The Yellow Wallpaper

As I was piling the laundry into the basket this afternoon my mother, who was lying on the bed, said to me: “Oh–Happy Birthday.” Today is my birthday, actually, and I think she first remembered it at that moment, but the setting was comic. It’s silly of me to expect the day to be a little different, especially in the present situation, but I do, and it was. Today was different because I was a little more disappointed than usual, despite my best intentions. I’m trying to chip away at my expectations until nearly everything beyond the necessities is a pleasant surprise, but it’s not working. I was hurt that my sister–who has quite a bit of free time, being between jobs–did not so much as mention my birthday or get me a card. I had even fantasized that she might offer to do just one of the weekend chores that keep me busy on Saturday and Sunday, to give me time to go to a movie or to get out by myself. No money would be involved, just a little time–but apparently still too expensive.

The result of all this was that I might have actually gotten disappointed enough to reach, temporarily, what I will call “Caregiver’s Nirvana.” I don’t know if I’ve ever achieved this before, or ever will again–maybe you have to be supremely and justifiably disappointed to reach it. But it’s the state where you let go of both the need to please and the hope of being pleased–you realize that you are not responsible for someone else’s problems or for alleviating them–even a problem like Alzheimer’s Disease. It’s not an angry or bitter realization, and it doesn’t mean that you would refuse to throw a lifepreserver to a drowning person. But it means that you become disenchanted with the idea of being “the good one” and clearly see yourself as a person with needs, too.

I imagine that every caregiver’s nirvana would be a little different–depending upon what she is most attached to. I’m learning how attached I am to being the Caregiver, and maybe that’s not a good thing. Oddly enough, it puts me, rather than my mother, front and center all the time. It’s all about how I decide to handle things, what I am going to do and what I am going through. A small example: I turned on the television and for once, did not ask my mother what she wanted to watch. She usually says, “I don’t care,” but will express her dislike of anything I choose that she becomes bored with. But today I turned on PBS’s “Mystery,” because it looked interesting and despite the fact that I know any show featuring actors with British accents is as appealing to my mother as exhaust fumes. Predictably, she began to fidget and then disappeared. She returned briefly, only to disappear again when I did not ask her if she wanted me to change the channel. Usually this outcome would mean that I had done something wrong, as if my mother were just an expression of my own psychic health. But I thought, “Why shouldn’t I watch ‘Mystery’? And what if my actions disappoint her?” So I watched it, and the show after it–the first time I remember watching “my” programs before my mother had gone to bed.

So that example might put into perspective my nirvana episode. My nirvana is probably what the theoretical “well adjusted” person feels all the time: a balance of needs and a healthy tolerance of what is beyond her control. Which brings me back to my sister–although I do feel that she could spend more time with my mother, especially since she has nearly every day free, I probably also expect her to feel the way I habitually do about caregiving, which isn’t fair.

Saturday has an odd dynamic for my mother and me. I’m not sure why–I know that I’m certainly in a different mode and maybe she’s taking her cue from me. But I think she “knows” Saturday–it used to be the day that my father would take her shopping, it was “her” day in a way it can no longer be, since he’s not around. And so she is always disappointed on Saturday, in a mood I now call “the Saturdays.”

I usually like to get practical jobs done on Saturday, which is hard because I often have to work around my mother. I’ve hired someone to cut her lawn but I still have my own to do, which means spending extra time at my house, now that it’s summer. Since I have only Saturday and Sunday to do my chores, I have to plan them around the weather and her mood. Today was lovely and my grass was high and my mother was unwilling to commit to a time when she’d feel ready to go out. I whiled away the morning doing the online banking (hers and mine), then the online grocery shopping (thank God for Peapod), then I chlorinated the pool. My mother was in her spot on the couch all this time, looking kind of glassy. I asked her again if she wanted to go out to a store.

“I want to go to a store that has knick-knacks,” she said.

The very last thing this house needs is more knick-knacks. My mother was a teacher for many years and never threw away any of the knick-knacks she received as Christmas presents during that time. We have Hummels, pseudo-Hummels, seashells, seashells with pipe-cleaners glued to them, teabag holders, figurines–you name it. In addition to the coffee-table books she and my father bought from Time-Life and Readers’ Digest in hopes of winning the sweepstakes. Books about Princess Diana, or “1996 In Pictures”–I don’t think they could even be donated to a library.

A bit alarmed, I asked her to explain “knick-knacks.” She fought for the words, then mentioned nail polish. “Oh, so you might want to go to CVS?” I said. She made a face. “What about Target?” She made another face. The only other option was a Nordstrom’s-type place, which I did not think she meant. But she wasn’t ready to go yet, she protested–her legs were wobbly. I watched the clock ticking off the minutes of my weekend for awhile, then announced that I was going to my house. Which I did, and cut my grass and checked to see why my landline was shorting out each time I tried to call my answering machine (the man painting my house unscrewed the fixture that anchors the telephone line to the side of the house, and I think the recent rain might have affected it). I got back to Mom’s at about 12:30.

I fed the dogs, made a sandwich for her and me. Finally, she was ready to go out. We had our usual conversation about staying inside the store only as long as she felt comfortable, then I convinced her that Target was the place to go. She usually doesn’t want to go to Target because she can’t walk too far and won’t use the motorized scooters they provide. But when we walked into the store today her eyes lit up at the sight of a real, old-fashioned wheelchair. I’ll confess that my heart sank a little: I think she should walk a bit because she gets no exercise, which makes her legs even weaker; and she becomes extra passive when I push her around in a wheelchair.  But by this time I was getting too tired to convince her to walk so off in the wheelchair we went, to the cosmetics area.

My mother still likes to wear make-up, but she now needs to be monitored when buying it.  She is drawn to foundation in shades of orange that are not found in the natural world. I don’t know who the cosmetics companies have in mind when they develop these colors–I suspect that because the drugstore brands only carry about seven shades, they want to make each shade work for as many complexions as possible, which results in some pretty ghastly hues.  I’m not quite ashamed to admit that I’ve hidden a number of bottles of these foundations when my mother wasn’t looking.  Only a couple of weeks ago I took her to a department store where the cosmetician let her dab a few shades on her jaw in order to find the best match.  We left the store with a bottle of good foundation, a nice shade of blush and a tube of lipstick.  A week later (at about 10 at night) she came into my bedroom and dropped them all on my bed, claiming she was allergic to them.

So today, after tooling around in the wheelchair a bit, we picked out yet another foundation, along with a bottle of nailpolish and Oil of Olay moisturizer.  I always try to get her interested in a book, but today no luck.  She will only read Danielle Steel (thank God she’s fairly prolific).  I also tried to get her interested in some colorful dishes, but again no luck.  Time to go.

I had about an hour of free time when we got home, and so I lay on the bed and read.  Then it was time to feed the dogs again and make dinner.  I also baked a cake, thinking that we might eat it while watching one of the movies I’d rented for the weekend.  I’d gotten a couple of romantic comedies–”Must Love Dogs” and “The Family Stone”–because she used to like movies like that.  About ten minutes into “Must Love Dogs” she said, “When is this going to get interesting?” and so I turned it off.  Right now the cake is sitting untouched on the kitchen counter and my mother is in bed.   Oh, well.  I also rented “Brokeback Mountain,” just for me.