These Are the Good Old Days

Song Of the Impeded Stream

I have a bad habit of ruminating on how my life might have played out had I enjoyed a more stable childhood home, one without a volatile alcoholic at the helm. It’s the old nature versus nurture debate and I can’t help but entertain it endlessly. Would I have to manage my myriad neurotic tendencies had I the benefit of a sober, attentive father? Could I have modelled myself after a cheerfully confident woman were my young mother not run ragged trying to protect us from her police detective husband who, while lauded as an exceptionally fine officer of the law, was an unfaithful partner whose explosive temper frequently terrorized us? It’s all academic of course, but as I’ve aged, and ruefully discovered that my body kept the score, I’m now faced with determining which of my chronic pain ailments might be healed, or at least alleviated with therapy, and which are simply permanent artifacts of my sixty-year-old self. As we enjoy the privilege of aging out, each of us must negotiate our mental, emotional, physical and spiritual health, but how do we calculate early causation when memory is the slipperiest of all flipping fish? This puzzle is the hard, sharp candy I can’t help but roll around my mouth regularly, tongue shredded, tasting bitter blood.

I suspect many of us get caught up in infernal internal dialogues with ghosts of childhood past, especially as we trouble shoot the rubs in our present relationships. It’s difficult having to sort out exactly when to prioritize selfless responsibility to our loved ones over the pull of personal ambition and it’s harder still to figure out what work is relevant to our growth and which is simply the unconscious retreading of old, limiting, self-protective patterns. Early traumatic events, which we’ve all experienced to one degree or another, lodge themselves so deeply in our psyche, they appear to be foundational elements rather than just ratty old furniture we should have thrown out ages ago. What long-held assumptions must we uncover and question? Which of our behaviours is intrinsic to our being? What graven images have been tattooed on our flesh without our consent? These are the questions I grapple with as I weigh the value of creative work I feel compelled to perform, against more altruistic actions I could be taking, endeavours that might prove to be beautifully beneficial to others.

In 2014, my mother was diagnosed with dementia in her 74th year, and if you’ve been lucky enough to avoid this experience, trust my telling you how our world crumbled. Plans of Christmas in Maui, a Yellowstone adventure, or even just a weekend lost in Vegas, disintegrated before our very eyes. By the time we could understand what was happening to her, in many ways, she was already gone. My vivid imagination, the sanctuary that once saved me as a lonely, only child, was now a theatre playing horror movies day and night, driving me down the darkest rabbit holes, as I tried to escape into productivity but failed miserably. Luckily, I was no longer alone. My husband held my face up to the light and air, and stepped up in his role of pragmatic, trusted son-in-law. My mother’s husband, who has had to deal with his smart-aleck, lefty, artsy, dope-smoking step-daughter since 1971 (I was nine when they married) has also risen to the occasion as her primary caregiver, thankfully, as she’s still able to live at home with him, for now. As her only child, I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming and crying out loud, into the position of sole secondary carer, provider of showers she hates to take (she loathes being wet and potentially cold), and also chauffeur and appointment escort, special occasion dinner host and wardrobe mistress, among other smaller roles, which have made me a different person. Am I the person I once hoped I would become? We’ll see.

Even without the insanity of a world in pandemic lockdown, this past decade brought challenges I never imagined and, frankly, thought I’d artfully dodged by deciding not to have a child back when doing so was an option. I’ve struggled mightily through my fifties, relying on worn out ways of coping that only served to compound feelings of powerlessness. I had to find healthier daily practices in order to remain upright under the weight of what living with uncertainty now entails. It’s mind-blowing to realize how fortunate I feel to have been tempered by my fate, especially lessons in survival learned early on as an indentured seven year old sailor on the good ship shit-show. Nothing quite like the exquisite joy and pain of parenting your parent to shift a somewhat skewed and self-pitying perspective into one of perfect, if not peaceful, clarity. Loyalty calls so sweetly, and love requires nothing less than complete surrender in the face of what is at its heart, our utterly unacceptable reality.

And yet I find myself thankful for each day with Mom 2.0. My discomfort pales in comparison to what she’s lost to her affliction, though there is a silver lining in that she has also forgotten painful aspects of her past, and now lives entirely in the present moment, a capability all my years of meditation and Buddhist study hasn’t manifested in me. I’ve adjusted my life in ways that allow me to make the most of whatever time remains for us to share, knowing today is all we have. It’s not just enough…it’s a gift I wish I’d never been given, but somehow find myself grateful for.

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
-Wendell Berry