Mom

Still working out how often to post on here, clearly.  But it's been an interesting week.  Mostly because my mother fell.

My mother is a set of contradictions, as much as anything else.  She's a working-class Italian American girl from a tough neighborhood who was going to be a school teacher but somehow stumbled into the sciences and became a laboratory technician (she finished her Ph.D. in biology the same year I did, only weeks after me; I think that makes her a second generation Ph.D. but will have to look it up somewhere).  A committed atheist who hates religion but who went to all Catholic schools right up through college, she once told me that Catholic schools are good training for atheists, because having gone to one atheism seemed the only logical course of action to her.  A political radical and fierce advocate for racial equality who for years told my Indian wife, then girlfriend, stories about an Indian roommate my mother had once had.  An incredibly forgiving woman who can bear a grudge like no one else I know; a consummate liar (I do not exaggerate; her stories about her childhood and political activism are so absurd that they defy repeating, even anonymously) who has a more accurate memory for detail than most people I know, regardless of age.  She will remember things that she heard decades ago and then, as often as not, embellish them beyond all credibility.

Everything about her is exceptional.

And for the last decade--maybe more, since she tends to keep things to herself--she has struggled with Parkinson's disease.

She fell this week.  So for days there were trips to the hospital and urgent care to try to figure out what had happened, to try to figure out what was going on, whether it was Parkinsons-related, whether she could still be left alone in the house (she lives with my sister and her family, but they're gone during the day).  Frantic searches for cheapish hospital beds for her home, discussions of home healthcare workers, of medications given and tried and forgotten.  My siblings are all medical types to one extent or another, so to them it's second nature.  To me it's all bewildering.

She'll be fine.  She fell and got dehydrated and suffered something my medical type siblings are calling rhabdo (doctors really seem to like shorthand for diseases; perhaps it makes them feel more in control to be able to name them?) because she was on the floor for so long.  She already looks stronger than ever, really.

She's in rehab only a few blocks from me for the next month, so I've dropped by for dreadfully awkward conversations.  One of the strangest thing about growing up with siblings is the challenge of how to speak to my parents (my mother, now) when they're not there.  We're so used to one another's rhythms, everyone filling in the silences, that it's awkward to communicate with almost any of my siblings one-on-one.  

So we sit, my mom and me, we talk about my son, about the food at the rehab center, about the anti-Trump book she's reading (she's convinced Michael Cohen wasn't as bad a guy as he seems; she's wrong but that's a post for another day), and exchange awkward silences for a little bit before I leave, exchanging "I love you"s on the way out.  It's probably not a perfect relationship, but the "I love you"s are true enough.

Parents.  Can't live with them, can't live without them.  

And in my mom's case, those are probably both really good things.