The Journey For Us

Popular culture clashes have long characterized my relationship with my housemate. Let me give you an example R. will readily tell on herself. She was in Winchester, VA on a trip and saw a sign indicating the place is Patsy Cline’s hometown. As R. was paying for her lunch she asked innocently, “Who is Patsy Cline?”

I imagine a deathly silence falling over the establishment while a voice with a thick southern accent says in the background, “Somebody get a rope.” I, on the other hand,  know that Hawkshaw Hawkins and Cowboy Copas were in the plane with Patsy when it crashed. Are you starting to get what I mean when I say “culture clash?”

My first MP3 player was purchased in anticipation of a car trip with R. to Colorado. I simply could not face all those music-less miles. I go to sleep when classical plays in the car, which is R.’s choice when she’s in charge of the tunes. To this day when we have to drive a long distance, I use the left ear bud while keeping the right ear open to listen to her. She doesn’t like the arrangement, but she tolerates it.

To my great shock, however, I have pulled off one cultural conversion. The woman likes to watch PBR bull riding with me. Understand that this is rather like saying Rudolf Nureyev enjoys clogging.

R. does not understand bull riding. She has no idea how it is scored, how long the rider has to stay aboard, or why one ride is better than the other, but she admits she finds the sport exciting. (I suspect she also likes the way some of those boy look in their jeans. I’m just saying.)

She gasps and exclaims at every twist and turn, convinced every cowboy is on the brink of imminent death from every bull. I don’t think she’s ever really seen an epic bull wreck, but she’d watch — maybe through her hand — but she’d watch.

I suppose with her 80th birthday approaching, I’ve made about as much progress as I’m going to make with her in the popular culture department. In some areas I’m getting a bit musty myself. I’ve stopped watching the Grammys because I just don’t have a clue and I start muttering things about people needing to put their clothes on. That’s a good sign you’ll never get near a mosh pit again.

Yesterday our friend Missy J. and Mama J. came by fresh from a trip to the stock show. I’d asked if they could get R. one of the famous artery clogging cinnamon buns because I refused to pay the price of admission just to go after one. As they pulled up in the driveway, I started to turn the bull riding off. To my great surprise R. said, “Just turn the sound off so I can watch while we talk.”

And so that’s what I did. At bedtime R. announced it had been a “perfect” Saturday and that she felt like she’d gotten to go to the rodeo. (I have no proof she’s ever actually attended a rodeo, by the way.) But hey, that’s at least one day we went for 8.

Only rarely do I allow myself the luxury of mourning the lost friendship at the heart of my caregiving reality. Don’t get me wrong. I have deep affection for my housemate, but she’s not the woman who was my friend the day before that small clump of cells shot into her brain in May 2002. For a long time I was given glimpses of that person, but they grow increasingly rare.

The only word I can use to describe her as she was before is “effervescent.” Her energy lit up a room; her generosity was legion. She was the woman to whom people went with their problems and their pain. She was a source of wise counsel and comfort, a rock in hard times and a warm companion in good.

Yesterday was one of those days when diplomatic relations went south in a way so disturbing I passed most of the afternoon in my room mindlessly watching TV and trying not to think. For her part, she nursed her anger, nurtured the grudge, and took a disagreement that should have been allowed to blow over in an hour and made it the ruin of the day.

I’ve been watching an Australian series on Netflix called “McLeod’s Daughters.” The central character, Claire, reminds me powerfully of a life-long friend. Her struggle to keep her late father’s station afloat is one with which I strongly identify. (In case any of you decide to watch, and I do highly recommend it, I won’t give away any spoilers.)

Suffice to say that Claire finds herself doing hard things, things that wound the heart she works so diligently to hide. In the first year I lived with my housemate, I cried more than I’ve ever cried in my life. They were uncomprehending tears, bewildered tears at the behavior and words of someone I thought I knew. Of someone I trusted never to turn on me.

As each year has gone by, I cry less and less. It’s not that I don’t feel, it’s just that if I cried as much as I feel like crying, nothing would ever get done. Yesterday was gray and cold. I was tired and worried because a couple of days had gone by without new work. In other words, she had me down and she used the opportunity.

The woman I knew before May 2002 didn’t do that. This woman looks like her, but she’s a whirling miasma of conflicting emotions and reactions. No rule holds true from one day to the next. A response that works on Monday ignites a volcano on Tuesday. And in her mind, she is the only one who suffers.

Her memory is so poor, that an hour into the conflict, she knows she’s mad, but she remembers nothing that she herself has said — only the choice, cherry-picked phrases I’ve used that she turns back against me. I’ve come to realize she never listens to the entirely of what I’m trying to say. She latches on to the one idea that serves her attack best, and the rest is air I’ll never get back.

I’m trying to write about caregiving. Time and time again though I’m drawn up short by my utter inability to accurately communicate what this life is like. Eight years ago, had anyone told me what I was walking into, I wouldn’t have believed them. Belief comes with the living of it.

But grief is very much a part of this process. A long grief fueled by unremitting, sharp-clawed little losses. She tells me I don’t love her. She tells me I don’t care or try to understand. It’s useless to argue, so I simply try to show her that it isn’t true, knowing as I go along that the effort will fail.

But believe me. It would be better if I didn’t love her. Better if I didn’t care. Better if I didn’t see and empathize. I’m not built like that. I feel it all. But she’s taught me that to show her that gives her more weapons when this unreasoning anger comes on. Within hours, if we’re very lucky, she will have forgotten it all. But the hell of it is this.

I don’t forget.

I have to admit I miss working in public places. Before my housemate’s stroke, I “officed” at Starbucks. I’m one of those people who functions well with a background buzz of noise. Right now I’m sitting at the car dealership waiting for a state inspection and oil change. I’m not crazy about the band playing on the big screen TV, but my attention has been wafting in and out around me.

The man to my left, who has been making good use of the free cookie offer, is in to have a leased vehicle serviced for someone else. The rep just told him that the brake pads have 1 millimeter left. New ones have 10. He opted to leave it alone because “it’s still grabbing.” If we leave at the same time, I plan to give him plenty of room.

The fellow behind me just had a long conversation with the guy at the parts desk about how often the highway patrol nabs speeders on the section of highway here in front of the sale lot. Parts guy says three or four times a day.  On the way out, I saw DPS working a wreck in which a red Corvette’s rear end suffered the bulk of the damage. If you don’t understand the concept of a “crumple zone,” this accident would have cleared that right up for you.

The woman in the tan car coat has really had enough. She’s half-heartedly flipping through a magazine and popping up to look out the front door every time the news girl uses the words “freezing” and “drizzle.” In the corner an intensely bored young woman is talking on an iPhone wearing a pink skin. If I were the iPhone, I think I’d be a little embarrassed.

I’ve been working on copy for a website – an assignment for filthy lucre – in between Facebook messages and Tweets. If I had a latte, life would indeed be good. There’s a coffee pot behind me, but I’ve tried the sludge here before and I value the lining of my stomach.

The best part about working in a public place in days of old was the open-endedness of the time. Unless I had an appointment, I could sit there an hour or four hours. Now, I’m always conscious of the time, always fearful that I’ve been away from the house too long. Spontaneity is one of the first casualties of personal freedom when you become a caregiver.

There’s no sense in resenting it, because the situation is what it is, but I’d be lying if I said I don’t miss those times camped out in a private bubble carved out of a public space.

Yesterday when I read that John and Elizabeth Edwards split up, my only thought was, “Who didn’t see that coming?” The few times I’ve seen her interviewed, she was trying valiantly to disguise or at least blunt her bitterness and not really making it.

As for him, well what’s there really to say? I hope his daughter does understand his denial some day, because the rest of us are struggling a bit.

I can truthfully say that marriage was never on my radar. I recognized from a fairly young age that I don’t have what it takes to live with someone that way. I’m cranky, eccentric, and set in my ways. Just living with my housemate is often a challenge for reasons completely unrelated to caregiving.

Many years ago, when a friend was going through marital troubles and I was performing the role of shoulder, she sobbed out that her husband was accusing her of infidelity. I said, “Well, that’s bullshit.”

“You don’t want to ask me if it’s true?”

“I know it’s not.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know you.” (And indeed, she wasn’t the one screwing around, he was.) It wasn’t at all what I intended in expressing my confidence in her, but she later told me I’d helped her make up her mind to leave him, that she realized if a friend knew her better than her husband, something was really, really wrong in the relationship.

(I thought the guy was a prize jerk, so it really wasn’t a point I could argue.)

That aspect of marriage I could have handled just fine, the fidelity part. The infidelity part? Well, I come from a long line of women who shoot real straight. I like to think that if I’d have been so inclined I would have chosen well, but that’s the great crap shoot, isn’t it?

What’s sad is that we hear more about the John Edwards and the Tiger Woods of the world than we do about the good guys, the ones who don’t have a roving eye, who come home every day because they want to, the men who would do anything for their wives and children. And they do exist, in great, honorable multitudes. I guess that doesn’t make for a good sound bite, but honestly, shouldn’t it?

My housemate may well be one of the most judgmental, insulting human beings I’ve ever encountered. Fortunately, she doesn’t behave this way consistently, but it’s the truth all the same.

Housekeeping has been our biggest hot-button issue from day one. Early on, there were times when she would throw what I can only call a wall-eyed hissy fit. I’d clean this place from top to bottom, sometimes at midnight to get her to shut up and her reaction would be, “You missed a spot.”

To say that this does not make me aspire to a rivalry with Martha Stewart is an understatement.

Yesterday, after a marginally rocky start to our day, I tried to make nice by sitting down and eating my lunch with her rather than bringing it to my desk. During the course of our conversation, I mentioned that I had watched an episode of “Hoarders” that really moved me to sympathy for the degree of the woman’s mental disorder.

Even when confronted with the fact that mice were nesting in her sofa, she would not allow the item to be removed. I found that and the reaction of her grown children to her deterioration both disturbing and moving.

Okay, color me stupid. I opened the door.

My housemate launched into a recitation of the virtues of an orderly house and I could not help myself. I pointed out that she’s completely OCD.

A glimmer came in her eye and she said, “I couldn’t be OCD and live with you.”

See that gauntlet? She threw that sucker right down in front of me.

“Be careful,” I said. “This is getting ready to turn into an argument.”

“No,” she said, adopting that pedagogical tone of voice that makes me insane. “You just never learned.”

That did it. I stood up and said, very quietly, “There is nothing wrong with my skills, only with your expectations. At the moment, I’m a little more focused on earning a living and building a surplus of cash. I really don’t care if there’s dust on the furniture. When I have time, I’ll do something about it.”

“You’re mad.”

“No, but this conversation is over. I found a program on television interesting and I chose to share it with you. That’s as far as I intended this to go. I’m going back to work now.”

Although I have great affection for my housemate and have for the 18 years we’ve known one another, I have often found her to be rude. I’ve excused it because she’s a Yankee. And I don’t mean that as insultingly as it sounds. We have different standards of polite down here. There are just things you do not say. Period. Even when prefaced with “bless your heart,” they are not appropriate.

I’ve known two honest-to-God hoarders in my life; one was a relative, the other the mother of a good friend. One home was actually dirty, the other just massively cluttered. I’ve been in both numerous times and it would never one time occur to me to make a comment on how someone else keeps house because it’s none of my business. Their house, their castle, their deal.

My housemate and I have had the last discussion about the program “Hoarders.” The fish I’m frying at the moment are so much larger than dust or hair balls on the carpet they defy comparison. And my attitude toward my housemate’s manners?

Bless her heart.

Over the weekend, a friend of mine attended a wedding. While she was on the dance floor with her gentleman, a little girl of about two approached, fascinated with the strand of pearls my friend was wearing. In typical West Texas fashion, my friend began dancing with the child.

I’ve watched that same scene played out with so many variations. Couples dancing holding a baby between them; fathers warming up their horses in the roping arena with a toddler hanging on to the saddle horn. My mother learned to dance standing on her father’s feet. I learned so many things trailing along after my Dad, I don’t even know where to start.

These moments are tiny legacies with long lives. I have memories about things that happened when I was theoretically too young to have such recall. My favorite occurred when I was alone, watching motes of dust in a beam of sunlight streaming down over the mobile above my crib.

We should polish these mental jewels, take them out from time to time and hold them up to the light, to remind ourselves of the days when we were small and the world was large, but — for those of us who were fortunate — so very, very safe.

I’m working on a personal project right now, something in between a wish box and what another blogger has described as a karma bowl. I see what I have in mind as a concentration of energy, pulling strength from the past and projecting it into the future. To accomplish that, I knew I had to have a cigar box.

In my childhood, there was always a cigar box on hand. They served as cash boxes at bake sales and treasure chests for children’s knick knacks. I loved the artwork on the lid (inside and out) and the way the cardboard corners became rounded and soft from use.

The rarest of all things, however, was a wooden cigar box, a prize so precious it was reserved for holding old letters tied together with bits of ribbon or photographs starting to curl and crack.

I found a wooden cigar box online yesterday for a pittance and bought it. The things I will put inside will be past gems — strands of memories like the pearls that drew that little girl out on the floor toward my friend — and future jewels, intentions made manifest in ways personal only to me.

There was a time, when I was a child, that I believed things of great significance could reside in the confines of a cigar box where the ghost of a rich aroma still lingered. I want to believe again.

As a caregiver, I have struggled with learning how to say, “No.” It’s only in the last few months that I’ve come to see my housemate is a tyrant because I’ve allowed her to become one. I gave her the metaphorical bell. She became adept at ringing it. My role in all this? Pavlov’s dog.

It isn’t so much a matter of refusing to do a certain thing as regaining control over the timing. I don’t know if all elderly people chafing at their disability do this, but my housemate wants whatever she wants instantly.

Mornings are a huge bone of contention with us. She established the schedule over several years of sleeping until noon or later. I built a working life around that. As soon as she realized that I had established a routine, she began to try to disrupt it in every way possible.

This threw me into gymnastics mode. I tried getting up at 4 a.m. for a few months until my body’s natural clock didn’t just rebel, it went into full-blown revolt. I tried acquiescing and letting my housemate get up at whatever ridiculous hour she chose. All that did was create a bored, dissatisfied little old lady by early afternoon and a world of interruptions for me.

Now, regardless of what I am or am not doing, when she calls wanting up, I do not respond instantly. I always tell her she has to wait. While I’m not always busy, this tactic does insure that when I am, I can take a period of time to get to a stopping point without dramatic fits on her part.

Most mornings she just rolls over and goes back to sleep. This morning, she’s turned all the lights on in her room, a blazing symbol communicating her displeasure that I do not instantly respond and that I do not move fast enough to suit her. She would deny that any of this is true, but I’ve lived it far too long not to know exactly what is going on.

These 15 or so minutes do not harm her in any way. They serve a functional purpose if I am in the middle of something, and regardless give me time to transition into being what I call “caregiver girl.” As I continue to cultivate more clients and more work, these grace periods will be even more essential. It’s hard to shift gears from being a professional freelancer to my life as a latter-day Stepin Fetchit. That role increasingly requires me to bite my tongue, and I have to get in a mindset to be able to do that.

The lesson I’m learning in this particular area of household conflict is that I am only a puppet if I allow myself to be. There are times when an instant response is required and times when it is only desired. Having another person rely on you completely and often unreasoningly is mentally and physically challenging. To the degrees that it is possible, you need to be the one who sets the pace.

Yesterday I had a brief discussion with a friend via direct Twitter message. She asked how some new writing projects were going and I responded with estimates of how much more I need to be doing to achieve the level of security I will find acceptable. She asked if I was capable of doing that much work, because to her it sounded exhausting.

I did not respond as graciously as I could or should have. I’m still working on regaining my graciousness after the stresses of 2009. Basically, I said that I did not give a bodily by-product if my desired workload would be exhausting or not.

When I say that I never want to go through another year like 2009, I don’t just mean that I don’t want to have that level of bad luck befall me again. I mean, I’m never again going to be in a position to be so buffeted by hard luck.

When another friend told me that a project, one in which she and I both believe, is coming back to life and wanted to know if I was still interested, I surprised myself with the speed and certainty of my response. "I’m still interested, but only as a consultant. I’m never putting all my eggs in one basic again."

Right now I’m reading one of those mildly bubble-gum-esque novels that seem to give me mental comfort, "The Crossroads Cafe," by Deborah Smith. The main character, in the wake of having been badly burned in a car accident, refuses to go anywhere without a fire extinguisher. It seems like a pathetic crutch, until she uses her fire extinguisher to give a much-deserved concussion to an abusive male.

Right now, when it comes to building a security net under myself and those I love, I’m a stone-cold, determined bitch. I don’t mean I’m frightening small children in the grocery store or being abusive to people, but the fire in my eye is not a twinkle, it’s an icy glint. I’ve been backed into a corner. I’m finding out I’m not the kind of woman you want to corner. I didn’t know that about myself.

So, exhaustion? So does not figure into the equation. And fear? Baby, that’s a weapon. Use it.

Waiting rooms in entities that perform service functions are strange places. Thursday I visited a local outfit that sells tires and was pleased to discover they could put two on the van within the hour. The vehicle needs to be inspected, and without those tires, it won’t pass muster.

I optimistically took the netbook along in the hopes of getting to work. At the dealership where I take the van for servicing, there’s free wifi, a big flat-panel TV, free cookies, and hot coffee. The place fairly bustles with activity, and I actually don’t mind going there because it’s primo people watching.

This joint had no wifi, lousy TV, a vending machine, uncomfortable chairs, and limp magazines. At first my only companion was a youngish fellow working a crossword. To my great amusement, he immediately took out an iPhone and started cheating like a big dog.

I inherited my mother’s sense of fair play when it comes to crosswords, a form of puzzle at which she excels. Mama rarely reaches for the dictionary and then usually at the end of a couple of days of grumpy trial and error trying to come up with the word on her own.

After a bit another youngish fellow walked in. He had a BlackBerry that chirped at him from time to time. He looked relieved every time he retrieved the handset from his shirt pocket. A monogramed guy bag sat on the floor by his scruffed-up boots, and ultimately he brought out a MacBook Pro.

Me? I sat in the corner, nebook on my lap, alternating between working on an article and writing blog drafts. I frankly was enjoying the chance to write without interruption, but wifi would have been nice. Other than the low-key hum from the television, no one spoke. The place was absolutely as quiet as the tombs.

I’m no stranger to working in public, having actively officed at our neighborhood Starbucks for a number of years. Then I was one of only two or three people who came in with laptops, now they’ve had to expand the number of plugs and the oddballs are the ones who don’t have computers.

Lord knows doing something productive on the netbook was better for me than succumbing to the mindless game show or flipping through the limp magazines, but it does make me wonder if we’ve become a society of folks who stare at glowing rectangles all day.

Of course my other option would have been to walk next door to Hooters, but that would have prompted a whole different kind of social musing, wouldn’t it?

Earlier in the week one of my first cousins died after a long battle with ALS. I was not close to the man, and in fact saw him last at my Aunt Elizabeth’s funeral seven years ago. At the time, we stood beside our grandfather’s grave talking, and I was struck by my cousin’s resemblance to the previous generations of our line. Had circumstances permitted, I would have gone to his funeral, and was deeply appreciative when a friend agreed to go by the mortuary and sign the guestbook on my behalf.

My housemate found my attitude puzzling, lacking my southern sense of “people.” She wants no recognition of her passing, wishes to be cremated, and has sworn me to secrecy about the location where she wants her ashes scattered. I, on the other hand, regard my deceased relatives among the most pleasant of my kin. They don’t talk your ear off when you go to see them.

Several years ago, while traveling with R. and a third woman of her vintage, I was party to a multi-state scattering of “mother and father.” The third woman, you see, had kept mother and father on the top shelf of the hall closet for a number of years and was seizing on our multi-state drive from Washington state back to Texas to dribble them out here and there.

Frankly, there was a great deal about this process I found disconcerting. First, she mixed father and mother together in a large ziplock bag, which was punctured in her purse on the flight to Washington. I have a vivid memory of the two of us standing in the ladies room at the Seattle airport while Ruth dumped mother and father out of the bottom of her purse and into a hastily acquired replacement bag from a donut shop in the terminal. She complained about the interior of the purse being dusty for the rest of the two-week trip.

Of course, first rattle out of the box, she announced her intention to leave some of the parents inside a national park, which is incredibly illegal. Figuring at least one of our party had to be on the outside to make bail, I declined to go on that hike, taking an alternate trail to the river where I spent a quiet hour on the bank writing in my journal. When I returned, I found my housemate and Ruth playing with a pair of ferrets at the visitor’s center. I raised an eyebrow and they confirmed with a joint thumbs up that the crime had been successfully perpetrated.

This was not to be my last “scatter the folks” road trip. When my housemate’s own parents died, we left them here and there on two separate excursions. In fact, there’s still a bit of her Dad on the top shelf of my closet. The old man liked me, so I say hi when I’m taking my jeans off the hangar, and he seems fine with that for the time being.

I, myself, am somewhere between the two positions, being in favor of cremation for the lesser expense if nothing else, but still wanting an appropriate burial with grave marker. This business of being scattered here and there offends my rut-loving soul. If I’m not given much to travel in life, why in the world would I want to become peripatetic in death?

Years ago I was assigned a novel whose title I don’t remember that involved a family leaving the deep South and moving to Texas. They could not envision leaving their dead folks behind, so they dug them up, uprooted the gravestones, and brought everyone along for the ride, recreating the family burying ground at their new home. I’m not sure I’d go quite that far, but I get it.

Are we southerners guilty of ancestor worship? Many of my Bible-thumping Baptist relatives (we are the wayward Methodists of the family) would bristle at the suggestion, all the way to the cemetery for the weekly visit and weeding. On just such a trip years ago with my elderly cousin Emma, I learned that she had a younger sister, Jessie, who died in her early teens of smoke inhalation. The four girls had been burning buffalo grass when Jessie’s skirt caught on fire, an all too common hazhard for women at the turn of the century.

Had I not been in that hot little West Texas cemetery hoeing weeds at the direction of an old woman, that family story would not be mine now. I’ve thought of Jessie often in the years since, and of how far women have come since that poor child died in the wake of such a horrible accident. I’ve thought of Emma describing sitting with her sister, and trying to ease her coughing as black phlegm came up from her scorched lungs.

There are many kinds of history. I studied the kind that’s written down in books, but I come from the sort that lives in the actions of the living and the remembrance of the dead. It isn’t so much veneration as inclusion, a recognition that the place and the people from whence we came is a much a part of who we are as anything we say and do. Personally, I can say that thinking in that way creates a comforting sense of connection back through the generations past that is, for me, one of my most precious possessions.