of the Catholic Church was doomed. Everything was presented to you in terms of sin.”

Joe Cultrera, the person who made the documentary, is a friend of a friend of my brother’s. That’s irrelevent except for the fact that it’s the initial reason why I took the hour and a half to watch it, even though its scheduling intruded on my favorite program, “Boston Legal” — which I had to tape and then stay up late to watch.
The documentary uses great compassion and understanding in portraying the deep emotional roots that ethnic communities tend to have in their neighborhood churches — many of which, although solvent and functioning, are being closed by the higher powers of that “one true church.”
The film is a brutal indictment — not of faith or the faithful — but of the powerbrokers who run what has become a corrupt, hyprocritical , and destructively self-perpetuating system that poses as a Christian religion.

a mother’s day reality bite

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The Limerick Savant has put out a call for Mother’s Day limericks. I dare the jester to print this one, an original by this burned out, currently bitter caregiver:

Of mothers there are varied kinds.
Some are honored; some are maligned.
There’s no perfect mater
and sooner or later
you learn to accept what you find
To “mother” with grace is not easy.
You’re expected to always be breezy.
And when you mother your mother
‘cause a choice there’s no other
you likely go out of your mind.

Anyone with a Mother’s Day limerick to share, email your creative endeavor to limericksavant@gmail.com.

Obviously, I had a meltdown today. Told my sib I just don’t care anymore. Either he agrees to let me hire someone to come over here and give her some companionship, or I give him whatever money she gave me and I’m out of here. (The reasons why I only have those two choices are too dysfunctionally private to share here.)

I left home when I was 17 because I couldn’t get along with her (I’ve blogged about that before). When I thought she couldn’t live on her own anymore and she was always calling me long distance about various ailments, I decided to take her on, hoping that we both had changed enough to find a way to coexist — if not actually enjoy each other’s company. What an idiot I was.

I find that I don’t mind at all doing all of the chores, both for her personally and just general cooking and cleaning. I just can’t stand her company. I am a terrible daughter. And I don’t feel bad about that at all.

According this site, she’s nearing the end of stage 5 dementia, moving rapidly into stage 6. There’s one more stage after that, and she could live another decade. F**K!.

the state of things

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Bush is scheduled to give his State of the Union address on Tuesday. I doubt if I’ll watch him. I don’t need any more reminders of how disillusioned I am by life on all levels these days.

I can’t even get the Sunday edition of my local newspaper, the Times Herald-Record, delivered the way it should be. It took me seven phone calls and six weeks to have them get the Sunday paper here the first time. And they still haven’t put up one of those tubes for newspapers delivered to rural customers. They leave the paper on the side of the road in a plastic bag. I’ll make phone call number eight tomorrow and give them one more week to get the tube up. Otherwise I won’t renew my subscription.

There’s a commentary by a local resident in the paper today, however, that deserves mention because he quotes the words of General Dwight D. Eisenhower 45 years ago as he was ending his term as President of the United States.:

‘In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence … by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this … endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. …

Today … the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system – ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society. … and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Whatever happened to that kind of moral Republican leader??

And here, on the home front, she washes paper plates, folds up sheets of paper towels and makes neat piles of them in her dresser drawer, keeps wanting to dance, takes out her hats (of which she has boxes) and reorganizes them. She needs something to do, something she can do. I ordered a “pencil by number” kit of flowers and hope that she might occupy herselp with “coloring.” We can hang up what she finishes on the porch.

I’ve been giving her iron and B-12 pills, and she seems to be stronger physically, even though she still sleeps away half the day. What the hell, she has nothing more interesting to do.

This week I will get a massage and a hair cut — not from the same person, of course.

I sit by my window and wait for a sunny day.

some things get better; some things get worse

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The good news is that I have something interesting to which to look forward. In May, the New York State members of the Hugh O’Brien Youth Leadership organization will be meeting for a conferece at the Legislative Office Building in Albany, and I’ve been asked to be on a panel about blogging. I don’t have the details yet, but I expect it will focus on blogging ethics, connections to traditional journalism, whether it all needs legislative regulations to keep it civilized.

So, if any of my readers have any suggestions for online statements/opinions about any of those kinds of things, please leave me a link. I know of a few myself, including Rebecca Blood’s essay, Chris Nolan’s recent description of “stand-alone journalism” that I found via b!X’s Portland Communique, and also b!X’s Communique link-handy page about weblog ethics and elements of journalism.

PLEASE NOTE (ADDED 08/17): Most of the links above have disappeared, but here is a current link tot he history of blogging. https://blogging.com/history
I’d also like to hear from “personal” (in contrast to political) bloggers, like me, regarding how they feel about government-imposed regulations on blogging. Please pass my request for comments around; I would love to be able to cite other “personal” bloggers’ opinions, not just my own.

And then, on the other front….

It’s 3 am and, again, the phone is ringing. This time it’s her pearls. You move the filing cabinet with all of her valuables into her bedroom so they are next to her all night. Then the robbers can’t sneak in when she’s sleeping and keep taking her things. This morning you find her cash-filled wallet in the bottom of the pillowcase of the bottom-most pillow on the made-up extra bed. It’s been missing for several days, but she didn’t put it there, she says.

And now back to an aspect of the panel discussion: is this the kind of thing that one should “ethically” be posting about. Is it an invasion of her privacy?

I would very much like to know what you think. What kind of guidelines have you imposed on yourself when it comes to what you post about and what you don’t?

Leave comments, please!!
VERY IMPORTANT ADDENDUM:
What I should have stressed is that this is a panel at a YOUTH LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE, so these are all high school kids we will be addressing. Some might already be blogging. I should have phrased my post to relate specifically to what adult bloggers would want high school potential bloggers to know. My fault for not being clear enough. Afterward, each panelist will have about an hour with a group of kids who are interested in the panelist’s “area of expertise.” I suspect the panel topic will be closer to “what can you do in your own life to take leadership and prepare yourself for leadership.” Or maybe “searching for and sharing the truth.” Or maybe not. I don’t have the specifics yet. I probably jumped the gun in asking for input. But I think I was wrong in assuming that the whole panel will be about blogging. I am the blogging person — that’s why I was looking for input. Sorry if, in my getting the cart before the horse, I indicated that the whole panel was about blogging.
This is a really good example how one should make sure she has all the facts before she blogs. Bad, bad Kalilily.
I said it better over here at BlogSisters because I took the time to think it through.
Kalilily Time is sometimes time out of whack.

And chaos reigns supreme.

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chaos2.JPG
This is the view across the top of my roll-top desk, past my room divider, into my kitchen. Like my life. Chaos.

— Still getting over major tooth abcess and root canal work.

— Now mother hearing voices singing Polish Christmas Caroles while the podiatrist (who she insists is Polish but he’s not) is working on her hammer toe.

— While making broccoli soup in my Vita Mix, didn’t realize that the machine was set on high speed and the cover wasn’t on tight enough and — heh — broccoli bits all over everything, including me.

— Made batches of pesto with the harvested basil after I cleaned up the broccoli mess.

— Still not ready for the craft fair that I do once a year; need to print up signs, finish a few more items, and price everything. New items this year, thanks to a brainstorm of my breast-feeding daughter: washable nursing necklaces and shawls.

— Am almost done using putting transfers (that I printed up on my computer) on a special t-shirt to wear to BloggerCon.

— Finished harvesting my tomatoes, basil, and parsley; now have to clean out my garden before frost hits.

— Gotta get to the library to return Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons, which was so enthralling to me that I read it in one day (instead of cleaning up some of the chaos). As an ex-Catholic who went to 13 years of Catholic school and is totally fascinated with the lore of Church and its roots in paganism, I just loved this symbol, taken from the book:
earthairfirewater.jpg

— Gotta pick up The Secret Life of Bees, which is waiting for me at the library, as well as one of Judith Jance’s’ mysteries-on-tape that I can listen to on my way back and forth to Boston.

— Next stop is at Hannaford to pick up my mother’s prescription for Quinine for her leg cramps and then to Joanne’s for fabric to cover seams that I let out from a jacket I love that I made smaller years ago when I WAS smaller.

When my friend P stopped by after the tap-dancing class that we’re taking but I missed because of my root canal, we commiserated about how being retired isn’t what we wanted it to be. (Her 87-year-old ex-mother-in-law, to whom she’s close, has just been diagnosed with advanced breast cancer.) She thought that she would be spending her time resting, traveling, reading, having fun.

Whoever keeps trying to tell us that life can be just fun and games at any age is really selling us a bill of goods. I don’t know anyone whose life is that way.

Meanwhile, I’ve got to go battle chaos. And entropy. Always entropy.

Yes. America as a whole seems to have succumbed to entropy. And apathy.

Battle on, Xena.

Mother Load

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“I sent you to college. You’re a teacher. You should be perfect.”

That’s what she said to me yesterday, my mother.

I don’t even remember what it was I did this time that didn’t meet with her approval. Not that it matters. I’ve spent my entire life repelling her disapprovals. But it does burn my butt that she still doesn’t get it.

Over on her weblog, Jeneane Sessum shares her current struggles to get beyond the load her mother laid on her. Mother-daughter stuff. Tough stuff.

I think I managed to do the mothering thing less destructively than my mother, although I certainly didn’t do it perfectly. Of course not.