If you are anything like me, the last time you went home to visit your parents you were more than a little worried. Suddenly they were more like old people playing dress-up in your parents' clothing. Their faces were too thin, their bodies too frail.
And you wanted to be good company, positive and encouraging, but certain selfish thoughts kept intervening: How will they take care of themselves? How will I turn my full and busy life around in order to be a caregiver instead of totally independent daughter?
Then, likely, right on top of the selfishness, guilt set in: I've been traveling too much, living my own life, not paying attention.
And then, adding another black mark to your conscience: Wait, I don't want to do this, be parent to my parent.
But you do it anyway, you become the guardian, the protector. In the same way you must breathe.
You begin by cleaning out their three-bedroom home of a zillion possessions and innumerable memories. But because you are part of the most self-indulged generation ever, one who thinks about the future in relation to your own fulfillment, not with respect to what your folks need to survive, you find a retirement home in Sequim rather than buy a larger home with a separate room for them.
You tell yourself you are doing the best you can. Still, you compare yourself. Only to feel even more guilt because, unlike your friend who moved her dad into her home on Capitol Hill, you are relieved, nearly giddy with joy, when your mom chooses to spend her last years in sunny Hawaii rather than next door to you "in the rain," as she put it.
But then, as if on cue, a little crash-of-chagrin sweeps over you. You feel like the worst son or daughter ever born. Which is only fair. You certainly act like it when you ask your mom are you taking your vitamins?, exposing your desperation. But desperation is powerful; it tries in a self-satisfied way that is part love, part fear and part hopelessness because you know there is no cure for decline.
Last week I went to visit my friend Bon, one of my longest-standing affections in this city. Sitting in her backyard, I can see the house her mother lives in since Bon moved her from Minnesota to right next door.
"I'm in awe of you," I told her. "How much you give of yourself. I'm more selfish."
But I didn't mean selfish. I meant unwilling, scared, resistant to say I'm too ambitious to become a caregiver because, in certain circles, I still apologize for ambition.
Because no one knows better than me how ambition works as a window and a shade. It allows me to see into all the possibilities of my work, which brings a high level of satisfaction, while it screens everything else. Case in point: In the world of mothers and daughters, instead of hiding behind this column, I should be visiting mom.
Still, for the life of me, and just to prove how potent denial really is, I still can't bring myself to think about life without her for very long. The experts call it "psychic numbing," a mental deadening that keeps us from exploding with grief.
It's also a huge shortfall in our humanity. One so revealing and scary I'll surely be paying huge consequences soon.
Mary Lou Sanelli has a new collection, "Small Talk," forthcoming in April 2008.
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