Full Moon

As a primary teacher, the general wisdom held that kids were more likely to act out and be a little weird when the moon was full. I've heard people in other caregiving professions make the same claim. Whether there is anything to it, or it is simply a self-fulfilling prophecy, I don't know. What I do know is that everything seems to run in cycles.

I've never lived right on the ocean, but I have lived not far from the beach a couple of times. Ocean tides rise and fall with great predictability ---- after all, tide schedules are published in newspapers and online. It's no secret that the moon waxes and wanes, the seasons come and go, our hearts beat steadily and our lungs require no consciousness to expand and contract.

With all the evidence of rhythm and cycle, it is no wonder that an event which falls far outside the norm makes humans and animals edgy. Where I live, we see it every year during hurricane season ---- and also during the winter if a bold meteorologist breathes the word snow. Anticipation rises, an excitement that needles the nervous system and causes unusual behaviors. Kids twirl, squeak, jump, giggle and clutch each other. Adults would do the same, but that's unseemly, so instead they stock up on essentials like bread, milk and beer, lay in a supply of batteries, and hit the social media sites.

Status updates! Exclamation points! Photos! Rumors!! And the sense that the unexpected is just around the corner, danger lurks and life is unpredictable. Anything could happen!!!

Never mind that life is always unpredictable, that anything could happen on any given day. We rely on the rhythms we know and understand to keep us safe and going forward. If I had to assess the risk of getting in the car every time I did it, I'd wind up cowering in my house. If I consulted actuarial charts (or even just the obits) every morning with an eye to my planned activities, I might never get out of bed.

Someone in our city was hit by a bus this week, and unfortunately he was killed. I often say, when drawing an example of an unexpected event, that "I could go out and get hit by a bus tomorrow!" It struck me as strange, and really sad, that someone actually did.

One week away from the "cataclysmic" election, we have a storm of unpredictable proportions. It's like a ready-made metaphor from heaven. It is making landfall right now, according to news reports. Millions of people are in the path it is expected to take, hunkered down and hopefully safe, but some folks will inevitably lose their homes, their livelihoods, their lives. Life stories are being altered right now; forever after, for them, time will be divided between 'before the storm' and 'after the storm'. It is out of rhythm, out of sync, and random in the way that natural disasters always are.

We here in the center of North Carolina have been spared the worst of it. Others will suffer. This is the type of event that causes physical changes, financial changes, and most of all, spiritual change. It is hard to survive destruction and not come face to face with the big questions: Why them? Why not me? After a lifetime of hard work, why is one person wiped out and another left intact? What is my response in the wake of such despair and destruction? Who helps? Who hinders or cheats? What is the Right thing to do?

There will weeks and months, if not years, of responding, rebuilding, renewal. Stories will emerge of heroism,  tragedy, luck and cruelty. Leaders of all stripes will bend the narrative to fit their own purposes ---- religious, political, social, educational. It will bring out the best in communities, and the worst.

What ultimately comes out, along with cockroaches, rats and diseases, are human beings being human.
As a writer, it's bonanza. As a person, it's another perspective on life.

Now I'm a taker, not a maker

Oh, don't get your knickers in a knot ---- this is not a political rant, despite the title. At least, I don't think it is. You know the old saw about a fish not being able to perceive water? At T minus 12 days until the election, it may be that everything is political and I'm just in denial, but I'm not intentionally trying to raise hackles or pit family members against one another.

My taking, at this point, is internal. I am once more in the place of being entirely "give out", as we say in these parts. Every day I wake up to the brilliant sunshine and deep blue of a Carolina sky in October, and think that this is the day I will feel good, have energy, not fall in the pit. Some days, I almost make it. I live in fear that I've almost used up my allotment of taking, and the people I love the best will back off and leave me to wallow in the hole. That hasn't happened yet, but since disaster-thinking seems to be my metier these days, I fully expect it.

Who knows what brings this stuff on? I can list the circumstances and get some pretty good agreement that some things suck right now. Top on the list, and seemingly the trigger, is putting my dying mother in "the home" a couple of weeks ago.  Of course it's sad when you are watching your mother die by centimeters, fading away like an old photograph. But doesn't that happen every day to people all over the world? Do they all become struck with the inability to function like normal human beings?

I have one task on the agenda for the day ---- pay bills. I've kind of been waiting until all the 3rd week payments get deposited ---- Jill's check, pension, social security, royalties. It's usually better not to take out more money than the bank says we have. But the funds have arrived, and still I stare at a towering stack of unsorted mail, some of which is emblazoned with bolded and highlighted due dates. That's what happens when you're a taker. You live off the dole and don't pay your bills. Ooooops. Sorry. I just couldn't help it. I'm a 47% kinda gal.

I'm not without resources. I have friends, family, professional help, even medication. I can't quite figure out if I'm being stalked by my old pal, depression, or whether this is a perfectly understandable and transient reaction to life. But that's what shrinks are for. Me, I just have to do at least a little of the stuff I know is good for me (I found a new AA meeting yesterday that I like!) and, as my ever-lovin' wife keeps telling me, go easy on myself. Easier said than done.

Maybe, just maybe, there are seasons for taking and seasons for making. Perhaps the cycles of ebb and flow apply even to me. Resistance is futile, and probably detrimental. Hasn't it been true, so far, that even the most painful losses later bring forth sweet fruit, as long as I don't harden my shell, hunker down, become immobile? Can I trust that it will happen again, that after the darkness, light will come? It seems, this day, this minute, so far away. But maybe just a spark, a tiny flame, a quickening of life, is all it takes to keep lifting my eyes toward the sky.

Dare to be happy

Since I have another sleepless night going, I decided to add some poetry reading to my usual remedy of chamomile tea. We heard a cascade of Mary Oliver poems and quotations this morning at UUFR, which reminded me that the perfect antidote tonight could be found in a reprise. So I've been browsing the web, reading poems and letting my mind swim about.

You know that saying: "If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy!"

Well, my mama ain't happy, not by a long shot. She's been in "the home" for 5 days now and is not adjusting very well. And why should she? She may be demented, but she knows whether she's around family and people who know and love her, or whether she's not. She may not remember my name, but she knows who I am. She told me first thing that she was mad because it took me so long to get there.

In truth, this goes against pretty much everything my motherly heart believes to be right. I don't let babies cry for fear of "spoiling" them. I don't say of a child who's acting out, "Just ignore him. He only wants attention." I have the romantic belief that humans read unspoken communication far more fluently than the spoken. And I can't bring myself to believe that leaving my mom, in her uncomprehending state, in a strange place with nobody she knows is actually "good for her". Necessary, maybe. Certainly it is safer, considering how much she has been falling. But good? That's not so clear.

I've never believed that the most vulnerable people in the household should be made to sleep alone in a dark room while the grown ups, who have a firm grasp on both object permanence and time, get to sleep together. In much the same way, the confusion and disorientation of dementia should not be something a person must grapple with alone.

At the same time, I do know that the strain of being a home caregiver was rapidly becoming too much. I should probably be impervious to it, should be stronger, show some true grit, but I was beginning to lose my grip. The horrors of Alzheimer's Disease occur on many levels and affect far more people than the patient herself.

Knowing that my mother is suffering, do I dare to be happy? Do I allow myself to breathe in relief, shake off the grinding responsibility, patter barefoot through the house with the dog at my heels and sing along with the music? Knowing that my Mama hurts, can I stem the tears, mine and hers? Find solace in watching her morning birds, take comfort in rationalization and platitudes?

This is it. In my life here and now the sun does shine, I can hear the songs and feel the tender kisses. If I wrap myself in guilt and grief, the days will trickle away until I suddenly see that the night is closing in and I can't bring them back.

Mary Oliver reminds me that the pond and the lilies are there, lavishly, every morning, whether I ever dare to be happy, whether I ever dare to pray.

Wake 'n Worry

It seems like you no sooner bring a baby home from the hospital than insensitive people start asking if she's sleeping through the night yet. New parents, especially breastfeeding moms, become intimately acquainted with the post-midnight hours. Sleep deprivation and exhaustion cause a haze of delirium to settle over the household. But that's all part of the picture. Tiny, new people are not designed to sleep through the night and in most cases they don't. From my status as Crone and Metaphorical Grandmother I will tell you there are two questions NOT to ask a new mother: Is the baby sleeping through the night? and When are you going back to work? Believe me, she's working. So don't be an idiot.

I was lying awake at 3:30 this morning thinking about all this. When my first baby was born, I used to sit in the rocking chair in the bay window of our upstairs bedroom and nurse him in those dim, early hours. The streets were utterly quiet. It was November and snow was already on the ground. Much as I missed my sleep, there was something amazing about those times, a stillness, as though the earth and I were breathing in sync.

Now, nearly four decades later, I am once again up in the middle of the night, this time with my mother, who is on the other end of life. It's not quite as easy to feel that sweet solace of the night; she's not as little and cute as a baby. But sometimes, I've had a similar feeling once she's back in bed and has drifted off to sleep.

I'm taking a poll here. Raise your hand if you always sleep through the night. Raise them high. Uh-huh. Just as I thought. As crazy as we are to have the most vulnerable people in our care sleep through the night, most of us don't do it ourselves. Getting up to go to the bathroom is maybe the number one motivator, often more than once during the night, depending on what we've been doing and how old we are. No getting around it, it's better than the alternative. Or maybe the dog barks, a storm comes up, the bed partner is snoring, a dream catapults us into wakefulness. Women of a certain age spend much of the night throwing covers off and on due to temperature fluctuations, which seem to slide right into intractable insomnia.

And how many of you stay awake for awhile after being awakened? Hands up. What do you do then? Probably don't think about how grateful you are to be awake in the middle of the night, especially if work beckons in the morning. It's the wake and worry time. Money, kids, money, health, family members, job, burglars, pets, money, job,  and performance anxiety. Oh yeah, and the car. And the house. And, on a really bad night, death.

I talk to so many people who say "Oh, you should have called me" when I say I've been up with Mom. It makes me wonder if there is anybody who really sleeps through the night all the time, or if that's one of those closely held secrets that people don't talk about much. Which gives rise to the myth of the baby-who-sleeps-all-night.

Mom is moving to an Alzheimer's assisted living place tomorrow. My nighttime foraging and worry-fests will be reduced, but I don't expect them to disappear altogether. I still have plenty more diseases to conjure up in the night, lots of financial crises to tend to (which always involves a great deal of mental math at 3am) and as the days tick away, the old standby, Grim Reaper.

Should I give you a call the next time I'm up in the wee hours?