Miraculous Trash Cans and Flying Paperbacks

Promotion of a book is a strange thing.  I went on a photo shoot last week, where the very talented Anre Fuentes of Urbanized Foot Photography took a zillion pics while I ran around doing strange things in a park.  My favorite shots are of me and a trash can we found.  It was one of those old fashioned steel drum things, upside down and empty, with the words "Throw Away All Hate" spray painted on it.  I immediately adored it.  Anre suggested I stand near the can and I asked, "You want me to get in?"  He got that "unexpected surprise gift" look on his face; a slow flush, kid-at-Christmas grin and the words, "If you want to" barely masking his delight.  I turned the thing right side up and climbed in, my long grasshopper legs barely fitting.  It smelled like old butt and wobbled like crazy, all of which cracked me up.  We took a bunch of pictures there, then spent the rest of the shoot wandering the park for cool things to pose with.  There was a wooden pole with words for world peace carved in it in various languages, a gorgeous gate I swung back and forth on, and a astro turf soccer field where I pretended to run away from my memoir, which I kept tossing in the air and fleeing from.

It was hot as hell and we were both soaked with sweat by the time it was done.  I went home, jumped in the shower, scrubbed the trash can butt stink off my skin, then went upstairs to work on some writing.

The next day I recorded myself reading the first chapter of FREAK, but the sound quality is sub-par so we're going to re shoot it with better equipment.  A new website is being built that will be more easily accessible, but I mourn my old site, which I think is beautiful.  We're going to use a lot from it in the new one, so I'm grudgingly happy.  I'm nothing if not loyal.  I've sent copies of the book out for review and had a new set of flyers printed up.  This last spring and early summer were very quiet in regards to book promotion, considering the fact that I got so damn sick, but now I'm well again and champing at the bit.  I've had many people contact me about how FREAK affected them, even helped them, and I want that to continue.  That's the purpose of the publication of my crazy life to begin with.  I want my experiences to help people.  So, wish me luck in the promotion of this very personal story.  And to all my brothers and sisters of circumstance out there, remember the words on that smelly garbage can: THROW AWAY ALL HATE.  That'll clean up a lot of emotional butt stink right there.  Take care.

Love, R

My Mom

As many of you know, my seventy-nine year old mom has advanced Alzheimer's.  She's in a nursing home.  Last month, she went into the hospital with aspiration pneumonia.  She's forgotten how to swallow and even though they'd liquefied her food, it often sat in her mouth.  She breathed it in and got pneumonia.  It was touch and go for quite a while; she had congestive heart failure and a cornucopia of other physical problems.  A priest even came in and gave her last rites.  We all thought this was it.  Then she came out of it, weak but fairly coherent, and they sent her back to the nursing home.  She's been going downhill ever since.  My sister and I decided that we weren't going to let her go through that again.  My maternal grandmother died a horrifically prolonged death, and Mom looks like she might be going down the same route, gasping out her life with breathless screams of "help me help me help me," panicked and terrified.  The doctors told us there was a way of simply making Mom as comfortable as possible but just letting Nature take its course.  That's what we're going to do.  But it is AWFUL. 

I haven't been able to talk to Mom directly for over a week.  She's in Illinois, I'm in New York.  She did something to her phone and it ended up in the laundry, destroyed.  When I was her caregiver for four years, she used to inexplicably hide things in her bedding, usually after pulling a Vera Donovan/Dolores Claiborne with them.  One time I found a small flashlight inside her pillow.  She's cut the ticking open with a fork and stuffed it in there. 

I call the nursing home and they try to convince her to let them take her down to the office to the phone there (anything to get her up and about) and even bring the phone to her, but she refuses to talk to anybody.  So I communicate with the staff and the nurses and the occasional email from family letting me know Mom's condition. 

Today was the worst day yet.  She's started screaming all the time, which is what she did right before we put her in the nursing home.  She used to scream if I went outside to fill the birdbath and screamed all night, every night, for hours at a time, unless I was in the room with her.  It became too much for me, and I told my sister I couldn't do it anymore.  Mom had to have professional help.  The nurse talked to me today and told me that Mom kept trying to get out of bed, even though she can't walk, stand or sit up anymore, insisting there was a little boy drowning in a pond and she needed to save him.  Mom lost a childhood friend that way, so I assume she's reliving it.  When there aren't horrible memories plaguing her, she hallucinates that spiders are crawling all over her and/or demons are coming through cracks in the walls and ceiling to drag her to hell.  Her right leg has been covered with some sort of awful blood blisters, as big as my palm, something she got a lot when I was in Illinois but hadn't had for a while.  Now they're back.  All of them burst today and the bed became saturated with blood.  They doped her up and she's lying quietly now.  I have no idea how much longer she'll hold on in that nightmare of a body, but as I've written several times: we're impossible to kill.  I pray, every night, for her to die now.  I just want her to go to sleep and not wake up, quiet and calm, not terrified all the time.  As far as I'm concerned, my mother is already gone.  Alzheimer's ate her alive.  All that's left is a screaming, wretched shell.  I want her suffering to end.  I want her out of that body.  Now.

So if you've read FREAK, my memoir, you know a lot about my mom.  She wasn't the greatest mother by any standards but she was still my mom.  There's no getting around that fact.  I wanted to share some of the happy stories between Ma and me, here, in the twilight of her life. 

When I was a tiny kid, Mom helped me take a bath.  I remember this distinctly.  I don't know exactly how old I was, but I was small enough for the porcelain side of the tub to hit me in the crotch when I stepped over it.  Very little.  Mom would sit on the toilet, directly beside the tub, and lay a clean towel on the floor for me to step onto after I was done.  She held another one in her hands.  I stepped over the side, up on tiptoe because the porcelain was cold, and shook water droplets off my foot so the towel wouldn't get too wet.  Mom said, "What a good idea!  What a nice, smart girl you are."  I recognized the fact that she was doing that specifically to make me proud of my genius, and I was grateful for it.  I must have shaken the other foot for a full minute.

She played tennis with me as a kid.  Nobody else ever wanted to play tennis, none of my friends were interested in it but I loved it.  She sucked but I didn't care.  She played tennis with me.  Even drunk as hell, she'd swing that racket.  I stopped wanting her to when I was around fourteen, having joined the tennis team.  She retired gratefully.  Still, I never forgot that kindness.

She was an AWESOME grandma.  All her grand kids adored her and with good reason.  She was sweet, attentive, very funny and laid back.  Charlie was with her by the time my kids came around and we'd go home every summer for a month or two to hang out with her.  Mom and I bonded then, more than we ever had when I was growing up.  By the time my kids were adolescents, she'd given up the booze.  I saw a wonderful person peeking out from behind the addict.  When I was twenty-six, she apologized for everything she'd done as a drunk, and there were some pretty terrible things in there.  She didn't remember half of them.  I decided not to describe them and simply accepted the apology.  I never thought I'd ever get one.  It was incredible.

She introduced me to movies.  Mom was a film fan since her own childhood, and used to bribe tiny me into going to whopper epics like Gone With the Wind and Doctor Zhivago with her, usually double features.  I bartered for Sugar Babies and popcorn, Milk Duds and huge sodas I could swim in, and I got them.  The truth was, I adored going.  After she got off her nutball Southern Baptist kick, where movies and Kmart were evil, she embraced a surprisingly eclectic selection of movies.  We'd share Saturday and Sunday matinees on television, where she'd bake a Johns cheese pizza and we'd watch Sinbad, The Haunting, Gidget films, Elvis Presley flicks, monster movies, comedies, dramas and romance.  We watched Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus together.  It was the first movie I ran a fever at.  When the whole "I'm Spartacus!" scene begins, the tears started flowing and didn't stop for two hours.  Mom threatened to never let me watch a movie again if I didn't stop.  That's the only thing that dried me up.  Movies are now one of my greatest loves.  Up until I moved back to New York, she and I would watch movies.  As the Alzheimer's progressed, our fare turned from spooky or violent to children's movies and old black and whites, but we still watched one pretty much every day.  Up until a month ago, I sent her a DVD every week.  I have a stack of movies ready to mail she'll never see, which I was saving for her birthday.  Even if she pulls out of this, her mind is gone. 

She taught me forgiveness.  When my brother Ian was killed on his motorcycle by a stupid hotrodding teenager, she went to the boy at the inquest and told him she didn't blame him.  She knew he didn't do it on purpose.  If he wanted to know what he could do for her, she wanted him to be a good boy like her son.  To live a happy life.  He collapsed in the courtroom and had to be carried out.  She meant it, too.  She actually meant it.  I never forgot that, even as the crazy, fractured creature I was at nine years old.  I remembered that forgiveness and decided to aspire to it.  I'm still working on that particular virtue.

My birthday is right around Christmas.  For the first twelve years of my life, every year I got a birthday present wrapped in Christmas paper.  I made a joke about it the fall before my thirteenth birthday.  That year, I got a gift encased in bright yellow paper with birdies and butterflies all over it.  Mom had bought me real, non-Santa wrapping paper.  I don't even remember the gift but I remember that paper.

There are a lot more little precious memories like that, silly little things that add up to a lot, but I'll end it there.  Sure, Mom did awful things as a mother, let her kids be destroyed in a hellhole of a family life, but there were those little moments I can look back on now with affection.  Many of them, like stars.  There's so much bitterness in us, we insecurity addicts, we damaged and broken human beings, and sometimes it eats us alive.  But there's always a bit of gnawed bone that remembers something good, and from that, we can regenerate.  I spent so many years, the majority of my life, incorrectly trying to right all the wrongs from my past, begin again, turn my back on my many terrible memories.  That's impossible and, being impossible, leaves one with a lot of frustration and even more self-rage that we just can't DO it already.  GET OVER IT, YOU CHICKENSHIT WIMP!!!  That's the internal self-hate dialogue of a fractured person trying to glue themselves back together with soggy tape. But I find, for me, the better road to to bring it with me.  It is my past, and part of what makes me who I am today.  I just pulled its teeth so it'd stop biting me all the time.  The Bumble Snow Monster from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.  Still big and scary but without its choppers.  All I get now is the occasional nip.  Good luck with your own dentistry, my dear brothers and sisters of circumstance.  May you have big honking pliers.  Take care.

Love, R

Gruel

I'm going to an artist's party this Saturday.  I've never been to an artist's party.  I'm usually the only artist at any party I go to.  Now I'm going to be one of the crowd.  I think I'll divide my time between working on a zombie comic and painting on the big wall they'll have papered from floor to ceiling.  Drop cloths are a must.

It's a very strange thing to accept party invitations when you've spent most of your life skulking about as an insecurity addict.  I always enjoyed people but was rarely allowed to mingle, even by myself.  As a kid, I was told I was too weird, loud or disobedient.  As an adult, I was told I was too stupid, loud and embarrassing.  That's the common descriptions self-loathing individuals are spoon fed.  Like the recipe for gruel in the book Oliver Twist, we're fed something that keeps us forever on the edge of starvation.  Makes us easier to control when we're too hungry to form an opinion.

This party is an epiphany for me.  A moment of clarity.  Not for enjoyment's sake, although I'm sure I'll enjoy it, but because I actually want to go.  When I was married, parties were rare.  When I went, it was usually with my husband.  The one time I rebelled and went alone, I was felt up by a drunk co-worker and called a whore went I went home.  I became so insecure after that, I never even considered going alone again.  Not this dumb loud whore who deserved her trouble.  No way.

When I got divorced, I was too busy dealing with the mess of my kid in rehab to go to many parties.  After Leland went to live with his dad, I was too busy caring for my invalid mom.  After I moved back to New York, it took a year before I could even think of going out anywhere. 

My roommate helped a lot.  She encouraged me to get up and dance, to hang out, to laugh and socialize with strangers.  I still don't care for parties much, but I love to dance.  I never realized that before last year.  I really love to dance.  That too, was an epiphany about myself.

So I'm going to this thing and I'm looking forward to it.  Life has taken such a strange and wondrous twist since I began to care for myself.  Living has become so much fun.  So keep at the self love exercises, my sad and weary friends.  I was suicidal, miserable, angry and sick of breathing.  Now I'm going to slop paint on a wall with a bunch of strangers and laugh as I do it.  A surreal and magnificent banquet after a lifetime of gruel.  Take care.

Love, R

Beloved Pie in the Face

I saw something extraordinary today.  One of my favorite human beings on earth, a young man I met when I first came back to New York almost two years ago, had his last day at work today.  He's been on a waiting list for the NYPD for three years and last night, he got the call.  He starts in three days. 

Employees come and go constantly at a restaurant.  It's a tough job; many new staff members quit after a few months.  M has been a waiter there for five years.  He's a funny guy with a true heart of gold.  I don't think he realized how important he had become to us all.  He was here at work when he got the call.  I didn't know about it until this morning when I came in to open the restaurant.  A co-worker noticed that M's schedule had all been crossed out and I felt my gut hit the floor.  M is the kindred spirit I've written about several times and we're very close.  I don't want him to go into the police force but I understand his reasons for doing it.  I love him deeply.  We all do and today, he got a rare gift.  He was shown how much he's loved.

He and I were both working lunch shifts.  I saw him walk in at noon and immediately felt my eyes tear up.  He gave me a wave and a warning look.  All afternoon, co-workers came up to him, one after the other.  Somebody brought in an ice cream cake and we all gave hugs and back slaps to cover the mixed bag of pride and dismay we were all feeling.  The night shift began drifting in and with them, two more gigantic cakes, balloons and a set of cards for all of us to sign.  I stood witness as a sea of people gathered round and watched as he got a whipped cream pie in the face.  He laughed, several servers slipped in the whipped cream on the floor, and every hand came up with a camera phone, recording the whole thing.  I grabbed mine out of my pocket and snapped a few shots. 

A couple of us went out after our lunch shift, treating M to a steak dinner and cracking jokes that began to sound a bit tinny.  The stress of losing him at work began to sink in.  We talked and ate and smiled but there was a bittersweet sadness to it.  M couldn't finish his meal and apologized to us.  We didn't care.  He could have sat and not touched any of it and we wouldn't have cared.  We just wanted to prolong the moment.  We just wanted to be with him.

They drove me home first.  I sat in the back and listened to the banter between guys, my arms and legs holding down the mountain of helium balloons so they could see out the windows, and I thought, "What a beautiful thing I'm seeing.  What an incredible feeling this is."

I took my shower and went upstairs to my room, where I immediately took out my phone to look at the photos.  And I saw it again, the unseen thing that sat with us in the steak house.  It was on every face in the photo, every grin, every soft and glistening eye in the background.  Love.  M was surrounded by people and every single one of them loved him.  It wasn't the adoration of fans, or the camaraderie of funny acquaintances: it was love. 

I sat on my bed and grinned, tears slipping down my cheeks as I stared and stared.  To see something so incredible, to actually witness it and get photographic proof of it, overwhelmed me.  Whenever my emotional coffers get empty, when I begin to feel jaded and weary with all the wickedness in the world, Fate throws me a bone.  A kid helping an old man across the street, somebody holding a door open for a baby stroller, a teenager whispering "I love you" to his girl across the appetizers at work.  Her getting up to sit beside him, squashed in a too-small booth but happy.  This day, I was given an enormous gift.  Proof of love.  Even among the sarcastic and often dissatisfied wait staff, love.  So good luck, my beloved friend.  I'm so happy for you and so scared at the same time.  But it feels good.  And all that love made me feel...safer.  The world is full of this kind of thing if you open your eyes and look.  If M can have it, anybody can.  Believe in love, my friends.  It's there, even for us wretched insecurity addict goofballs.  Believe in yourself.  Love yourself.  That's the beginning.

Love, R

Cap and Gowns

It's been a century since I last wrote on this thing.  Lots of computer problems, work schedules and old lady exhaustion.  Forgive me.

So, what's happening now.  My mom is back in the nursing home and has begun to eat again, a very good sign.  They drag her, kicking and screaming, to PT (Pain and Torture...uh...Physical Therapy) and make her lift her swollen, rust red legs, bend her wobbly knees, and hit a balloon back to the therapist.  Her arms have gone from coal black to purple and red, which they tell me is an improvement.  Her skin no longer looks like greasy plastic wrap.  She gets lots of praise, which she enjoys immensely.  Her mind is severely affected by the low oxygen blood saturation; sometimes she knows me, sometimes she doesn't.  The nurses and staff adore her, which is also a very good thing, and she can speak to me for five minutes at a time before she runs out of breath.  One day she's very depressed, the next deliriously happy.  She's happiest when she can just lie in bed and watch basketball.  In spite of her having very little short term memory, she still knows everything about all the basketball players.  That's a big comfort to me.

We've been very busy at the restaurant; everybody has been given gigantic schedules and even the maniacs who work six days a week can't take it anymore!  But graduations are finally at an end so it should slow down some.  I went for two six day stints in a row and felt myself starting to go into one of my crashes so gave away two shifts this week, which gives me four days off in a row to regain my strength and hopefully NOT crash.  I slept the first two days for the most part.  Today, I cleaned the house from top to bottom and baked bread.  Baking relaxes me. 

I saw beautiful, beautiful things these past two weeks.  Tiny kindergarten graduates in their teeny tiny cap and gowns, glowing as they gobble macaroni and cheese, chicken fingers and french fries, fringe swinging from their lopsided caps.  Young middle school graduates, shyly proud and subtly nervous about the change ahead, high school graduates champing at the bit to be out and off to college, puffy-chested with the swell of adulthood.  I grin and congratulate, telling them, "You've spent all this time preparing your future.  Now go get it."  I watch the old timers smile their tissue paper smiles, reminiscing and happy to see the new generation taking the reins for whatever lies ahead.  So much promise, so much hope; even in the exhausting job of waiting tables, one becomes almost drunk with it.  I love when a person's batteries of hope are almost drained, only to be filled up again by a parade of shining faces.  Whatever they faced to get to where they are now, is in the past.  They'll drag along baggage, stumble and fumble and fuck up, but they'll keep going.  The comforting thought is that so many of them will make it.  They'll go on to the next level, they'll graduate, or they'll find a new path and walk it for a time.  But they'll all keep walking.  Even if they hit road blocks, fall down and decide to lay there for a long time, they'll eventually get up again.  Because they have these moments to draw on.  These shining moments to remember.  They will always have them, deep inside, where they can draw on when times get rough.  All they have to do is access the golden things.  Oh, it's been an exhausting, maddening, miraculously beautiful two weeks, my friends.  All those faces.  Golden moments for me to draw on for the rest of my life.  Take care.

Love, R

Water Skitters

This has been an eventful month.  My mom's still alive but can't really move.  She has little idea of what's going on but seems relatively happy with all the attention she's getting, so that's good, I guess.  A close friend's relative fell off the wagon and went on a drug-crazed crime spree.  They caught him a few days ago; he's now incarcerated and thankfully no longer able to harm others.  Another friend's close to losing everything, due to a loved one's addictive behavior.  A pal of one of my relatives got drunk and bit someone at a bar.  The attack was so savage, the victim will need surgery to repair his bicep.  My relative thought that was a hoot.  He also got a kick out of a young woman stumbling into the local police station, blood streaming from between her legs, to report a rape.  The accused was a drinking buddy of the redneck cops, and they laughed her out of the station.  He thought that was hilarious as well.  My cousin Lydie's daughter had a friend who was murdered over the weekend by an ex-boyfriend.  He shot her then killed himself.  The girl's father found the bodies.

As I said, an eventful month, which isn't quite half over yet.

All this horror got me to thinking.  We all read of tragic events, watch terrible things unfold on the nightly news, experience terrible things ourselves.  We witness the devastation when friends go through trauma and to a certain extent, we feel the pain of all of it.  But for the most part, tragedy close to home has a far greater sting.  We feel bad for strangers we hear about but it doesn't tear us up; not like a loved one or ourselves suffering.  That's probably a survival mechanism; thousands of years of evolution working to keep us sane.

When I get overwhelmed emotionally, I used to do a number of horrific things to dispel the tension.  When it's me personally, I have a tendency to retreat, hide somewhere where no one can witness my fragility.  That's about the extent of my self-destructive behavior nowadays.  When I was younger, it was a much different story.  I've been on the verge of fainting and still kept a smile on my face.  I've chewed holes in the inside of my cheek to keep from screaming, clawed my arms and back to gory ribbons in a frantic attempt to release the emotional pressure, slapped my own face until it was black and blue.  I picked fights with bullies and relished the joy of beating and being beaten to a pulp.  That's what insecurity addicts do when they've lost control, when they're under the influence of their drug of choice: overwhelming self-hatred.  We turn to drugs, sex, violence, self-destruction, even religion to find release.  Insecurity addicts will rush around like water skitters on the surface of a pond, zipping and zagging in seemingly random panic as they try to escape themselves.  Until I recognized that my behavior itself was an addiction, I flopped around in wallowing misery and repeated bad relationships.  I grew so used to things being so bad all the time that cynicism just took over my brain.  Everything was bad because that's how it was.  That was life.  More specifically, that was my life.  Men were pigs, women were backstabbing whiners and repulsive victims, old people were kind because they were too weak to be bullies anymore.  Even children were mean.  I'd experienced it all personally, and my own limited view colored everything I saw.  Life was pain.  Glean what little you could from it until you could finally check out and die.  Just keep slogging along in your manure pile until God let you drop dead.  That was how I thought and felt for years.  Do what you can to help your kids have a better life, make sure to let them know they're loved and precious, shelter them as much as possible from reality.  Hope against hope that they'll turn out to be the very very rare: kind and gracious human beings.

But something happened to my obviously fucked up thought patterns.  I was in a terrible marriage for fourteen years to a highly intelligent but quite sadistic man.  Slowly I let him beat me down emotionally until I was little more than a quivering jelly with moments of half-assed revolt against his tyranny.  Outwardly, I was tough and funny.  Inwardly, I obeyed him and loathed myself.

When my daughter tried to commit suicide, when my son turned to drugs, I was forced out of my own self-absorbed behavior.  Ironically, insecurity makes you very self-absorbed.  I'm a sack of shit, I'm a sack of shit, God, I'm repulsive, I hate myself, I wish I'd die already, me, me, me, I, I, I.  I didn't want to see the obvious flaws in myself, either.  Nobody wants to be told they're self-absorbed when they think they're being selfless.  I truly believed I was being selfless, even noble.  I really did love my children more than anything.  I truly did believe I was making their lives much better than my childhood had been.  And to a certain degree, I'd accomplished that.  Their dad was a jerk, but he was educated, working toward a higher goal, dedicated to bettering himself.  That was a good role model, so I thought, but I wasn't seeing clearly.  I was still seeing through the shit-colored glasses of my childhood.  The kids weren't beaten or raped, molested or brutalized, sure, but they were abused nonetheless. 

An abused-in-the-past parent has little idea of what is needed to promote a healthy environment for their own kids.  The logical part of our brains recognizes what to do but the emotional part flounders.  It's like learning a new language.  You suck at first, but keep at it and you'll get there, slowly but surely.  My kids' misery opened my eyes at last and through the ensuing years, we all learned a thing or two about ourselves.  I know now that it's okay to have had a terrible past but not okay to endure a terrible present.  It takes a lot of work to heal yourself.  A lot of work.  Like any other addiction, you're fighting against yourself to stop doing something destructive that you love and don't want to stop doing.  It doesn't matter that your addiction is killing you.  You hate yourself anyway so who gives a fuck?  At least I'll go out dramatically and very, very badly.  Good.  I deserve it.  Stupid bitch.  That's the mentality I began with.  I never did drugs or drank excessively but my patterns were killing me.  And I was glad.  Events like what's happened this month would have crippled me in the way a quadriplegic would be crippled by a broken leg.  Gangrene would have simply set in to an already incapacitated psyche.  But I've worked on myself these past ten years.  I'm still an insecurity addict.  I always will be.  There will always be a part of me that longs to slide back into that dark hole I clawed myself out of.  But I love this person I've become, this person I have always been, just hidden.  I'm not willing to let myself indulge in misery anymore.  I'll get knocked down, flattened by events, exhausted by sadness and tragedy in the future.  But I'll get up again.  Because I want to.  I want to be what I am now even more than I want to be the tragic figure of the past.  I am using my experiences to help others now.  I have become a force for good.  A goofy, fucked up, stumbling-over-my-own-feet force for good.  Something to be ludicrously proud of.  I'm a good person. 

Good luck with all the hard balls Life throws at you, my friends.  Hang in there.  Look in the mirror and find the sweet kid who's hiding behind your eyes.  Treasure them even if you can't treasure yourself.  Believe in the impossible miracle of self love.  Believe it even when you sneer at the very thought of anything so stupidly impossible.  As Rogers & Hammerstein would sing, impossible things are happening every day.

Love, R    

Seven and Counting

My mom is...better.

Forty-eight hours ago, my mother had been given last rites and all the doctors were waiting for her to simply stop breathing.  I was discussing with my cousin plans for the coming funeral, weeping copiously and struggling with guilt over the simultaneous wave of relief that it was finally over.

Now she's better.

We are an amazing family.  Nuts and maniacs and galloping addicts but by God, we're hard to kill.  I went through ten years of debilitating illness and almost died on the table during the hysterectomy.  My aunt lived with pancreatic cancer for seven years with no treatment whatsoever.  She was in her nineties when diagnosed and refused any treatment.  Called the lump in her body "the little unwelcome guest."  My diabetic father, when he was seventy-eight, passed out at the wheel of his tiny Toyota and got broadsided by a gigantic SUV going seventy-two miles an hour.  It hit on the driver's side.  The accident broke Dad's back, neck, shoulder, arm, seven ribs and his leg, and he developed five pulmonary emboli in his lungs due to an unknown allergy to Hepron.  He's fine. 

But Mom takes the cake.  This is now the seventh time the doctors have told us to say goodbye, this is it, she's done for, and she's proven them wrong.  Even I had begun to believe that this was it.  The last three times were the worst.  Four years ago, an operation to put stents in her heart tore the artery in her leg wide open.  They had to give my five-foot-nothing teeny weeny mother ten units of blood.  The room looked like it "had been hosed down with blood" the nurse practitioner told me.  I saw when it started bleeding again; the bed was soaked in moments.  She was in the hospital for over a month but survived.  Then, right before we put her in the nursing home, before she'd been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, she had forgotten how to eat, walk and breathe.  They told us she had maybe a month at the home, then she'd be gone.  That was two years ago.

And then this latest foray into Death's Doorway.  As I've written before, you all know about her mood swings and repugnant revenge scenarios as the Alzheimer's shook her mind loose from sanity.  She went into the hospital with double pneumonia.  She wasn't responding to the antibiotics and her heart went into A-fib.  I talked to a nurse friend of mine and she described A-fib as "a can of quiet worms that suddenly go nuts and wiggle all over the place uncontrolled."  Rather disturbing description. Mom hasn't been able to talk for almost two weeks because the oxygen saturation level in her blood was so low, it dropped to lethal levels when she tried to speak.  Late yesterday, I heard her garbled voice for about sixty seconds.  This morning, we talked for five breathy minutes.  She told me she felt better than she has in months.  She also told me that my brother Frank had come to visit and was such a good boy.  Frank isn't there, hasn't been there the whole time.  He lives out of state.  But she seemed chipper. 

I feel a bit like Tom Cruise's character in the movie Magnolia, when he sits by his unworthy father's deathbed and glares for a few defiant moments before becoming a sobbing basket case.  As much as a person wants to hate their parents, as much as they actually DO hate their parents, there's also that kid who doesn't want ma and pa to kick off.  Just a fact of life.  It makes me think about something I figured out about my father years ago. 

Dad has a very hard time at Christmas.  He goes into these black sob modes, actually wailing and gnashing his teeth, but the cause is a strange one.  He misses Ian, my beloved brother who was killed in the motorcycle accident forty years ago now.  If you've read my memoir FREAK, you know exactly how horrible Dad was to Ian.  He beat the shit out of him all the time and told him he was the son of a rapist (a man raped Mom on a blind date when she was a teenager).  So for years, we all wondered what the hell Dad was talking about during his yuletide rants.  "Ian was the best friend I ever had!"  "Nobody understood me like that boy."  "We loved each other.  I was closer to him than anybody else in the world.  He was wonderful, just wonderful."  This is the kind of fantasy that pours out of my father's mouth between Thanksgiving and New Year's. 

Then I figured it out.  Dad's very smug about his own sadistic past.  He knows what a monster he is and he knows exactly how terrible he truly was.  But he also knows he has the option to apologize.  He never will, but he knows he has the option.  With Ian dead, that option's gone forever.  He blew his chance.  I think that's why he freaks out every Christmas. 

In us abused basket cases, maybe we too are waiting for that shiny wrapped gift of apology.  I know I've fantasized over the years, especially when I was a teenager, that my parents would suddenly become decent human beings and beg my forgiveness.  I didn't even need the drama of tears and bent knee; I'd have been perfectly, gloriously content with "sorry I fucked you, sweetheart.  Don't know what I was thinking" or "I really did you wrong calling you an incestuous slut.  I'm sorry I broke your finger that time."  The little kid in all of us wants the fairy tale of parental love and sturdiness, something strong and firm and kind to cling to.  It's tough enough just growing up without the Manson family as your foundation. 

So I did something strange tonight.  I stood in front of the mirror and put my palm against the glass.  Hand to hand, we looked at each other, my reflection and me.  I saw the shadows that shouldn't have been forced into those eyes.  I saw the humor and the good spirit, thanks to my daily exercises of self love.  It's a gift that I can see those at long last.  I also see the lonely longing, the brutalized kid peeping out, scared but hopeful for words that will never come from our parents.  So I said them.

"I'm sorry, baby.  I'm sorry you went through that.  I'm sorry there's still so much rage and pain and insecurity inside of you.  I'm sorry that in times of stress like these, you have to keep such a tight rein on the monster within.  I know you want to let it out.  I know how good it would feel to let it out.  So thank you for being brave.  Thank you for staying such a good person.  I'm here for you.  I'm your mother, your father, your sister and your brother.  I'm your friend.  I'm your family.  I will never leave you and I will always love you.  Together we'll keep on working toward accepting the past and refusing to let it eat us alive anymore.  It'll get bites in, but it'll never chew us up and shit us out again."

A strange litany to babble to myself in a bathroom mirror, but a profound one as well.  The insecurity addict in me has been hard at work these past two weeks, trying its damnedest to drag me back down into that rut I crawled out of.  I've fallen backwards into it so many times, sinking into that oh-so-familiar pit of misery and self-loathing, bad company and worse decisions.  But I stayed out of it this time.  Because I meant those words I said to myself.  I am here for me.  Always.  May you all find a champion in yourself, for yourself, and forever.  There's a steady war inside of us that nobody can afford to lose and so many of us do.  I've lost many, many battles, done things I'm embarrassed and ashamed of, been a coward, a loser and a repulsive whiner.  But that's not all I've been.  I've also been a hero, a friend, a good mother and a brave soul.  We're always changing.  There's always hope, defeat, sorrow, joy and victory.  So lighten up when you find yourself hating that fucker in the mirror.  Give them a break.  Love them.  You can do it.  Believe even when it's impossible.  You can do it.

Take care.

Love, R