The Yellow Wallpaper

Today was one of those flat summer days–flannel-colored sky and spongy air. I usually wake up on Sunday morning with a list of chores that should have been done on Saturday, and today was no different. Yesterday was a washout because my “post-traumatic” migraine (entirely expected) kept me out of the sunshine and in my own brooding shadow all day. So today I got up and set to doing the bill-paying, clothes-washing and house-cleaning that I had put off.

But first I had to establish what day it was for my mother, who invariably believes that Saturday is Sunday, and Sunday is Monday. We have this conversation each and every week. Once that’s settled, she tells me that she can no longer walk–usually after wandering in and out of the kitchen and bathroom several times and then making her bed. I give her her pills and her cane and remind her that she has to begin the day slowly, then I make those cinnamon buns that come in the tube, which perks her up immediately.

“Where are all the dogs?” I hear her ask, and I sigh.

“Mom, Dustin died.”

“I know that, but where are the others?” We try to establish which dogs she means, a conversation that wilts pretty quickly.

“Where’s Daddy?”

“It’s just you and me, today,” I say. I’m getting better at the evasive reply.

“I thought he was just here.”

“Not today.”

She looks puzzled for a few moments. I ask her if she’d like to look at the Sunday paper but she says no, and within fifteen minutes has slumped over, asleep, on the couch.

I shower and dress, check my email, and then begin to clean the bathroom. Here is where something mildly remarkable occurs. I spritz Chlorox cleanser over the bathroom sink and counter, and tear several sheets of paper towelling from the roll. Before wiping the sink I notice that the paper towel has a pattern printed on it–nothing memorable, just some floral designs. But on every other sheet is also printed a quotation, and I expect to read the usual banal/inspirational sentiment. The sheet I had pulled, however, had a quote from Katherine Mansfield:

“Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.”

What??! I stood there and stared at the paper towel, surprised and a little thrilled to find such philosophical resonance on a household cleaning product. Could this be? And what did it mean?

First of all, Katherine Mansfield was one of my writing teachers. Not literally, of course, but the first “real” English teacher I had in high school assigned us Mansfield’s story “Miss Brill” to read. It affected me profoundly, although I didn’t realize it at the time. I remember leaving myself behind as I read the story–it took me somewhere else and then brought me back. Her photograph accompanied the text–probably the most reproduced photo of her, in profile, her hair pinned up untidily–and I stared at this woman as if I’d known her from somewhere and then carried the image away with me.

Years later I made a study of her fiction, her letters and her short life. She grew up in New Zealand before moving to London, where she lived on the periphery of the Bloomsbury Group and moved warily around the likes of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. She was inspired by Chekhov, and her fiction is like layers and layers of different colored tissue paper pressed together to create a deceptively simple picture of a deep moment in time. Her subject matter is not “plot-driven” as much as it is revealed, through details of gesture and clothing. Although not the intellect that Woolf was, Mansfield was the more gifted writer of fiction.

So having her “speak” to me by way of a paper towel… Well, how could I not stop and relish the absurdity and the timeliness of it?

“Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.”

What does this mean? Do things change as a result of our accepting them? Do we change them by accepting them? Or is change the reminder to us that acceptance is a momentary act–a brief one-ness before we continue on our separate ways? Or is acceptance and change the inevitable progress of life, the cause and effect of mindful living?

Or maybe someone at the Sparkle paper towel factory was gently reprimanding those of us who only clean our bathrooms periodically?

No. I’ve decided that this little experience was, at the very least, a reminder of how the “quotidian” can wink at us, pull back the curtain for a second, and then let it drop before we can catch our breath. There are surprises in the most mundane moments of the day, just as the most tumultuous happenings can seem mundane.

I lost count of the number of times today that my mother asked me why “he” hadn’t come home. I think she may have split me into two people: the person she can see and the other person she talked to on the phone. She’s seemed a little “off” for the past couple of days–a co-worker of mine finds that her parents also tend to be a bit more confused on Mondays, possibly because of the routine change.

I’ll admit that I was short with my mother today–it was one of those BAD days that make you believe in spells or Mercury in retrograde. I got the first call from home at 8:30 this morning: my mother instructed me to cancel Eva today because she wasn’t feeling well. And while I was at it, cancel her for tomorrow, and the next day, too. “I’m not going to go to school anymore,” she said.

It’s a wonder all my hair didn’t fall out at that very moment. First, I was at work, where the people around me were overhearing me trying to sound composed and reasonable, but I’m sure they could tell that I was about to crack. I managed to convince my mother to eat some breakfast and take her pills, then go lie down. Silence, then a sullen, “Alright.” I called my sister–who goes over to my mother’s house to let Eva in each day–just to warn her. We now have a verbal shorthand: “Small craft warnings,” I said to her answering machine and hung up.

My sister and mother are like oil and water. After a call to my mother, Liz reported to me that Mom “wasn’t going to let anyone in the house.” Again, I tried to modulate my conversation in front of my co-workers, but my blood was beginning to bubble. I advised her to go over to the house and let herself in–I doubted my mother would be that extreme (but I’m sure I’ll be surprised one day)–and this she did, with no trouble. I spoke to my mother by phone after that, to tell her that we are not trying to be mean but we worry about her even more when she doesn’t feel well, and that’s why I refused to cancel the homemaker. “Oh, I know,” she said, very agreeably.

Despite the humid weather, I needed to take a walk during my lunch break, to shake off the stress. Oddly enough, ANOTHER movie is now being filmed in the area, and once again I wove my way past catering trucks, 18-wheelers, and coils of cable lying on the sidewalk. This time, sections of street were blocked off to all traffic–auto and pedestrian. I didn’t realize this and was hurrying back to the library when I heard: “Ma’am!! They’re filming–please stand back!” First of all, I really cannot adjust to being called “Ma’am.” I don’t feel like a “ma’am.” Second, whatever happened to Hollywood sets–to the MGM backlot with its replica of Anytown, USA? Why do the few remaining parking spaces on the East Side of Providence have to be given to a film crew at my expense?

The rest of the day? I had two doctor’s appointments. For the first one I arrived at a locked-up office. I called the doctor from my cell phone and got his machine: he was on vacation this week. I had made the appointment six months ago and apparently he’d firmed up his vacation plans after that, and forgot to tell me. The next appointment was with my new therapist. I sat in the waiting room (which seems to be shared by several professionals) with four bossy little girls for nearly a half hour past the scheduled time. One strike. When I finally got into her office and began to talk, she immediately took an alarmingly proactive stance: I would have to face putting my mother in a nursing home. Hmmm…aren’t I supposed to be arriving at that (or any other) conclusion on my own? Isn’t that what therapy involves? Two strikes. And then when I was finishing a thought, she interrupted me to remark on how it looked like it was going to storm. Yeeerrrr out!

And so I came home from this to find my mother waiting at the front door. “Where’s Steven?” she asked me, and my heart sank. “Mom, it’s just the two of us,” I said, bringing in the two sandwiches I had picked up for supper. Two minutes later–”You didn’t bring enough sandwiches, you only brought two.” I had to go into the bathroom at that point because I had absolutely no patience left. I felt like I’d been tied to something and dragged around all day.

And as if to punctuate this crappy day with a great big exclamation point, an entire shelf of glassware spontaneously dropped this evening, breaking nearly everything on it. My mother and I were sitting in the living room after eating when we heard the din. Apparently the nails holding this shelf in place had been weakening for awhile, and this seemed the appropriate time for it to give way. I guess it was a nice little poetic flourish.

Thursday was one of those bottomless days–no shape or tone to it. I got up at 5:45 and felt my sinuses groan. Several days of humidity followed by a day inside the very dry, air-conditioned building where I work was all too much for them. I phoned my boss, took an antihistamine/decongestant, and fell back into bed.

Of course I dreamed I was at work. I must have slept for a couple of hours because I awoke to hear the anxious touchtones of a telephone being dialed. I lifted my head and saw my mother in her bedroom with the cordless phone. “Mom, who are you calling?” I asked.

Although only a narrow hallway separates our bedrooms (and I always keep my door open) she had not noticed that I was home. She looked very surprised to see me. “I didn’t know you were home,” she said. “I was talking to the nice lady you work with. She’s taking care of everything.”

Just what I wanted to hear. The fact is: I DO work with nice people, but I hate having my private life bleed into work. And I hate the unpredictability of my mother’s reactions to any variations in the routine. Were my coworkers rolling their eyes (”Deb’s Mom called twice!”)? It’s bad enough that I take a lot of sick time, but to have an even more public unravelling bothers me. Should I now call work, just to reassure them that, no, I hadn’t run off in the night to join the circus–I was indeed home and had everything under control? Or should I just let it go until the following day? I opted for the latter, mostly because my eyes hurt so much from sinus pressure that I couldn’t bear to look at a computer screen, send an email or dial a telephone again.

I stayed in bed most of the day, letting the gloominess wash over me. Whenever I’m home like this, I’m not sure whether or not my presence affects my mother’s day. She drifts quite a bit–from her bedroom to the living room and then back to the bedroom again. She also arranges and puts things away–usually the same few things, like the toiletries that we keep beside the bathroom sink, or the odds and ends on the dining room table. We both have several tubes of lipstick beside the sink, and I’m inclined to stand them upright. My mother likes to lay them down, so we have a pantomime of sorts going on there: at night I stand them up, during the day she lays them down.

By late afternoon I was drowning in gloomy introspection and my congestion was easing up, so I resumed reading Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are, hoping that it would help me to regain some perspective. I’ve begun seeing a therapist who recommended I read this book, and I like its simplicity. Each section is short and gentle, and many sections include excerpts from some of my favorite writers, like Thoreau. I read only a few pages and then closed the book and listened to my breathing, to the hum of the window fan, the rattle of a bluejay. My mind is usually spinning, but this seemed to slow the world down, stretch it out. I have a habit of mentally collapsing obligations and potential problems into one big nervous pall that I can’t shake. Maybe if I can remind myself to stop once in awhile and listen to my breathing, I will be able to see this pall for what it is: a cloud of possibilities. In reality I’ll deal with them one at a time, if necessary.

By evening I did feel a little less tired and vulnerable. My mother and I watched the news and then the Mass together, while I continued knitting the Bohus sweater I’ve been working on for, ‘lo these many months. We both went to bed in good moods.

What I’m trying now is to substitute the following song for the racing thoughts that often wear me down. The melody is calming in and of itself, and if I pay attention to the words I feel reassured:

‘Tis the gift to be simple,
’tis the gift to be free,
’tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
It will be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed.
To turn, turn will be our delight,
‘Til by turning, turning we come round right

‘Tis the gift to be loved and that love to return,
‘Tis the gift to be taught and a richer gift to learn,
And when we expect of others what we try to live each day,
Then we’ll all live together and we’ll all learn to say,

Refrain

‘Tis the gift to have friends and a true friend to be,
‘Tis the gift to think of others not to only think of “me”,
And when we hear what others really think and really feel,
Then we’ll all live together with a love that is real.

Refrain

Written by Shaker Elder Joseph Brackett, Jr. (1848)

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.

“He made such a nice dinner tonight,” my mother said, once we’d finished and were relaxing in the living room.

In the past I would have corrected her: “No, Ma, I made the dinner.” But now it isn’t important. The gender confusion is actually a clue to me that she’s contented. The presence of “him”–usually meaning my father–means that things are in order for her.

She’s been unusually cheerful and agreeable for the past few days. I think no longer facing the prospect of The Wedding has ended that particular anxiety loop in her mind. Her nurse practitioner also increased the Namenda last week, but I don’t know if that would cause such an immediate effect. What I DO know is that it’s so nice to go off for work in the morning without the nauseous knot in my gut. I also know that this consanguinity won’t last for too long, that I can’t be too seduced by it. I think the Alzheimer sufferer’s world is much more porous than average–she can’t compartmentalize as well as most.

I’ve experienced this myself during a period of serious depression when I was younger. I can remember a day when I was at my worst–a neighbor was having a big, beautiful maple tree cut down. As the chainsaw screeched I felt an awful foreboding, as if the tree were connected with my own well-being. It wasn’t a passing feeling, either–I couldn’t shake it for a long time afterwards. The absence of the tree reminded me–for some reason–of my own extreme vulnerability, as if its shade had literally protected me. Sometimes I think that my mother confuses bits of the outside world–events, people, things–with parts of herself, and this makes it harder for me to understand her ups and downs.

In one of my classes of the past year we talked about “mental maps”–which is a fascinating subject. When drawing a map of a particular place, an individual often reveals as much about her self-perception as she does about the layout of the particular place. One’s socio-economic status, for example, will influence her perception of the size and of the components of her own neighborhood. I think I’m going to ask my mother to make a map of our neighborhood–just to see if I can read it. How interesting it would be to ask a group of people with dementia to draw maps of their own locales–this might be a way to understand a bit more about the inner dislocation that results from diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Just a short post to, first, link to an excellent essay called How to Be Where You Are by my friend Gail, at Mom and Me Too, about mindfulness and how the daily acts of caregiving can enlarge what seems sometimes to be the very isolated life of the caregiver and her Ancient One. In her essay Gail writes a wonderful passage about the way she selects the color of her mother’s bedsheets on a given day, based on her awareness of her Mom’s present situation and of how the use of different colors can soothe or encourage anyone who looks at them. It doesn’t get any better than that.

As an addendum to Gail’s essay I’d like to quote a passage from one of my favorite writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson. I thought of it as I read Gail’s words. Finding the eternal in the ephemeral is, to me, what mindfulness is all about. It counteracts the ridiculous celebrity culture that we live in by affirming the capacity of each one of us to touch what’s truly important: the permanence of the spirit, or the divine presence within us all. I know, I know–it sounds way too New Age-y to matter to someone who has to deal every day with bodily functions and misplaced memories. But as Gail says in her essay, we already do this in so many ways without even thinking about it. Being aware of The Moment–the comforting aroma of fresh coffee, the lullaby of crickets on a summer night, the particular blue of moonlight on a new snowfall–reminds you (the often-lonely caregiver) that you have a hotline to all that matters. Right now. And it’s everywhere, once you cut through the double fog of regret and anticipation.

I’ll “up the ante” and also propose cultivating an attitude of gratefulness for each day. It sounds crazy–I should be grateful for my mother’s ever-growing confusion? I should be thankful for the nights when I get only three hours of sleep because she gets up at midnight, thinking it’s morning? Well, no–we don’t have to be that literal. I see gratefulness as choosing to accept with grace what we cannot control, rather than falling into bitterness and blame. Being cynical is no more authentic than going out on a limb and believing that there is meaning in even the smallest clean-up–but I do think the latter choice is certainly braver. Gratefulness.org is a nice place to start.

“The trivial experience of every day is always verifying some old prediction to us, and converting into things the words and signs which we had heard and seen without heed. A lady, with whom I was riding in the forest, said to me, that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer has passed onward: a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet. The man who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world [my emphasis]. I remember one summer day, in the fields, my companion pointed out to me a broad cloud, which might extend a quarter of a mile parallel to the horizon, quite accurately in the form of a cherub as painted over churches, — a round block in the centre, which it was easy to animate with eyes and mouth, supported on either side by wide-stretched symmetrical wings. What appears once in the atmosphere may appear often, and it was undoubtedly the archetype of that familiar ornament. I have seen in the sky a chain of summer lightning which at once showed to me that the Greeks drew from nature when they painted the thunderbolt in the hand of Jove. I have seen a snow-drift along the sides of the stone wall which obviously gave the idea of the common architectural scroll to abut a tower.”

From Emerson’s “History” (from Essays: First Series (1841))

So this has nothing at all to do with dementia. A fairly big-budget movie is being filmed here in Providence, and I’ve run into it on several occasions over the past couple of months. It’s a live-action version of the old cartoon called “Underdog,” which I missed altogether as a kid, my cartoon days having ended with “Rocky and Bullwinkle.” But I’m kind of curious about “Underdog” now, having seen all the effort that’s being put into making it. A location often involves at least four 18-wheelers, a large catering truck, many smaller vans and box trucks, and dozens of people with cables and klieg lights and, yes, the camp chairs. A couple of times one of the streets I take to work has been closed off, and I’ve had to detour, grumbling, around the set.

I can’t really imagine “Underdog” having much to do with the East Side of Providence, which is a beautiful neighborhood of Victorian and Greek Revival homes from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. For a few weeks, “Underdog” was filming around the Athenaeum, an early 19th-century private library whose claim to fame was as the setting for Edgar Allan Poe’s infatuation with local poetess Sarah Whitman. I’ve heard that Jim Belushi is in the movie but I’ve never seen him, or any other human actor (that I’ve recognized, which isn’t saying much). On my walk from the parking area to the library one morning, however, I DID turn a corner and almost bumped into a very life-like, nude, (anatomically-correct) male mannequin that was leaning, face first, against the side of one of the equipment trucks. At first I thought it was an “extra,” surreptitiously relieving himself, except that he looked a bit stiff and not quite embarrassed enough. No one else was around, which made the whole encounter even creepier.

But I think my best celebrity sighting was today. Again, the location was an unlikely one (unless they’re filming a historical version of “Underdog,” set, maybe, in the 18th century). Every morning I drive up College Hill past the First Baptist Church, as genteel a structure as you can imagine. Lately it’s been surrounded by trucks, cables and the overall atmosphere of busy-ness that clutter creates.  This morning I was stopped in traffic on Waterman Street, alongside the church.  A large black SUV pulled up alongside me and parked in a no-parking zone.  Its windows were tantalizingly tinted, and before I had the chance to even guess what famous name might appear before me–right on Waterman Street, beside the bus tunnel–all four car doors opened and a cadre of hurried people spilled forth, clutching cell phones and clipboards and duffel bags, all of them looking late and worried.  I recognized none of them and was about to give up when the final occupant emerged: the snowiest, cleanest, pouf-iest little poodle I’d ever seen, like a little cloud with a red collar and a black nose.  I knew immediately that this was not just a camp-follower–this was a star.

They disappeared before I could get a better look, but at a meeting later that morning I shared my experience with some co-workers.  One of my co-workers had been lunching down the hill by the courthouse a week earlier and had seen “Underdog” himself (like a beagle, she told us, but not as distinctly colored) rehearsing a scene in the park across the street.  We then surmised that the airily-coiffed poodle being ferried into the church must be Underdog’s love interest in the film.  I’m now a little more interested in the whole enterprise, having seen at least one of its stars in an informal moment.