Category Archives: family

toe dipping

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I finally have begun dipping a couple of toes into the waters of life — at least the waters that are not to deep, since I can’t swim.

I have sent poems in to two contests being held by regional poetry reviews. They are old poems, but they might be good enough.

I have enrolled in a four-week poetry workshop based on the Amherst Writers and Artists Method. It’s a start.

I took my first water aerobics class today — just the thing for elder women, and there are a bunch of us. My plan is to go twice a week.

It’s a start — at loosening up my social skills, my once writing talent, and my tight back muscles.

It’s just too easy to just hang around here and be entertained by my 7 year old grandson. Here’s what I mean.

I need to create the life I want to have at 70 (which is only 7 months away). It’s a start. And it’s about time.

when sleep won’t come

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I’ve tried just about everything herbal and homeopathic and over-the-counter. I’ve tried relaxation CDs and guided imagery. The only thing that works is a sleeping pill, and I will have to convince my doctor to prescribe some more. But I wish I didn’t have to.

I can’t fall asleep for one night, and my mom can’t fall asleep for good. And I think it’s all tied together.

I am helpless to help her, and her distress surrounds me even long distance, follows me into my own darkness.

I can’t bear to be with her and helpless to ease her distress.

Although yesterday, before I left to return home after five days trying, I sang to her, and she stopped her constant moaning long enough to try to sing with me.

“You are my sunshine,” I sang, and her straining voice joined me, mostly wordless, but struggling to carry the tune.

Down the street from where I live now, a teenage boy with some sort of autism sometimes sits outside and “sings” along with his audio player. The sound is haunting.

“Somewhere over the rainbow,” my mother sings with me, hauntingly, and for a few minutes, perhaps whatever mental and physical pain she’s feeling fades into the background of her distressed mind. We take the best cbd oil for anxiety to be able to feel better because we have tried many pill and none of them work as well when i go to sleep.

But not for long.

mom

I wish you could slip into that long sleep of peace, mom.

We both need some rest.

there’s a dinosaur in our back yard!

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dinosaur

My daughter is getting ready for my grandson’s “Jurassic Park Birthday Party” scheduled for next week, when he will turn an enthusiastic 7. The dinosaur that she built behind the fence will remain there long after the party is over because my grandson loves it, and we all think it adds a certain sense of adventure to our back yard. — which already is a haven for all kinds of creatures anyway.

The little plywood play boat that my daughter built last year has deteriorated into the perfect home for a couple of friendly garden snakes. A shy newt makes an occasional appearance among the foliage near the fire pit, and our weird resident bunny keeps the clover crop in check. The ever-fatter ground hog periodically lumbers out from his home under the shed to nibble on what the bunny has left behind, and the chatty family of cardinals joins the flickers and finches each morning to make short work of the bird feeders’ seeds.

So why not a dinosaur!

“I can’t not buy those Ferragamos“

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I’m reading Origins of the Specious and remembering the grammar wars (well, skirmishes, really) that I used to have with (son) b!X back in the old days. I was as adamant about the rules as he was about accepting common usage.

When I taught 8th grade English in the late ’60s, our grammar text book was my bible, and I carried it with me all through graduate school and beyond so make sure that my writing and editing were grammatically “correct.” Now I find out that b!X’s points were the ones I should have been paying attention to.

Like ending a sentence with a preposition (see previous sentence). Or beginning a sentence with a conjunction (note current sentence). And then there’s the split infinitive, as in “to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

I rarely read non-fiction, but this book is as entertaining as any Stephanie Plum adventure, chock full of ear-opening anecdotes that explain where those old grammar rules came from and who were responsible.

Here’s a little sample of Patricia O’Connor’s clever chapter headings and her catchy writing style:

Isn’t it Pedantic?

Quick, what’s the plural of “octopus”? If you think “octopi” is classier than “octopuses,” go stand in the corner…..

We live in a postmodern world, but the Latinists are still among us, especially in academia. They insist on using plurals like “gymnasia,” “syllabi,” and symposia,” even though dictionaries now recognize a preference for Anglicized plurals (“gymnasiums,” “syllabuses,” “symposiums”). There’s pedantry off campus too, of course,. I’ve seen real-estate ads offering “condominia” for sale — to ignormani, no doubt.

As Garrison Keillor notes on the book’s back cover:

It’s right there on page 54: ‘It’s better to be understood than to be correct’ — pull that out the next time somene corrects your grandma. This tour de force of our beautifully corrupted language is both. And dull it ain’t….

And yes, as the title of this posts indicates, sometimes double negatives are what make the point. Never say never.

back yard serenity

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These are two welcoming places in our back yard, thanks to the hard work of my daughter and son-in-law. The rest of the yard is requisite open space and jungle gym for the family’s youngest, as well as a vegetable garden strip.

But these are my favorite spots.

buddha2

firepit2

Now, if only I could convince the mosquitoes to move somewhere else.

a movie for the aged and the ages

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Take a grandchild to the movies and go and see Up.

It was supposed to thunderstorm this afternoon, so we figured we’d all go see a movie that we all might enjoy. And we did.

A Walter Mathau look-alike (voiced by Ed Asner) literally animated Carl Fredricksen is my new hero, and if you wear dentures, creak when you get out of bed, and wish for adventures you never had, you’ll love him too. He brings a refreshing understanding and appreciation of elderly people (with those continually growing noses and ears and those increasingly sagging jawlines and shoulders) who struggle not to be overwhelmed by a world that often seems to be leaving them behind.

In some ways, my almost-seven-year-old grandson saw a little different movie than I did, but that’s OK. I mean, when I laughed at Carl’s dentures flying out when he spit at the villain, it was for a reason much more personal than my grandson’s giggle.

But we both did see a movie about a feisty (and sometimes crotchety) old guy and a fumbling, eager kid who, together, grapple with many of their obstacles to making ordinary life an adventure. And they succeed.

“Up.” Definitely and “up” movie.

look for me at TGB

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I’m Ronni’s guest blogger today at Time Goes By, as she spends a couple of weeks in NYC at work and play, including participating in the Age Boom Academy.

From an 04/02/09 Time magazine editorial:

For the past several years, I’ve been harboring a fantasy, a last political crusade for the baby-boom generation. We, who started on the path of righteousness, marching for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam, need to find an appropriately high-minded approach to life’s exit ramp. In this case, I mean the high-minded part literally. And so, a deal: give us drugs, after a certain age – say, 80 – all drugs, any drugs we want. In return, we will give you our driver’s licenses. (I mean, can you imagine how terrifying a nation of decrepit, solipsistic 90-year-old boomers behind the wheel would be?) We’ll let you proceed with your lives – much of which will be spent paying for our retirement, in any case – without having to hear us complain about our every ache and reflux. We’ll be too busy exploring altered states of consciousness. I even have a slogan for the campaign: “Tune in, turn on, drop dead.”

Read the whole piece here. and go over the TGB to get my take on it.

other person’s words

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I am struck tonight by the power of other persons’ words.

Oh, I know, this web is a world of words. I spend too many hours meandering among miles of words that escape my head and ignore my heart.

Ronni Bennett’s Time Goes By is the one blog I read every day because what she has to say always has relevance for me. And so I don’t know how I managed NOT to read an incredibly moving section of her blog until tonight. And it is a section that has deep meaning for me because it’s about her time being her dying mother’s caregiver.


“A Mother’s Last Best Lesson” is presented in 12 poignantly honest pieces that hold the mind and touch the heart.

It’s not that I identify with Ronni’s experience; my attempts to take care of my mother have been very different. But she tells a powerful story, and there is something in me that is jarred by her revealing words.

There is something in me that resents not being able to do for my mother what Ronni did for hers. Oh yes, our circumstances are very different. Dementia makes it so. As does, in my case, situations of brutal familial disputes over how my mother’s care should be handled. I couldn’t win, so I abdicated because I have no legal power to make her struggle any easier, and I couldn’t bear to just stand by.

Ronni’s story made me realize that, after 8 years of caregiving being the intense focal point of my existence, I now find I don’t have a point, a purpose. I can get up in the morning, or not. I can eat, or not. Bathe or not. Go out or not.

I am finally “retired” from employment and living with a loving family and an almost-7-year old engaging grandson who is a joy. But I have forgotten how to be engaged in my own so-called life.

I am feeling like a work in progress that has had no progress for 8 years. In my past life I raised a family; held various challenging and rewarding jobs; was an vocal activist on behalf of various political and educational issues; and found power in the poetry of women’s spirituality. And I wrote. And I wrote. I was passionate about everything I did; if I didn’t feel passionate about it, I didn’t do it.

I have found myself in a “dark night of the soul” before and have labored, successfully, to find my way out, one step at a time.

Next week I am going on a week’s vacation to Maine with two of my closest friends. We will play Boggle and drink wine and laugh a lot. We will walk on the beach and read and contemplate and talk and laugh a lot.

And when I come back home, I will begin yet another journey to find the parts of myself that I have lost, to regenerate the parts of myself that have lost passion and purpose. I think I have found a new counselor who might be able to help me with that process.

Over the course of some 20 years of my previous life, I had the good fortune to have had as a friend and counselor someone who has moved on to assisting veterans and their families as they reconnect and readjust into full, productive civilian life.

He was a poet before he was a therapist, and his work and his words, now, still hold a great deal of healing power.

The word psychotherapist comes directly from the Asclepiad tradition. It means “soul attendant.” Psychology literally means “the order and meaning of the soul.” It didn’t become a science until Freud and his followers arrived out of the medical tradition. Modern psychology left the soul far behind and has not yet reconnected with its spiritual roots, though it needs to, because psychological healing occurs at a spiritual level.

The above is from an interview in The Sun magazine on helping veterans with PTSD, entitled Like Wandering Ghosts: Edward Tick On How The U.S. Fails Its Returning Soldiers. It’s worth a read.

straddling worlds

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I keep wondering how long it will take for me to feel really settled in this next stage of my life — to adjust to a new physical state and a new mental state.

Massachusetts is very different from where I was living in New York. Needless to say, I was financially shocked to receive a $348 bill from the town for the “excise tax” for my car. Everyone in Massachusetts who owns a car pays an annual excise tax. Well, since there’s no sales tax on clothing and shoes, I suppose that’s only fair.

On a more positive note, it seems that I don’t have a co-pay for doctor’s appointments through Medicare. I guess it all balances out, especially since I’m in the middle of a round of doctor’s appointment to get my health stabilized — including starting physical therapy for my arthritic back.

Parts of my old life are still with me, though, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I will be traveling to visit my mother this weekend, although I’m not even sure that she will remember me. The live-in aide will be able to visit her family, and my brother will be able to have a few nights to himself. And then I will travel half-way back home and spend some time with my women friends, whom I have seen in months and months.

When I get back next week, I wonder if the Cardinal eggs in the bushes not too far from my back door will be hatched. Every day, we go out and check to see how mom and babies are doing (not too close, though; the dad scolds us insistently if we get too close). My grandson is excited about perhaps being able to see the babies still tucked into the nest. Of course, he gets excited about a lot things — spotting a Monarch butterfly, adding a model Brachiosaurus to his dinosaur collection, driving by a construction site while a grapple is working, watching an air force plane flying overhead, going fishing with his dad.

I used to get excited about all sorts of things. I seem to have forgotten how. Maybe I need some mental therapy as well as the physical.

Now I’ll go pack my car.

a Mother’s Day tribute to my kids (reprised)

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This is the third Mother’s Day that I’m blogging this post. After all, my kids are the reason I’m a mother, right?

Some women take to mothering naturally. I had to work at it. And so I wasn’t the best mother in the world. I would have worked outside the home whether I had become a single mom or not. And because I did, mine were latchkey kids, with my daughter, beginning at age 12, taking care of her younger brother, age 5, after school. I left them some evenings to go out on dates. Oh, I did cook them healthy meals, and even cookies sometimes. I made their Halloween costumes and went to all parent events at their schools. My daughter took ballet lessons, belonged to 4H (but I got kicked out as Assistant Leader because I wouldn’t salute the flag during the Vietnam War). I made my son a Dr. Who scarf and took him to Dr. Who fan events. I bought him lots of comic books, invited friends over to play, and taught him how to throw a ball.

But most of all, I think/hope I did for them what my mother was never able to do for me, — give them the freedom and encouragement to become who they wanted to be — to explore, make mistakes, and search for their bliss. I think/hope that I always let them know that, as far as I was concerned, I loved them just the way they were/are.

Not having had that affirmation from my mother still affects my relationship with her. I hope that my doing that right for them neutralizes all the wrong things I did as they were growing up.
So, you two (now adult) kids, here’s to you both. You keep me thinking, you keep me informed, you keep me honest, and, in many ways, you keep me vital. I’m so glad that I’m your mother.

So, in memory of those not-always-good ol’ days that you two somehow managed to survive with style, here you are, playing “air guitar and drums” — enjoying each other’s company sometime in the late 70s and bringing so much delight into my life.

airguitar