Doing the right thing

Mother by Marriage ~ Photo by Megan Frasheski

These past many months have been challenging for my husband's parents and siblings.  The relentless aging process for his parents and how to do the best you can for them as you keep them safe.  The process of this is quite different than with my own mother who set up literally a Fort Knox to keep her family out of her protection.

Mother by marriage (MBM) remains at the Assisted Care and is doing well there.  She still has a the hip wound that refuses to heal and now she has been to a Wound Specialist to aid in the care of it.  Last week the Dr. had to reopen the wound as there is a pocket that won't close up.  I won't even write about what they did as it makes me queasy to even think about it.  

Father by marriage (FBM) mentally is fading....quickly.  It was a success to keep him from driving but that was with some rather humorous ways that he tried to get back behind the steering wheel.  Brother by marriage (BBM) ended up removing the batteries from both cars and that seemed to work even though FBM keep calling to say he needed to go get a battery and would we take him to go buy one.  Then he ended up taking a cab and going to buy one by himself!  My sister by marriage (SBM) was visiting MBM when who should stroll in but FBM.  Big shock when he mentioned that he drove himself.  I failed to say that his license was taken away two weeks before via his Dr.'s recommendation (only because we all had to pressure the Dr. to understand that FBM should not be driving and at last he agreed it was dangerous for him to be behind the wheel).  

My Love went and bought two Clubs that go from the steering wheel to the brake pedal and slipped in the garage without FBM knowing and installed them in both cars.  FBM thinks that the DMV came and installed them!  So now we know he can't drive.  Wheewwww.

We have a caregiver go by the home everyday, and takes him grocery shopping as well as on short errands.  She has also driven him out to visit MBM.  

It's not easy learning how to parent a parent.  I've said before it is not for the faint of heart.  You have to be strong, you have to let go everything you thought of about your parent as the one knows how to tend to themselves.  It takes time for both sides as well as lots of redirecting and patience.

FBM is much like my mom in that he is difficult and can get quite nasty.  I'm glad my mom is beyond that point.  For now my Love and his siblings are learning just as I did how to tackle the onslaught of constant phone calls, demands, flowery four letter words this way and that, the crying, the yelling, the lack of hearing and the understanding that dementia brings with it.

Today an example of how hard it can be to deal with him.  We get a phone call from FBM that he wants to go to Costco.  My Love says he will come pick him up and take him.  A couple minutes later and BBM says he is going to pick up FBM as he wants to go to Costco.  Mmmmhmm.  See, FBM just starts calling.  He doesn't remember if he called or not, he just dials numbers.  We assume then that BBM will take him and my Love doesn't need to go.  5 minutes pass and BBM calls us to say the FBM is mad because he wants to go to Costo and BBM doesn't think there is anything he can't get at the local Safeway and doesn't want to drive him all the way to Costco.  My Love tries to explain that FBM just wants to get out and what is the big deal of not taking him.  They hang up.  Another 5 minutes pass and BBM calls to say that he has left because FBM wouldn't write a list and he wouldn't take him without one.  My Love tells him "Dad can't write a list"....well BBM refused to do the the right thing and said dad is unreasonable.

My Love right now is off to pick up FBM and take him to Costco.  Yes, it is a 1/2 hour to FBM and a 1/2 hour back to Costco, maybe an hour at Costco then 1/2 hour back to FBM's home and then 1/2 hour back to our home.  Maybe.  It might be longer but it will get FBM a chance to get out of the house.  To visit with his son on whatever level it may be.  It will be walking without a list to get who knows what.  Sometimes you have to do this.  It may seem a waste of time but for our elder folk it is all they have to think and do on a given day. 

The girl with the bracelet

She sat next to me in my Crafts Class.  She was pale skinned, with long wavy hair that sometimes looked unbrushed, slight of built and quiet like I was.

I had switched to the Craft Class because the Chorus Class disappointed me.  Over the summer we had moved to this town and I was less than happy over leaving my friends.  They would all be in their Freshman year at the High School and I was in a three year Middle school.  I couldn't even call myself a Freshman, I was a 9th grader.  The year was 1972.

She didn't talk readily but would give a demure smile if you spoke to her in greeting.  Her eyes looked haunted and sad as though there was something she was not able to say, and not knowing anyone at the school I could not ask what was her story.  At 14 I didn't have the best social skills of making new friends and frankly I didn't want new friends, I wanted my old friends.

Our class was in a large, high ceiling room with a kiln room in the rear.  We sat at high desk tables on stools, two by two, making clay bowls.  Our teacher with his laid back ways, allowed us to talk while we worked.  Her table was the only one with a vacant stool.

Day after day we sat working on our bowls, not saying much.  Sometimes she had dry, crusty looking lips and her eyes looked like she had been crying as they were red and watery.  She never seemed to have any friends in the room who would come up and talk to her.  In some ways we shared the same isolation.

I noticed that she wore a bracelet but it was not a decorative girls type of bracelet.  It was of silver in color with writing on it.  I asked her one day what it was.  She told me it was for her boyfriend who had gone to Vietnam.  He was missing and she wore this always and never took it off.  I didn't know what to say and muttered a "oh".   That was all we said as we worked.

She wore a POW-MIA bracelet.  A young man off to war missing in action.  Her sadness was understood by me of what I thought she might be feeling.  Or so I thought.  I too had lost a boyfriend when we moved.  He as well had moved away and we had tried to correspond thinking we would still always be boyfriend and girlfriend.  It felt tragic to me not being able to see him, hug him and kiss him.  I did not know what tragic meant.

Tragic meant for her maybe never seeing the man she loved.  For he was a man, not a teenager, sent to fight, drafted.  How could she love one at her age who was so much older than she?  What did her mom and dad think of this?  How long had he been gone or was missing?  I had questions in my head but I lacked the courage to ask her.

She had been absent for a few days and I wondered when she would be back.  Our class project now was working on leather belts, pounding on the head of a tool with a small hammer to create designs of our choosing. By now I had made new friends at the school as well as in this class and was accepting to a point that this was where we lived in this new town.  I still dreamed that somehow I could convince my parents to let me move back to our old town and live with my girlfriend's family.

She was gone a week.  When she came back she looked more frail and pale that before.  It saddened me to see her so.  I asked her what happened, had she been real sick?  She looked at me with old eyes and said "I had to stay home because my baby was sick".  I was speechless.  She had a baby?  She was 14.  In my world you don't have a baby at 14. 

She told me that she missed her boyfriend so much. That he was the father of their little girl.  It was hard to raise her child alone even though she lived at home with her mother and father.  She had not seen him for a year.  She did not know if she ever would.  She did not know what would happen with her life but here she sat making a dumb leather belt, going to middle school as a 9th grader and not to High School.  She was a young teen mother and not married.  

This was my wake up call that life can be tragic beyond a break-up of a boyfriend at school because he liked another girl over you.  This was more tragic than having to move away from your friends.  I didn't have the maturity to understand what she might be going through but I could be her friend here and now.

I didn't get to know her any more than in that class. Sometimes the shallowness of our teen years keeps us from wanting to reach out beyond the girlhood rules of friendship.  The girls I began to hang out with cheered me up and accepted me.  She didn't have time to be a teenager to do what teens do. To go to the movies or shopping.   I didn't see her again when we all finally moved on to 10th grade and at last to High School.  

I am haunted by her memory all those years ago. 

Sixth Sense

Flat top of the Maverick from the rolling

I found the photo of my brother's car that he had his accident in when he was a teenager in 1970.  It is a miracle that he is alive.  It was a brand new Ford Maverick, red exterior and black interior.  Quite a snazzy car for a young driver.

My story of this event was my first encounter with a Sixth Sense.  When I hit the age of 13 up until I was 17, I went through a phase of frightening, wake up in the night, dreams on a regular basis.  I dreamt of my Grandmother dying often.  Whether it coincided with my Step-Grandmother telling me that she believed in Reincarnation or that she believed in Channeling and in fact had lived other lives in other times, it certainly laid some mental groundwork in my thoughts.  Once when I was in 4th or 5th grade she visited us and played a tape of her talking about her Channeling experience.  It was creepy and odd to hear her speak this way my having been raised in the Presbyterian Church Sunday School with a strict version of Bible Stories.  We didn't discuss Reincarnation or Channeling or what that was.   I became curious but laid it to rest. 

On the night of the accident I had dreams of my brother being hurt though I couldn't interpret if he had died or not.  It was a troubling sleep where I tried to change my dreams but I kept going back to him.  Somewhere in an awaken moment I heard voices in the house though I knew the hour was late into the night.  I couldn't understand what was being said and fell to sleep hearing their muffled voices.

What happened was that my brother had been in a serious car accident on the Monterey Salinas Highway just at the Laureles Grade.  He had gone out with his girlfriend that night and was returning home to Salinas after he had dropped her off at her home in Pacific Grove when he fell asleep at the wheel.  Amazingly he suffered only minor injuries of a broken rib, scrapes and bruising.  He wasn't wearing a seatbelt and that may have been what saved him.

Falling asleep, in that relaxed state, he slid down and avoided being potential decapitated or certainly seriously injured.  His car rolled and hit a tree in the end.  At the time even though it is a Highway, it was a quiet road at night, mostly just a country road with very few residences.  I don't know how long it was before someone discovered the accident but in the 70's there were no cell phones so someone would have to find a house somewhere to call for help.

In the morning when I came out of my room, I was told that he had been in an accident and in the hospital.  

I was relieved that he was okay but to digest the fact that I had dreamed he had been hurt only to find out that indeed he had been hurt did scare me. How was I to understand that I could have dreamed something and that it happened?  What if more of my dreams became real?  

I like to think that my being a teen helped me to pass through without any residual effect.  I did have good dreams too.  This did have the effect of my interest in spirits, ghosts stories and hauntings outside my church upbringing and what I wanted to believe or question. 

Wordless Wednesday

Photo by ? ~ 1997 ~ thoughts from a 12 year old

Fixing a hole...

Another continuing saga with our elderly parents....if you haven't read this you may want to so that you understand what I am writing about......previous post.

Today is just one of those days with FBM,  who decided to abscond MBM and dear Love had to intervene along with a local policeman at the Assisted Care Home she lives at...this is the song I thought of because everyday another hole is made by a very confused, agitated, irrational, volatile, paranoid elderly man, ....catching all this?  Seems that no matter what,  the story will have an unhappy ending as he can't understand or accept that his wife will never be where she once was and will always need care that he can't provide because of his frailty.   Worse still is that his Dr. can't do anymore to help as he doesn't think FBM is incompetent enough to need care himself which floors all of us.  He can't write very well anymore, and can't comprehend or understand verbal dialog except when a part of his brain flips to the up side and he more or less ends the discussion of where he thinks his wife, our mom, needs to be. Then there are the endless phone calls that start bright and early in the morning to his kids of wanting to move her home, not move her home, move her to a V.A. Hospital, change Dr.'s as he doesn't trust her Dr., wants his gun back (another story), thinks his son stole the gun and calls the local police on him (he is doing this almost every other day and the police are getting tired of him calling), he sobs, he wails, he yells and yet the Dr. can't help us except to turn this all over to Social Workers and even that is a whole different can of worms.  


It is a lovely sunny day, I just had our daughter and her fiance visiting for a few days and they have just flown back to the East Coast, youngest daughter came to visit as well and middle daughter hung out with all of us too.  Life can be sweet and I am looking at that rather than the dismal saga that dredges on with FBM.  I love the hugs my children, my adult children share with me.  That is comfort medicine of the best kind.  I am glad that they all had the chance to visit with MBM while they were here as I know this brightened her day.  Hold close your love ones, tell them, show them....and in the meantime we will continue to plug the holes that keep erupting in the aging parents.

I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in

And stops my mind from wandering

Where it will go

I'm filling the cracks that ran through the door

And kept my mind from wandering

Where it will go

And it really doesn't matter if I'm wrong I'm right

Where I belong I'm right

Where I belong.

See the people standing there who disagree and never win

And wonder why they don't get in my door

I'm painting my room in the colourful way

And when my mind is wandering

There I will go

And it really doesn't matter if I'm wrong I'm right

Where I belong I'm right

Where I belong.

Silly people run around they worry me

And never ask me why they don't get past my door

I'm taking the time for a number of things

That weren't important yesterday

And I still go

I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in

And stops my mind from wandering

Where it will go

New blog to share......

I have had friends that have asked of my daughter's and my trip to Italy this past Fall.  So with pleasure I have started a blog of travels for those who want to read about that trip and of other travels with lots of photos.  Here is the debut of it......   Snapshots On My Journey

    Enjoy!

I take photos in awkward ways....

Dear daughter caught me attempting to take photos of this fantastic scene in Venice but sadly my photos didn't turn out.  Darn.  At first I felt silly getting down on the ground with the gorillapod and my camera.  There were so many people walking on that lovely night behind me.   I hadn't done much with night shots and I only wished I had practiced before we came or at least taken more while we were there.  Another time.....another time.

Please tell me that was not my panties showing either!