Oh, I Love My Rosie Child........

I got to spend a few days with my bonus daughter to watch Rosie.  It was heaven on earth for me.  I have missed seeing her like I did Abigail when she was small.  Rosie is a very happy child.  Rosie and her Mimi got some time together and we had a very good time.

The first morning when I got there I had to bribe her to take a bath.  The bribe I used was her phone.  Abigail and Rosie have a phone.  I did not know this but Rosie led me right to where it was plugged in to charge.  I had no idea how to run the phone, but Rosie did.

After her bath she also picked out her own outfit.  It had a sweatshirt that zipped up the front.  I started to zip it up for her but I had forgotten Rosie is 2.

"I tan do it mysef", she informed me, resisting all help I offered.

And so she did.  She could also brush her hair herself, and that was fine with me.  I have yet to forget the stress that combing Abigail's hair put me through.  No one would see us anyway.  I learned a long time ago not to sweat the small stuff.

Rosie showed me everything, inside and outside the house.  She quickly forgot about her phone when I mentioned "outside".

Outside I discovered that Rosie is the Jumping Queen of the Trampoline.  With a tutu and glittering shoes, she jumped off and on all day.  She wanted me to jump with her.  I told her I couldn't because I'm an old grandma now and when I jump on trampolines it makes me pee my pants.  Just a little bit.  She solemnly took this information in, repeated it after me, and did not ask me to jump again.

The second day I decided to get in there and clean out some sticks and leaves that had found their way into her trampoline.  She looked at me, dead serious, and said "Don't pee."  

"What?", I asked, looking at her in confusion.

"Don't pee", she repeated, her eyes not wavering.  I had forgotten all about telling her that the day before, then I laughed when I remembered.

"I won't", I assured her, and so I just sat there, picking up sticks and leaves, while she watched me and made sure I didn't pee on her trampoline.

Two year old's have minds like steel traps.  I can't remember the last time anyone listened to me like she does.  

She gave me the tour.  We identified several types of wild flowers growing in her yard and pulled weeds out of the cracks between the tiles.  She led the way to the pool.

She told me not to get in the water.  I said no problem, that it wasn't time yet anyway.

I held her up and let her pick some blooms off a tree.  She thought they were very beautiful, and smelled good, too.

I managed to talk her out of opening this gate.  She graciously stopped, but she knew exactly how.  If you want to know something, ask a 2 year old.  They know everything, I swear.

Not only did Rosie know how to work her own phone, but she knew how to work mine.  Mine happens to have pictures from the day she was born until now, and she was really thrilled with that.  She would pull up the first time Abigail ever held her, and stare in wonder that she used to be so small.  I, too, stared in wonder at exactly the same thing.  She called my father at least 3 times in 2 days, until he gave up trying to talk to her, adding entertainment to his day.

Rosie loves her babies even more than being the Queen of the Trampoline.

She is getting ready to be a big sister, as well as a little sister.  I told her I thought it would be so much fun to get to be both.  On these days, she was concentrating on her "boy baby".  You can tell he's a boy because of the Royals shirt he wears.  He came with us on all our travels, complete with a stroller, blanket, and a diaper bag, all remembered and gotten by Rosie herself.  She knows how to wrap him up in his blanket, make sure the sun doesn't get in his eyes, and strap him in so he doesn't fall out.

I sang her a few bars of her song but she just said "I not a store-bought woman!!" and then wanted to know what that was.  She was very touched that someone had written a song about her.  I told her that the best part was "cracklin Rosie make me smile", and we looked it up and danced to it thanks to youtube.  Youtube is one of the best parts of the modern world in my opinion.

Frequent dismounts were called for if he would "cry", and she would pick him up, rock him side to side to while making the "shh-shh shh-shhh" noise instinctively known by all mothers of all babies everywhere.  She would strap him back into his stroller while saying "It's okay......I gah choo....."

On my last day there, we celebrated by eating outside, which was Rosie's dream that day.  Also her dream, to drink coffee.  This turned out not to be about the "coffee" as much as the "cup".  Rosie's parents do not have an coffee, but they do have an impressive collection of tea bags, most of which did not have caffeine.  I drank all the ones with caffeine myself, and made Rosie some "coffee" in a cool cup which consisted of some Chamomile tea and milk.  She was thrilled.  We had "sammich"es of waffles folded over peanut butter and jelly for snack, and every time she would take a bite, she would turn to me and say "I drink my coffee!!" with the biggest laugh.  It was so much fun to do so little and make such a sweet child so very happy.  

When her mother got home, Rosie got to tell her all about our adventures that day and I got to spend some time with my beloved Abigail.  Abigail wanted me to sing a pirate song.  I confess, I was never that into pirates, so I sang "16 bottles of rum on a dead man's chest", and she looked me dead in the eyes for a few seconds and then looked at me like I was nuts, and said "That doesn't even ryhme".....for all the world like I was some kind of idiot.  Which was very true, I had to admit.  That's the way I remember it, anyway.  Maybe we should have looked it up on youtube!  

Then, in what was possibly the funniest moment of all, she grabbed both sides of my face and put her face right in mine and said "Mimi! Do you remember the red lipstick??"

How could I forget the red lipstick???  My lips were chapped for days.  Apparently, after Abigail gave us those "makeovers" that day, the red lipstick mysteriously disappeared.  I looked at her mother as I said that yes, I did remember the red lipstick and Abigail explained that she had lost it somehow, on that very day.  Her mother silently smiled a small smile as she met my eyes, and I was reminded again how lucky I was to have this wonderful, determined and sometimes sneaky woman in my life.  Sometimes that red lipstick simply must go.  We moms gotta stick together. 

Changing Roles....For My Daughter's 20th Birthday

I don't know if The Beautiful Redhead had any idea what she was starting when she offered to babysit for her friend's newborn daughter, I don't think any of us did, then.

I basically took her on initially as a project.  I thought I could be a good mentor to her, it would not cost me a dime, and it was a way for me to be able to give something back.  Since then I have grown to love her like a daughter and also as a dear friend, not to mention that I got a pretend grand child out of the deal.  I would not have missed this for the world.

This odd relationship has enriched all of our lives and I do not believe any of us would change a thing about it, all things considered.  In it I have been able to glimpse what my relationship with my own dear daughter will eventually be able to be, even though at the time this all started she was still in the phase of a teenager who mostly rolled her eyes at her mother.  It got me through some rough spots, I freely admit.  In addition, it has given my daughter a person who is just like an older sister, someone she can go to for advice and a guardian angel to watch out for her when I cannot.

My relationship with my bonus daughter was free from the constraints of my own children who were still in the years of believing their mother needed to be protected from the truth.  Truth be told, all most parent/child relationships need is absolute brutal honesty, which is asking a lot on both sides.

Sometimes I play the role of mother, sometimes friend with my bonus daughter.  Since we are both mothers, we usually come down on the same side of things, and this is a great comfort to me.

The other day my dear Abigail came to visit me.  We made blueberry pancakes wearing our aprons, then we went and fed some carrots to some horses.  Nothing big, but time together spent doing whatever we wanted.  She does not seem to know that The Beautiful Redhead is my daughter, and when I say she is, the pretend Grand Baby steadfastly insists "I am your child......" and I do not correct her.  She is most certainly the child of my heart, and too young to understand that love is the eternal spring that never runs dry.  There is more than enough to go around for all.  I let her have this truth, and am glad to do so.  The Beautiful Redhead, on the other hand, I think sometimes feels a little jealous.  I am ashamed to admit that this warms my heart because it proves to me that she still loves me.  She has just turned 20 and we are almost at the point where we can be equals in the emotional world of our hearts.  At last!  I rejoice for this, have worked and waited for this.

I recently picked up the phone for a conversation with my bonus daughter.  She was making dinner for my daughter, who makes Abigail mind, and Abigail says she is mean.  My bonus daughter has come to depend on my daughter to sometimes be the disciplinarian when she can't get Abigail to mind.  Just like real sisters!

At the beginning of the conversation we were talking as friends.  She was asking me what The Beautiful Redhead would eat, so I took on the role of mother.  At some point my daughter arrives and in the background I can hear her and Abigail having an animated conversation.  We keep talking.  In the background I can hear an escalation of noise.  All of a sudden my bonus daughter's voice becomes stressed and she says "I have to go now, The Beautiful Redhead and Abigail are fighting." And just like that, we were both mothers again.  I got off the phone laughing, grateful for the fact that while our roles all keep changing, they are also staying the same, and in the end the mothers are always in charge.

My Beautiful Redhead, Mackenzie Grace, this is to show you in case you ever feel alone, that you never are.  You will always have a friend, and a mother, and we will always love you no matter what you do.  When you are proud of yourself, when you are ashamed of yourself, when you don't know where to turn, come home to us.  We will never think less of you. We will defend you like dragons when you need it.  We have done it all before, and we will carry you and uphold you even when you cannot do that for yourself. 

I am so very proud of the person you have and continue to become.  You shine with bravery, grace and love.  You are smart, you know your own mind and you do not have a problem with speaking it.  I doubt that you realize how far ahead of the game you are.  You make up your mind and do not stray from your values.   You are true to yourself.  You have a beauty that will never fade because it originates in your soul.  The rest is just window dressing, and quite beautiful window dressing at that.  I don't know if you realize how beautiful you are, from the inside out.

For the days when you don't, here is proof.  I am so very blessed to have been lucky enough to be your mother.  My love for you has grown with you over the years.  The day you were born I thought I could never love you more, but I was so very wrong.  This love will keep growing, and every person you touch along the way will only multiply that love by however many people are lucky enough to know you.

I would not have missed these past 20 years for all the money or sleep in the world.  Never forget that.  I love you sweetie.  Here's to the next 120 years.  I will still be loving you then.

  

Throw down over Alzheimer's

All through the long process of losing my mother to cancer, I thought at first that I could not take the stress.  After a couple of years I realized that I could indeed take the stress and wondered if I would ever "go back" to the way I used to be, once it was over.

Isn't that funny?  I don't know if everybody thinks that or not, but if you do, I can tell you the answer.  The answer is no.  You won't "go back" to the way you used to be; not after you start your period, move from home, have a baby, lose a loved one, or go through hard things.  I used to be so amazed at the changes in me and try to imagine the person I was before in the new situation, whatever it was.  The answer was always obvious.  You will never "go back", because what you will be at the end of the process will be just another piece of the total package that will be "you" then.  Now.  At this moment.  There is no "going back" in the course of daily life.  Las Vegas was built to be able to fulfill that wish, within reason and for cold hard cash, for a very limited piece of time.  It's as close as you will ever get, unless you have the misfortune to suffer from Alzheimer's.  In that case, you may not know it, but you will indeed "go back" and experience things with no more wisdom or mercy than you had at the time.  Be careful what you wish for.

A very good friend of mine who I grew up with has a mother, whose home I spent a lot of time in, who is in the last stage of Alzheimer's now.  It has been a long, painful, heartbreaking process for everyone involved.  But what can you do?  You have to go through it.  There is no way around it.  There are the usual defenses, oblivion, denial, rationalization, anger, but none work very well for very long.  What starts out as Mom not remembering your name (and what mother ALWAYS calls you the right name??) gets steadily worse until medications are messed up badly enough to get some attention.  This usually leads to an inspection of the home, which very quickly reveals that things are not as they were, and they won't ever be "going back" to the way they used to be, either.  Things are MUCH worse than they have ever been before.  Whether you are a spouse, a chld, a sibling, or a parent of this person who is obviously not the way they were doesn't matter.  You feel betrayed, helpless, angry and heartbroken.  And that's just the beginning, folks. 
This is a disease that has no time frame for when it will be "over", and most likely their bodies will be in much better shape than their minds for years to come.  It drags on for years, getting slowly, slowly worse until that beloved personality is gone from the body that housed it for so long that you were fool enough to think were inseperable.  You can spend a small fortune on slippers and clothes that just get lost as fast as they are replaced.  I won't even go into what can happen to the teeth.  You learn to make peace with seeing your mother tied up because that way she can't hurt herself.  Or anyone else.  You have to cut your more tender feelings off because they will do nothing but enable your loved one's husk to hurt itself even more, and make you person non grata in the one Rest Home you could stand to put her in!  It is not for the faint hearted, and you don't get invited to join, or a chance to decline.  It comes to you unannounced, unrepentant, and unlikely to leave any time soon.  All you know is that it is going to get a lot worse before it gets better, (what would "better" be, by now?  Don't think too hard about that, just keep moving), and you lower your sights in order to survive it because you already know one of you isn't coming out of this horrible mess alive.  This goes on and on for what seems an endless amount of time.

My friend's mother was a very beautiful and great lady.  She was a wife and a mother to 6 cihldren, and gardened to feed them.  She made many beautiful quilts as well as lots of her families clothes, and had a welcoming home. She was famous for her potato rolls.  She was funny and wise and out spoken, especially if you came into her house in the middle of the night smelling of "beer and cigarettes!".  She scolded you heavily but never without respecting you, and would defend you like a grizzly bear if she thought you needed it.  When she really laughed, she threw her head back and really, really laughed.  I laughed with her many times until I cried.  She held my babies when they were small and adored them, remarking on every detail.  Sometimes I would catch her looking at me and have the strongest feeling that she knew everything I was thinking and feeling as a young woman and I would be so GLAD that there was nothing I could do about that.  She was a woman with whom you felt your secrets were safe. You felt understood as opposed to judged.  I miss her so very much, and she is not even actually gone, except in every way that really counts.  It is a grief that feels premature and incomplete, like a betrayal and so wrong, but when the end finally comes, what will be left to mourn?  It is as she disappears that we all mourn what is gone, and then what has been gone for 1 year......2 years........so long.  And still it does not end.

It is getting rarer that she recognizes anyone, now, but for years I would listen to my friend mourn her mother's gradual disappearing.  At first I offered ideas like crossword puzzles and that Suduko thing, Then it was those alarms you could get for your doors and windows in case someone got out of the house.  Eventually, all I could do was listen and sympathize and cry and search the Bible for comforting passages.  I began to realize how many times in our lives we change and never "go back" to the way we used to be.  I began to see myself not as the daughter in the situation, but the mother.  It was the most horrifying thing I have ever thought about.  I knew that this great lady would rather be dead than ever have anyone see her like this.  I knew that she would have NEVER wanted to put her husband or her children through this.  I knew that she was completely helpless and blameless and trapped.  I wondered if she ever knew it.  I hoped she didn't.

It was during a long phone conversation, which is the only kind my friend and I ever have, :) that I ended up going on a rant and pretty much bawling out my poor wonderful old best friend who I had only ever comforted before.  It was---galling for me.  I mean, I really didn't want to do it but I just couldn't not point out this thing from her mother's point of view.  I had to do it for mother's everywhere.  For WOMEN everywhere.  I had to do let this mother's daughter have it just like her mother would have if she had still been, well, aware. 

My friend calls me and she is mad at her mother.  MAD.  This is understandable and I am sympathetic.  The story is, Mom was MAD at Dad, REALLY mad, and cussed him out like a dog because she said Dad had bought her Brother beer.  (Now, Dad was in his 80's at the time, Brother was in his 70's, and of course could drink all the beer he wanted to, BUT in her mind, at that moment, everyone was apparently MUCH younger and Brother had had some problems with alcohol during his life).  Now, even though everybody involved except Mom knew that she was not "herself", Dad's feelings were hurt to the point that he was really really upset and now Friend is PO'd at Mom because it's not Dad's fault.  I do not expect this to make logical sense, OK?  It's all emotion, that horrible, inconvenient, illogical DOWNER that will not leave you alone.  I was quiet for awhile, listening to her story, wondering if this was an actual, factual thing that had taken place 50 years or so ago or if it just drifted through her mind and stuck.  And then I thought about all the things I could reveal about myself that I probably didn't even remember anymore, and how a person can't really be blamed for that kind of thing, at least not unless it's God blaming you at the end of this impossibly long am sometimes miserable road called life.  And that's when I said "Listen! (finger went into the air at that point.  This is a sign that I have had enough, anybody will tell you) Let me tell you something as a mother!!  (Friend does not have any children of her own)  When you become a mother, you start living your life differently, like a filter, so that your children will have a picture of what a "mother" and a "home and "decent" are supposed to be.  Do you want to do this?  NOT PARTICULARLY, but you DO it, because, you HAVE to, because it's the RIGHT thing to do, because you have to set an EXAMPLE.  But nobody is just a mother, and your mother may be different ages in her mind right now, and she might be fighting mad AT THIS MOMENT about something that actually did happen, and IS happening for her, right then.  It's nobody's fault, but Dad and you, Friend, are just going to have to suck it up!  Because she can't help it!  Do you ever think that at one time in her life she was just a girl, who had yet to meet her husband, and she may have had other boyfriends, and NOW she might just tell that in front of the one person who would be hurt by it even though he has been married to her for over 50 years?!!!  DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT WOULD DO TO HER IF SHE KNEW???"

By now, I was sobbing.  So was my Friend.  My poor Friend, who had done plenty of stuff when she was just a girl, I happened to know, as all girls do, myself included, and was now remembering (thanks to me) not only that she had to be strong for Dad, but that Mom was a girl and therefore on the same side as Friend, eternally, and deserved a little loyalty too.  You might think that it was a low point for us, but not really.  The thing about Alzheimer's is that it just goes on and on and you just have to cope with it and along with coping comes emotional detachment, if you want to survive it.  It's like war, that way. She knew I might hate this crappy mess we were in but I would not leave her alone in it, even if it meant letting her have it.  Just like a mother!!  She saw it my way.  She saw it Dad's way, and she saw it Mom's way. Talk about your multi-tasking.

If there is any blessing in this, for this family, it is that they are many.  Six children have grown into quite a crowd.  She is a great-grandmother several times over now, although she doesn't know it.  The last time she went to a family gathering she asked her husband "Who are all these people"?  He replied, "Well, don't ask me, you started all this", and she told him she wanted to go home.  I didn't really blame her.  You know how you secretly dread having everybody over when you are young and it's so much work and wears you out so bad,  and it has yet to occur to you that you will ever have Alzheimer's?  Well, someday you might announce that to all of your family, thinking they are strangers who would not be hurt by that information.  Don't worry, though.  Dad got her out of there before she did that, her partner in crime, her keeper of secrets, her hero to the end, whether she knows it or not.  I really love them both and the family they made.  They have much to be proud of.

She is receiving hospice care in the nursing home now.  She is a woman well loved, leaving a life well lived.