Randi Kreiss

Home front: my mom, my pup, my shrink and me

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It is said that we cannot step into the same river twice. The river changes, and so do we, second by second. At the moment, I am furiously treading water.

On May 15, two demanding guests landed on our doorstep. Their stay? Indefinite. Their impact on our home life? Incalculable. We welcomed my mother, 94, who had been living with my sister for six months since our dad died, and we welcomed Lilly Bee, our new puppy. One might think that these two events had nothing to do with each other, but one would be so wrong.

Both guests arrived with very little luggage but oh so much baggage. Lilly, our Madagascar Coton de Tulear, is a product of “puppy culture” breeding, which exposes pups to people and noise early on. She came wee-wee-pad-trained and happy to sleep in a crate at night. She curls into my lap like the sweet bunny she is. But puppy-culture fearless? Not so much. She is scared of men, sprinklers, twigs, cars, lawnmowers, plastic bags and baby strollers, among other objects. But I waited for her for eight months, since our Zoe died, and I waited for her even before her mother, Ivy, was pregnant. And I waited for her week to week and month to month as she grew up with her litter in Arizona.

I’m ready to throw myself into the job. She’s a baby, and I plan to give this summer over to training her and giving her a healthy head start. She’s just beginning. The gestalt of puppy-hood is sweetness, energy, enthusiasm and affection.

My mother is at the other end of life’s emotional seesaw. Not so much because of her advanced age, but because life holds little interest or joy for her. She doesn’t like where or how she lives, but she will not consider other options. The gestalt of old age, for some, is anxiety, fatigue and resentment. And that is contagious in a household.

I’ve been dressing myself for some years now, and yet my mother asks why I don’t wear more red. She asks where I’m going when I leave, and when I’ll be back, and who I’m seeing, and what’s in the mail, and why I don’t frost my hair, and why my husband doesn’t eat more fruit. She asks if I’m cold or hungry or tired. She asks every hour if I’ve heard from my kids, which only reminds me every hour that I don’t hear from them as often as I’d like.

And so the circle goes round and round. I look at her and wonder if that will be me in the future.

Her brand of mothering is oppressive. That sounds harsh, and it is, but it’s also true. And it goes both ways. I’m sure she thinks of me as Nurse Ratched on wheels. We’re both stuck. My sister, too. My husband, too.

Thousands of women in our generation are struggling with the same parent-care issues. The New York Times had a spot-on piece last month about women — and it is mostly women — being the health care safety net for aging parents (“Health Care? Daughters Know All About It,” May 11). What the article got right is the guilt that turns the wheels of this late-in-life dynamic: senior citizens taking care of super-seniors. Medicating our own arthritis so we can lift a wheelchair out of a car. Our health care system offers nothing for the millions of people who are neither very rich nor impoverished.

We stumble ahead, trying to do the right thing.

Yesterday I saw my oncologist for a routine checkup. She walked into the room and said, “Randi, what happened? You look awful.” She added, “You didn’t look this bad when you were diagnosed.” And so we talked, and it turns out she and her sister are also caring for an elderly parent. Cancer had to wait its turn. We commiserated for half an hour. I thanked her for putting on her shrink hat for the day.

Many people say how lucky we are to have the opportunity to share this time with our mother. My parents lived with my husband and me for six months a year for 10 years after they moved to Florida. It was all cool. We loved those years.

This is different. It is another time, another river. My mother is weighed down by years and sadness and daunting medical issues. We are trying to keep her afloat.

And we are trying, at the same time, to enjoy Lilly Bee, to let her sweetness work as a balm in our complicated household.

Copyright © 2017 Randi Kreiss. Randi can be reached at randik3@aol.com.