I Don’t Really Know How to Be an Adult Like This
Do you?
This was only a few months ago
St. Petersburg, FL // September 2023
I am in Florida, and my mom isn’t doing great.
The lesbians who used to drive her to church won’t anymore. They said they can’t. She fell down. They said it’s dangerous.
For whom? I wonder.
I don’t wonder. I know.
For them.
I guess they think she’s a liability. I think they wanted an excuse to be rid of the favor. And that one will serve. “It’s too dangerous.”
Her church has a Care Committee. One of the lesbians in the couple, the sharp one, is on the Care Committee. She says mom needs more care than the Care Committee can provide. She also says my mother is difficult to help.
The other one, the soft one, said she wished she could do more, the last time I saw her, but she just can’t. I guess in lieu of doing more, they opted to do less. So now they are doing nothing.
I cannot blame them, and yet I do.
My mother needs more help than I want to provide, too.
She is difficult. It’s true. And it gets truer. That’s what 82 years on the planet and a 40-year cocktail of meds will do to a person. She is so brittle. So frightened. But she is also loving, my mother. And she has hardly any place for her loving to go.
When she divorced my father in 1995, she lost his whole family in the process. (Except for my great Aunt Kay, who was always her own person.) They are Catholic and obsessed with Disney. I don’t really talk to them. Clearly I’m the forgiving sort. My Grammy came around in the end. Before she died. She regretted shunning her. But. Damage done.
Mom’s Brazilian family would help, but: geography. Mom won’t move back to Brazil, and they’re all in Brazil, or Germany, or Los Angeles. I moved to Los Angeles a month ago. For the winter. For the sunshine. I could have moved to Florida. They have sun here. She has a room for me. An ADU even.
I don’t want to live in Florida.
I really don’t want to live in Florida.
The town where I went to high school grew up. Now it has coffee shops and craft breweries and coworking spaces. That’s nice. Makes it easier to visit.
They even have Street Art / St. Petersburg, FL // November 2023
But I still don’t want to live here.
I always feel more or less guilty about that.
I need to hire someone to help her but I also need her to pay for it because instead of earning an adult wage I decided to be an artist. Someone needs to be here every day to teach her how to use Netflix. And WhatsApp. She used to know how to use WhatsApp. She is going backwards.
I think these will have to be daily lessons.
I can’t even convince her to leave her cell phone on. This is the only thing her and my father agree on in their old age. They can’t have their phones with them all the time. They can’t even have them on.
“Please,” I have said, innumerable times, “I need to be able to reach you in an emergency.”
“I can’t have it on all the time,” she says.
WHY NOT?! EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD DOES!?
IF YOU FALL DOWN AND CAN’T GET TO YOUR LAND LINE AND YOU LIVE ALONE AND NOBODY VISITS YOU WHO WILL FIND YOU IF YOU CAN’T CALL FOR HELP?
She’s been falling down. Her arms are covered in bruises and her shirts in blood stains. And not just blood. Unidentifiable chalky smears, something that looks like coffee but can’t be coffee because mom doesn’t drink coffee. Droplets of urine in a trail, like an incontinent Hansel and Gretal, from the bedroom to the back bathroom. Almond butter on her chin. A streak of blush like a diagonal neon line only vaguely in the direction of her cheek. She can’t see the stains. Her glasses are coke bottle thick and speckled with… what? What is that?
She doesn’t want to move from this house. In our tenderest conversation, she told me if she leaves she’s afraid she’ll never be independent again.
But to be independently miserable?
She’s scared of most everything; I don’t understand why she’s not scared of being unable to call for help.
Some of you will remember the television commercial “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up.” Parodies abound. Google it, kids.
But also, fucking think about that. You’ve fallen. And you can’t. Get. Up. And you don’t have a cell phone on you. And you can’t crawl to your land line. And you live alone. And nobody’s coming. Noone’s coming for days. Maybe nobody’s coming at all. What do you do? You live on the floor now? You die there?
The problem is her sandals, she said. She needs better sandals, she said. She doesn’t know where to get them. We got them today. They are still in the shoebox.
A medical alert device used to look like a beige remote-control on a leash, and you had to wear it around your neck. The new ones look like an Apple Watch. See? Dignity. But it’s no use buying dignity for it to sit there unopened on her kitchen table next to the blue-light blocking glasses I got for her insomnia.
I’d really like to pay to know that someone is coming.
She has a helper a couple times a week for a few hours. Monika. Monika installed a shower bar. Mom won’t use it? Made her take it down? Monika brought her a walker. Mom made her put it in the garage? I’m gonna wash that sucker off and put it in the living room.
She fell when she went to bed last night. I was here. I helped her up. Something happened while I was at the coffee shop today. I wasn’t here. Her palm is bleeding. Like stigmata. She wouldn’t let me clean it. She just wanted me to turn the light off. I turned the light off.
I usually do what she asks.
But I think I’m going to have to start infringing on her autonomy.
This is a necklace I bought myself for doing hard things. I think I have some really hard things to do, really soon.
St. Petersburg, FL // September 2023
Everyone throws up their hands at some point. It’s a matter of how long. That’s why the lesbian couple won’t drive her anymore. What’s that thing about helping people who help themselves? Misattributed to God? Actually a guy named Algernon in 1968?
But I can’t throw up my hands. I would be the worst. There is no one else.
There is no one coming.
Mom asks if I want to set an alarm for 7. Why, why would I want to do that? Yesterday we were up at 5:30am for her endoscopy and I am jet-lagged and sleep-deprived. Today, all I want is to sleep in until I wake up. The woman has nothing to do and she’s an insomniac with sleep apnea. She sets her alarm for 8. Her alarm is inexplicably in the living room. She won’t put the alarm in her bedroom. I can’t sleep through her alarm, but I also can’t sleep through her awakening. It’s the sandals. They are loose. And she cannot pick up her feet. She shuffles through the house like a couple of asynchronous snow shovels. Guess I’m getting up at 8am.
She wakes up at 4:45am and uses the microwave. The MICROWAVE. Shuffles back and forth from the kitchen. Bip Bip Beeeep! Schhrep schhrep schhrep schhrep! My eyelids hurt.
She wakes me up at 9:30am to tell me I’ve been sleeping a long time.
When she set the alarm, I had asked, “Why, why would you do that? You don’t have anywhere to be in the morning. Why not sleep until you wake up?”
“I’m afraid I won’t wake up,” she says.
We really need to pay someone who won’t throw up their hands.
She used to beg me to go with her for sunset. Now I can’t convince her to go. / Treasure Island, FL // September 2023
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