Maternal Dementia

Now that they are older, they wake up at a reasonable hour, something later than eight o’clock and occasionally after nine in the morning. (Well, until school starts tomorrow.) They totter down the stairs with that first-steps-in-the-day stiffness; their thumping like a gentle alarm clock alerting me that they are awake and they are coming my way. Then appears one of them – it could be either of the girls, though Short-pants is prone to rising earlier – pushing open the door to our bedroom, which sticks and sometimes requires serious muscle. A little sprite appears, donning just a pair of pink Cinderella underwear, lifts up the white comforter cover and crawls in between the sheets for the morning cuddle. It might be moments later – or as long as an hour – when the other one arrives and squeezes into the bed on the other side of me.

These cuddles are mostly wordless, except for the three questions:
Did you sleep well?
Did you have any good dreams?
Did you wake up feeling loved?
Short-pants adores the ritual of this Q&A, and answers each one with a deliberate “Yesssss,” letting the s stretch out for emphasis. I rarely ask Buddy-roo; before I even finish the first question she interrupts, “I don’t want you to ask me those questions.” I’ve asked her why not, dozens of times. The best I can get out of her is that she just doesn’t like them. So we cuddle in silence.

I’m struck by how the character of the morning cuddle has transformed over the years. When they were babies, this was the moment when they took my breast for the first meal of the day while I savored those last minutes of precious sleep. Then they were toddlers and we were constantly at war, fighting to keep them out of our bed until the sun had risen (our line in the sand), when the morning cuddle revealed the true pyrrhic nature of all those little battles we’d won the night before. This morphed into another stage in which their arguing, despite our admonishments, would crescendo into tearful screaming matches about who got to be on what side of the bed next to which parent – a prize that was hard to predict because De-facto and I never knew which of us was the coveted parent and we could fall out of favor at the drop of a hat.

Until now, a new phase, when they seem very content to wake up slowly, rising softly and silently and joining us in bed with little expectation of conversation, just the warmth and comfort of their parents and another twenty minutes of dream-time and morning slumber. (This is a great phase.)

I came across a photograph of my mother that I took a little over a year ago. Aware of her impending departure, I tried to capture little vignettes of her – things I wanted to remember – like the expression on her face while she washed the dishes (I snapped this without her noticing, from outside the window above her kitchen sink), or seeing her seated in her designated place at the head of the dining room table or curled on the couch watching television with her eyes closed. One morning I even photographed her sleeping in her bed, with her back toward me. I realized I didn’t have a strong memory of her sleeping alone in her bed; when I lived at home my father was usually beside her. Then there’s this: she was always up earlier than me. I never saw her sleeping in. Until that morning.

I took note of the details: the color of her tousled hair, the lace trim of the familiar nightgown against the skin on the back of her neck, her hand raised next to her pillow, clutching a piece of Kleenex. After I took the photo, I lifted the covers and slipped into bed beside her and put my arm around her. I wished somebody else was there to take a picture of the two of us in our morning cuddle so I could show Short-pants and Buddy-roo.

Instead I told them about it, which I suppose is even better because they had to conjure up their own image of the occasion in their minds. This prompted an inquisition: When you cuddled with Grammy, did she ask you the morning questions? No. Why not? I made them up for you. You made them up for us? Yes. Why? I don’t know. But why? I guess maybe to ease gently into using words after a long sleep. Gently? Why gently? (You see where this is going.)

This morning, they arrived within minutes of each other, their long, lithe bodies quickly snapping up the covers and diving into bed with us. We dozed in and out of the velvet pocket of morning sleep. When it felt like enough time had passed for words, I ran through the three questions with Short-pants. She answered with an emphatic and serpent-like “Yesssss,” pulling her arms tighter around me with each response.

I know Buddy-roo hates the questions but I keep thinking maybe someday she’ll change her mind and share this little ritual with us, and remember it later in her life as a good moment in her childhood. So occasionally I try them out on her anyway. This morning I braced myself for her usual scorn, but instead – surprisingly – she answered me.

Did you have a good sleep? It was okay, except it was too hot in my bed. Do you have any good dreams? I don’t remember if I dreamt or not. Did you wake up feeling loved? Maybe, if there are pancakes for breakfast.

Not so gentle, but not a bad way to start.

Our days are filled with affection. My children, being completely bilingual, are adept at American hugs and French calins, and dispense these joyously (mostly) throughout the day. But there is something especially poignant about the morning cuddle, the first and most delicious caress of the day.

It is as if the toxins of their tantrums, their princess demands, their bêtises and all their mis-targeted mischief – all the moments of yesterday that made me close my eyes and count to ten before asking (not out loud), “why did I have these children anyway?” – all of it washes away overnight, flaking off during their sleep and disappearing through the dream-catchers hanging above their beds.

They rise in the morning, semi-conscious and automatically innocent. The footfall of tiny feet down the stairs, uneven and still stiff from an overnight of motionless sleep, groggy in the sweetest kind of way, waking me enough to skooch over and make room for the small body that nudges its way under the covers and curls up like a spoon within my embrace. Even several days dirty from country house living, the skin smells sweet and the hair is scented with the sweat of swing-sets and forested play.

Almost immediately, breathing lengthens and loudens, and sleep reigns again as if the trip from the bed upstairs to our bed downstairs was a quick flight between REM stages; like they could wake up and have no memory of how they got in bed with us.

Short-pants is curled up beside me and her soft long limbs intertwine with mine. Buddy-roo will stumble down any minute. There is a bond that is renewed with each and every morning hug, a reminder that we all fit together, our DNA is shared, so then why not a few moments of pillows and sheets? We revert back to the moment when we were in constant embrace, those babies in my womb and De-facto‘s thoughtful arm over my big belly. Ages ago it seems, and yet reenacted every morning.

Last night, the last drive of our spring break trip, a tour that took us to Italy and slowly back through France, visiting friends along the way before a respite at our country house, driving sometimes in 10-hour chunks. The final leg took only 4 hours and 5 minutes; we managed without even a bathroom stop, allowing De-facto to beat the previous record by 2 minutes. This morning’s cuddle is particularly cherished, then, as it marks the end of our spirited (but tiring) voyage and the return to Parisian routine.

I lay half-awake, staring out the dormer windows, listening to the sound of our city street coming to life, caressing the soft skin of my child, breathing in tandem with her. Slowly I let the thoughts of my day ahead creep in, the things to do after being gone nearly 20 days may be daunting, but I am fortified by the sweetness of this moment, to be savored until, say, the two of them break into battle just about the time of my second cup of coffee.

The bedroom we sleep in at our country house has no windows except for a skylight in the ceiling. When we bought the house it was barely a room, its rafters exposed and the underside of the terracotta-tiled roof in full view. The first summer we were here, we put in a proper ceiling and cut in the skylight to add some natural light. There was talk of cutting a window in the 18”-thick stone wall so that we could see the cornfield behind the house. But like many of the dreams we have about this rundown, part-barn, second home of ours, that was added to the list of things we’ll get to, eventually. This renovation is a long-term project.

There’s something to be said, however, for living in a house before you renovate it. The assumptions that you make when you first stand in a room are tested over time. Though the country kitchen of my dreams is still years away from being realized, the placement of its appliances will be different – having used the room and divined its natural circulation – than if we’d put a brand new kitchen in straight away.

And after sleeping in the windowless, womblike back bedroom for four years, I’m not sure we’ll ever put a window in that wall. I have the best sleeps in this room, thick and heavy with velvety dreams. It’s like being in a tank, oblivious to the outside world, protected from noise and light, impervious to everything, except a small child who decides it’s time for you to get up.

This morning I was curled around Buddy-roo in the center of our big bed, having both fallen back to sleep during the ritual morning cuddle. Short-pants had slipped out from under the covers earlier; I remember hearing her uneven steps around the foot of the bed. De-facto was exceptionally industrious, rising early to lay a belt of cement beside the house to add security to the foundation (don’t ask), preferring to work in the cooler morning hours.

“Mama.” I felt a skinny finger tapping my shoulder. Since Buddy-roo was motionless beside me, it had to be Short-pants.
“Mama, I’m hungry.”
I groaned. I was in the middle of such a delicious sleep.
“Mama, I want something to eat.”
“Ask Papa.” I mumbled.
“He said he’s too busy.”

It didn’t really make sense that De-facto would say he was too busy to make breakfast for one of his daughters. And Short-pants knows how to pour a bowl of cereal for herself. But when you’re half-asleep things don’t necessarily make sense. Maybe, I thought, if I don’t respond, she’ll leave me alone. I could still fall back to that dreamy slumber, if I just didn’t move.

I could hear her breathing behind me.
“Mama,” her voice sweeter than ever, “I’m really hungry.”

Later, after stirring honey into a bowl of yogurt – and explicitly explaining to her how to do it – I sat beside her on the rickety bench by our table. She silently spooned yogurt into her mouth while I cupped my hand around a bowl-like mug of café-au-lait. We sat together like that, wordless, and watched the sun pour through the window across the dusty floor. I can sweep that floor three times a day, but here in the country, it’s always dusty.

“Did Papa really say he was too busy to make you breakfast?” I said.
She shook her head no. “I didn’t ask him.”
“Why did you have to wake me up? I was having such a nice sleep-in.”
I was about to launch into the little lecture I’ve given before, about how impolite it is to wake us up early when it’s a weekend or vacation morning.
“I just wanted to have some time alone with you,” she said.

I wanted to be angry. But how can you be mad at someone who simply wants a little bit of undivided attention? It’s true that I’m always in the middle of something. I spend too much time doing and not enough time being. I live my life feeling barely caught up, always running someplace and I’m already late, taking care of something I forgot to do, perpetually spewing the busy mom’s mantra, “just let me finish this….”

When the girls were babies and I was up to my ears in their 24/7 care, people told me “it will go by so fast, enjoy it while you can.” At the time – given that some days I couldn’t even find a moment to brush my teeth – I resented this clichéd comment. But now I’m finding out how it might be true for me. While I wouldn’t go back to those diapered, toddler years again, I do sense that right now is a unique window of time, a window when they are (relatively) independent and yet still interested in having anything to do with me. I know it won’t last forever, this window. I want to take advantage of it while it’s here and now. Spending time with them is not something to be added to the list of things I’ll get to, eventually. They are my most important long-term project.

And I will get to them. I will, as soon as I finish this post.

This morning, when I went to wake up Short-pants from her heavy slumber, I found her curled up on the floor beside her bed. She’d removed herself and her covers from the mattress and appeared to have slept on the floor. Every light in her room had been left on overnight. Her bed was covered with little one-inch squares of paper, each one with a math problem, column addition or subtraction. Each one with a solution. There were at least a hundred of these little squares peppered over the bed, like confetti after a victory parade. What midnight madness seized her?

The thing is, I do kvetch about my kids, and they do tire me out. But when I come upon a scene like I discovered this morning – the fascinating evidence of a little mind at work, overcoming her insomnia, entertaining herself with math problems in the middle of the night – well, then it’s clear that the positives outweigh the negatives on this whole mothering thing. In the end, it all adds up to something pretty good.

I enjoy a luxury that many of my peers do not: my mother lives in the same house that I inhabited for the first 18 years of my life. Her home is our family’s homestead; going there is not only a visit to see her, it’s also a return to my own history.

It helps that my mother has been in no rush to throw away the artifacts of my childhood. The toys that I played with as a little girl are still here, stowed in boxes in a dusty backroom, pulled out whenever a visiting friend brings a grandchild along, or when her own come to stay. The subject folders from all of my high school classes, with homework in the left pocket, tests in the right and notes in the hole-punched center section, are stacked in chronological order on the top shelf of the closet of the room that was once my bedroom. The room has been renovated to receive overnight guests, with the exception of the interior of the closet, which looks as it did when I left it so many years ago, like a hidden shrine to my youth.

I asked my mother to walk through the rooms of her house and tell me their stories. In each room, she’d settle herself in a comfortable chair and then she’d look up, as if she was looking into the recesses of her memory to find an anecdote. Something about the makeshift dining table my father constructed when they first moved in. Or how the long bedroom upstairs was filled with glass cases, like a museum, when the previous owners lived here. Or about how she won the dispute with my father during a renovation, about making a unused door into an elegant window. In the living room she recalled setting up extra tables and making seating arrangements for dinner parties and the laughter that these events produced. Upstairs she remembered when and where they bought the bedroom furniture, and named her uncles and aunts in all the miniature black and white photographs hanging together on the wall.

This morning I lay in bed, staring out the window as the sun stretched its arms across the fields beside our house. Thirty years ago, on any June morning, I might have lay in just the same way, looking out at the leaves on the branches outside the window, motionless in the fresh new day. The sounds of morning in this room are as they always have been; the chirping birds, an occasional car racing down the road in front of our house, a water pump clicking on and then off down in the basement, muted but audible on the second floor of this old Victorian farmhouse.

I tiptoed across the hall and peeked in at my mother, soundly asleep on what has always been her side of the bed, even though she’s slept alone in it for the last twenty years. I slipped under the covers beside her, just like Short-pants or Buddy-roo cuddle up to me on any given morning. I remembered how once, years ago, when I was about 10-years old, I’d curled up on the couch with my mother and she said to me, “Are you ever going to be too big to cuddle with me?” And I told her, “Never.”

I assume some responsibility for Buddy-roo‘s addiction.

When she was about 10-months old, she started spending her mornings with the television. This is because she’s always been much too early a riser. We compensated by feeding her a breast-in-bed (and later a bottle) and then removing her from the room designated for sleeping adults, and exiling her to the living room.

Far from punishment, she delighted in the placement, upright and secured in the exersaucer, smack in front of the television. First it was Baby Einstein (et al) that entertained her. I choose the word entertain carefully, as I never bought into the intelligence-enhancing promise of these DVDs and I would prefer not to be confused with that sort of obsessive mothering. Let’s call it like it is: survival parenting. Ya gotta sleep.

De-facto and I would take turns. One of us would fetch her from the crib, and then after the feeding, the other would carry her out to the living room and sleepily plant her in the large plastic circular device. Having set up the video the night before, it’d be just a matter of hitting two remote buttons and she’d be glued to the tube while we could stick to our pillows.

As Buddy-roo outgrew the marbles dropping (and other hallucinogenic images) in sync with Mozart, her morning fare evolved to longer movies, mesmerizing her for sometimes up to an hour and a half, permitting us the equal prolongation of that oh-so-needed shut-eye.

A gold-medalist, Buddy-roo broke all the exersaucer records. Not only could she sit in that thing twice as long as Short-pants ever did, she continued to use it until she was more than 3-years old. Her legs would be bent into a full squat, even with the saucer raised to its highest setting. Pulling her out required pressing my own foot on the saucer tray to hold it down and get enough purchase to wriggle her legs and feet through the holes of the cloth seat/harness. It was like pulling Winnie-the-Pooh through Rabbit’s window. (Another favorite, by the way.)

We created a habit. Like a drug, Buddy-roo consumes movies. She thinks about watching one first thing in the morning. She asks for it the moment she’s home from school. This is her most favorite pastime.

As a rule, we watch very little television in our home and we try to avoid watching it when the kids are around (our HBO box-sets come out after bedtime). The exceptions to this include only the CNBC’s Squawk Box (De-facto loves his business news fix) and Jon Stewart’s Comedy Central relay on CNN. But despite our abstinence, Ruby-doo loves the idiot-box. At least we avoid commercial TV; she’s limited to a world of DVD movies.

We have many-dozen. Half of them are Disney. I know there’s a whole storm of anti-princess sentiment. I don’t particularly love those caricature films, but Buddy-roo does. Sure, we’re promulgating a false rescue by non-existent Prince Charming, but I’ve tried to compensate by coaching the girls a bit about the gender roles depicted in these films. While watching Sleeping Beauty, I asked Short-pants and Buddy-roo, “What if the prince pricked his finger and fell into an eternal slumber? Would you fight the goblins, forge through the thorny forest and slay the dragon in order to deliver the awakening kiss? Would you do it for him?” After a moment of reflection, Short-pants responded, “If I felt like it.” Good enough.

I’ll admit that I use the electronic babysitter when I have work to do. This becomes problematic when the kids choose to watch something more educational, like Sesame Street or The Electric Company episodes. De-facto and I can’t help ourselves; we end up gravitating to the couch, too. What’s not to love about award-winning actors Morgan Freeman, Rita Moreno and Bill Cosby teaching your kids how to read? I’d argue that the 1970s produced the best children’s programming on television.

Perhaps I should be ashamed or discouraged about my tube-headed daughter. But I’m not. For her, watching a movie is a physical activity. This becomes especially evident when she’s watching a musical. She’s up in front of the TV screen acting it out. She’s marching up the mountain and sitting with the Von Trapp children as they do-re-mi through their first picnic. She’s kicking up on the rooftop with all the chimney sweeps in Mary Poppins. She dances every move with Miss Turnstile in On the Town. She hides behind the couch during the fight scene in West Side Story. (I know, that’s a kind of a tough movie at the end, but I figure I’m introducing her to Shakespeare.) For Ruby-doo, television is not a passive activity. It’s her greatest pleasure.

So we mete it out. A little each day. Her reward is our salvation.

The other day, while watching Mary Poppins, Buddy-roo asked, “Why do people put their money in the bank?” I gave her a simplified explanation about savings and interest and borrowing, finishing my tutorial just at the start of that scene near the end of the film where there’s a run on the bank. She watched the panic as the bank tellers slammed their window screens shut. “But why do people put their money in the bank?” she asked again.

Maybe she is ready to watch Squawk Box.

There are no little shoes everywhere.

No toys strewn about. No little bodies crawling into bed with me. No crying in the hallway. It’s nobody’s fault about the sunrise.

All I hear is the rain outside my window. And drumming and hooting and hollering from a distant meeting room.

In Sestri-Levante, Italy, I am attending the CREA (the European Creativity Association) annual conference. The first time I was here – for the first CREA conference – was in 2003. Short-pants came too, still drinking from a bottle. Buddy-roo was just a small cantaloupe-sized creature. But she was in my belly, so she was here.

On Sunday, before I left, Short-pants asked me why I was going to Italy. When I told her I was going to CREA, she said, “but you’re going without me?” I explained that this year was different: I was going to the conference alone. Her tears were angry ones. “But I want to go. I always go.”

It’s true. This is the first year I have come to this conference – one I helped to originate and for a few years was a member of the core organizing team – without De-facto and without the girls. We’ve always come en famille.

Not that I am totally alone. I have a roommate: his mother.

I met her before I met the De-facto himself. In a rare case of really smart thinking, I chose the mother-in-love first. I met her almost twenty years ago at the parent conference to this one, the Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI). So you could say that for us, creativity is a family affair.

The people who attend this conference year after year – I am among about thirty volunteer leaders – have embraced my children as their own family. We have even adopted grandfathers for the girls, two exceptional Italian men who bring to them the wisest kind of experienced playful creativity. While people here do understand why I have not brought the girls this year, they are not happy about it. You can count on a group of creativity practitioners to appreciate the expert mind of a child. Our girls are a bit like gurus here.

It’s been necessary to focus entirely on the design and delivery of the program I am facilitating, which is fairly intense. And then to go out for a beer afterward without having to check in with anyone. I am happy to have quiet catch-ups with my mother-in-love while the early light fills our room. I’m happy to be fully present for the kind of in-depth conversations that erupt so spontaneously here without that back-of-the-brain chatter: what time do I have to relieve the babysitter? What do I still have to do this and that before I get the kids? Does De-facto have them or do I need to get them…?

But this morning, as you’d expect, the mixed emotions of motherhood wash over me. It was just a tiny bit too quiet. I was actually wishing that someone would crawl into my bed wrap a small, soft arm around me and complain about the sun coming up.

“Once again. Not happy.” Buddy-roo‘s defiant proclamation, this morning, from the foot of the bed. Her (initial) complaint is still a mystery, some inadvertent slight by her sister. It’s very early. I’m too weary to care.

I lift my head off the pillow. Her arms are crossed. Her bottom lip protrudes. It’s a very mad face. I start to snicker. (Can you blame me?)

“It’s cuz of you, mama.”

Of course, I knew that.

She hadn’t even finished making her way down the stairs and into our room to fold herself between us for the morning cuddle when she started issuing complaints. Buddy-roo‘s disposition at this hour of the day (7:00 am) has never been cheerful, nor quiet, but it seems now – at the age of five – to be growing in petulance. We’ve tried to discourage her by ignoring it, forbidding it, making fun of it, and then ignoring it again. We haven’t (yet) found the cure for what ails her every morning. Given that her bed is built into the wall, we can’t even say she got up on the wrong side of it.

No precaution or response on our part seems to change this daily outburst from its current crankiness to something more subtle and cheerful, like her sister, Short-pants, who we hardly hear descending the stairs from her room before the door creaks open and she slides soundlessly under the sheets and into my embrace. Sleep then quickly takes her back into its possession, inviting us to return as well.

Not so Buddy-roo. Something is always wrong. Even though she may have slept well all night in her warm nested cubbyhole. Even though a cup of apple juice is waiting for her on my bed table to quench her morning thirst. Even if her big sister takes the place on my side of the bed – even when she’s the first to wake up and crawl in with us – leaving Buddy-roo the coveted center spot between her parents. Even if there’s no school. Even if pancakes have been promised. It’s a miserable moment, this first one of her day.

For the record, she does cheer up as the day goes on. But the first fifteen minutes are brutal.

This morning her complaint: “I didn’t want the light to come so early.” She preached to a sleeping choir. Her grievance mounted into a full-on whine and then the ultimate attribution:

“It’s cuz of Papa.”

I, too, am quite practiced at faulting him for things that don’t go my way. But this is over the top. It’s not like he left the shade on her skylight open, or he made a boisterous noise that woke us all from deep slumber. Or like he willed the sun to rise. There’s no way to assign the blame to him, as enjoyable as that would be.

But with her, there’s always some other force or person to blame for all her terrible times. Without a moment’s reflection, everything is because of someone else. She lives, remarkably, without responsibility. And without guilt. About this I am actually a little envious.

But is she different than any one of us? Only in her honesty. I think deep down we all like to blame someone else for our misfortunes. We blame Wall Street, the banks, the Fed. We blame the sub-prime lenders and also the people who signed up for their unrealistic loans. We blame Edward Liddy and Timothy Geithner. We blame Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh; they blame the New York Times and Jon Stewart, who in turn blames Rick Santelli and Jim Cramer. For a while, Saddam Hussein was a convenient guy to blame. Then we blamed Bush and Cheney (still do). Now we’ve got Obama, who’s actually said he’ll take responsibility for the economic mess, but not without first refusing the blame for it. (Can you blame him?) But how quickly we’ll forget and lose our capacity to forgive him for not fixing it fast enough or well enough. He won’t escape the blame, either.

I’m not exempt. It’s always the rotten fault of my clients. Or it’s the French. And of course my kids, they’re to blame for the train wreck they’ve made of my life. And then there’s De-facto. It’s his fault, after all, that I got pregnant in the first place.

See? It is cuz of Papa.