Digging Up the Back Forty

Every once in awhile, the only way I can deal with anxiety is to dig. When I comment that I am going outside to "dig the back forty" people who know me are aware that I am hugely overwhelmed.

I can't dig as well or as long as I used to. Aches and pains get in the way. Besides which, the back lawn, which now takes the place of the "back forty", is covered in six inches of snow at the moment, or it is raining outside or there is a wind chill of many minus degrees. So I pace.

I have worn a path in the floor in the living room from trying to expend excess negative energy that stems from trying to make nurses, careworkers and government officials see united sense about my mother's care.

During these many bouts of pacing, I find once I've found a solution, I can put that particular problem to rest. But during the last while, once one dilemma is solved, another crops up...and then, sometimes there are so many complications, I don't know which one to choose to unravel.

I attempt to still my mind, to find my centre. To take each convoluted thought and painstakingly smooth out its path...

My mother's care is the biggest conundrum. There are so many people involved in her care, each one having a different view of the reality involved.

She can't walk.

She doesn't know how to use her powered wheelchair, with an oxygen tube attached to her nostrils.

She can't stand for long enough to transfer herself from chair to chair.

She is confused, falling further and further into senile dementia.

Any activity of any kind tires her to where she has trouble speaking. She has one infection after another. And yet, she has managed to convince others who have power that she knows of what she speaks...leaving no prisoners in her quest to go home.

So the family begins a kind of dance.

The prognosis by her doctor for my mom to live at home, largely by herself, is not good. Each person, her daughters included, after having spoken with Mom, comes out of her room feeling differently than the other...

All this makes for much discussion amongst the professionals and Mom's family. I think about many different viewpoints, as I pace.

And what is my hope for Mom? I see her, through my admittedly only 55 year old rose- coloured glasses, being cared for, in a room with the morning sun streaming in. I see her sitting in her favourite recliner, in a room where there are many aids to health and help within easy reach. I see her living her remaining time in reflection, without the incessant fear that has plagued her all her life. I see her sitting in her chair, watching the gardens flower...the gardens that surround a care home.

My viewpoint is admittedly selfish. I no longer want to receive telephone calls from my Mom, where she begs me to find help for her. I no longer want to feel so helpless, from those breathless calls. I no longer want my body to tense each time the telephone rings, especially if it is at night. I live at least 3/4 of an hour away from my Mom.

I have no experience with picking up a body that becomes limp and unresponsive. Even if my body allowed me to. When she falls, I have the most horrendously helpless feeling...this is my Mother that is lying at my feet. So I will push my body to its limits, trying to help her up. This has happened to me a couple of times...it has occurred many different times, with others. But Mom expects the help, and always manages to convince the helper to do it.

And Mom expects to go home. She has the right to live at risk, I tell myself. I would leave her be, to do as she likes, if she could only do it. Mom's spirit is willing; her body is failing. And she is afraid of recognizing it, of accepting it, as so many of us are, when we reach the last mile or so on the path of life.

Mom recognizes too, that her memory is failing, that one day is blending into the next. She counts, does my mother. She counts the days on her calendar; she counts the hours on the clock. She asks which day it is, over and over. She struggles to grasp and remember the day and sometimes, she's successful. But, increasingly, she's not.

But she has not forgotten that she wants to go home...she just does not remember the horrible times she had just so very recently, when she was home. And since this memory is not allowed to surface, she chooses, instead, to remember a time when she was able.

This is the memory that urges her to go home.

But the other memory...that is the one that makes me pace.

Basic Truths

After hours of power outages yesterday afternoon and evening, my mother was returned to the hospital by ambulance.

I had tried to leave Qualicum Beach earlier in the day, but Wind held me back. A drive through the Grove and along Cameron Lake was not something I wanted to face in the driving Rain and howling Wind.

But when I spoke to my mother early in the day, she confessed to falling again, the night before. She had called her neighbours to request assistance, not allowing them to call anyone, let alone an ambulance. They banded together, these seniors. But Mom bruises easily now; she had to fess up to her caregivers. She had to admit, to them and to herself, that she could no longer walk, even the smallest bit.

Many, many long distance calls ensued between my sisters and I. Not much got done this day; but we managed to work together on finding a way out of the maze of information that was thrown at us, by caregivers and doctors and oxygen people. And then Wind threw a huge salvo; transformers blew everywhere and electrical power was no more. Telephones were down, too. Plans drew to a grinding halt.

The highway that might have taken me to my mother was closed.

It was not until later in the evening that telephones were working again. This is when I discovered my mother had been taken back to hospital by ambulance. She is on oxygen; electrical power is essential. By returning to hospital, Mom could no longer hide her desperate straits. Her doctor, having been apprised of her situation by two of my sisters, was now convinced of a different reality than the one promised him by my mother, and has indicated that he will keep her safely in the hospital Care Ward.

I would, under no circumstances, count my mother out.

Throughout all this, I felt as if a huge wall had been erected in front of me. It seemed everywhere I turned for help, I was blocked. It became very obvious...Graham noticed it first. I felt as if I was living in one of those dreams, where everything happens in slow motion or not at all.

When Wind once more blew with such force, crippling the Island, even cutting off telephones and electricity, blowing Trees across highways...I thought I'd better listen. I thought I'd better relax a little, go with the Powers That Be...and learn a little about myself.

Shaman Maggie, in her infinite gentle wisdom, had sent the four Basic Truths of Shamanism to me, indirectly. She had sent them to a student; and copied me. These Truths are always with me...I have them taped to my computer...the list is the first thing I see when I turn on my computer. For whatever reason, the instant I opened the email, I suddenly knew that I had not been using them as much as I could have been.

But it was the fourth Truth...effectiveness is the yardstick of ability...that stopped me in my tracks.

I was so intent on working hard, using authority and clear intent, to help my mother. I was beginning to wonder why I was not being heard; why was the whole scenario so very difficult? Why was I feeling blocked, even when I followed the rules? And why was nothing going the way I had intended it to?

There are outside influences here with my Mom; there were things that were totally out of any control I might have tried to exert. My mother has never listened to advice...why would she suddenly start now? My sisters and I have rarely agreed on anything longer than 5 minutes before becoming exasperated...it would take time to learn to work together.

The only thing, this lesson told me, I could do is keep my balance, and let the forces at work do their work. And watch.

All the world's a stage...

My Mom uses a different persona with each one of us... showing each of us a face that is unrecog- nizable to the other. And I see what my mother is doing...the age old use of manipulation by pushing the aged buttons between that particular child and mother.

We did not have a relationship as I grew up, my mother and I. Neither good nor bad. It just was. To me, at any rate, in the blindness of the youth. During this last year, Mom and I, on our own, grew closer...she was gentle and loving with me, she projected back to me, eventually, what I was giving to her.

But she was not this way with my sisters...she presented a different face to each of us. A different way to place us exactly where she wanted each of us on this stage of life...

And now, the Powers That Be have placed us exactly where we haven't been, my sisters and I, during our lives, on a stage where it is crucial that we work together.

It will present revelations, this sudden upheaval in all our lives...and it is out of my control. Effectiveness is the yardstick of ability...and I was blocked at every turn.

Another lesson taken in.

Still, it leaves a question...who is my Mother?