Maternal Dementia

I have always been the documenter of our family’s history. As a child I would stack together multiple pages of paper, folding and cutting them to create pocket-sized books. I’d write about our family rituals or offer how-to advice. These books were a source of great entertainment to my family and good fodder for teasing me, still, to this day.

My most famous title, The U.D.T. Rool Book, a palm-sized field guide I wrote when I was 7-years old, described, step-by-step, our family’s summertime swim-in-the-lake ritual, as practiced by the Underwater Demolition Team (U.D.T.), a club invented by my father to get us out of bed and in the lake every July morning. Another family favorite: the handy pamphlet titled
The Key to Popularity, my very first (circa 4th grade) effort at parody, a tongue-in-cheek embellishment of my mother’s theory that if she just made sure we all learned how to ice-skate and water-ski, we’d be popular.

As happens with the artifacts of our childhood, these little books disappeared. And then, during renovations or severe spring cleanings, they re-appeared. When my mother recovered The Key to Popularity, probably in the back of some drawer, she put it in its rightful place on the kitchen counter, in that the space that is a magnet for all manner of junk – those old, chewed-on, unsharpened pencils, pens that no longer work, worn nail files, remnants of note pads, tchotchkes and campaign buttons – the miscellaneous counter in our kitchen (we all have one, don’t we?) where things just end up and somehow, stay there.

Every time I went to visit my mother, The Key to Popularity was still there, wedged in a square lucite box meant for Post-it notes that were used up over a decade ago. This little book, like many of the masterpieces I authored as a child, was a charming chapter of our family jokelore; she couldn’t bring herself to throw it out. But I cringed every time I saw it.

When my father died, at the age of 59, we assembled in shock, unprepared and unbelieving. Things we’d meant to say had gone unspoken. Nothing so dramatic that he didn’t probably know already, but still, it felt as though he was plucked away from us; his life was interrupted. The painter who made a portrait of him, later, purposefully didn’t finish the canvas, in homage to his unfinished life.

On the day we buried him, prior to the mass, there was a small private service at the funeral home, the last viewing of his body before the casket was closed. We stood around him, shedding tears – and giggling. “What are you all chuckling about?” my mother asked, mildly perturbed as she approached us at the casket. She saw the little trinkets and photographs we’d placed beside him and she smiled. When I showed her The U.D.T. Rool Book tucked in the breast pocket of his blazer, she took my hand and squeezed it. She even chuckled with us when she saw what had been slipped under my father’s lifeless arm: the previous Sunday’s New York Times crossword puzzle and a sharpened #2 pencil. “You kids,” she said.

How many times I heard her say that: You kids.

But the truth must come out: It was my mother who started the tradition of doing the Sunday Times crossword when my parents were dating in college. She was, by her own report, quite skilled at crosswords – more adept than my father. But she figured out quickly that if she didn’t answer all the clues she knew right away, it would take longer to finish the puzzle, elongating their afternoon date. This was a surprise to me; I’d always associated my Dad with the Sunday crossword. I asked her about this and she shrugged. “He got so good at working the puzzle, I let him take it over.”

My mother told us, knowing it was futile, not to put anything in her coffin with her. I teased her that I would bury her with the family carrot, but in the end I had a better idea. I tucked The Key To Popularity in beside her, next to the white satin interior of her casket, just a little helpful guidance for heavenly social interaction.

There was something else lying around on that kitchen counter: a hand-made oragami oracle that Short-pants gave to my mother last year, to “help her with important decisions.” Constructed out of intricately folded paper, this device resembles an egg carton in which you insert your thumb and index finger and move the triangled peaks this way and that way. With a ritualized guess of numbers and colors, the correct answer to all-important questions can be divined, much like the famous 8-ball, with oracle-like responses under the folded flaps: Yes, of course or Maybe not.

Though I was not present during the days that my mother made her decision to stop treatment and enter hospice care, I have this fantasy that she stood, leaning against her kitchen island, moving her fingers back and forth within the folded paper, asking the question, “Is it time to go?” and that Short-pants’ oracle gave her the response that settled it once and for all.

This folded contraption was also placed in the casket with my mother, in case she needs to make any decisions in the afterlife.

My mother’s mother, my Grammy, used to tell us that she and Grandpa had a plan to meet up after death at the entrance to Macy’s on 34th street in New York. When she died, I imagined some purgatorial dimension where their fantasy was lived out, returning to the roaring twenties that belonged to them when they were roaring, in their twenties, and finding each other again.

So I imagine my mother, holding her edition of The Key to Popularity, meeting up with my father, with the original U.D.T. Rool Book in hand, comparing notes about the memories of their happy life together. “Sure glad she wrote it all down,” they’ll say, marveling at my little handbooks, “so we’ll never forget.”

And then Daddy will pull out his copy of the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle, and they’ll work it together, for eternity.

I’m embarrassed to admit that even though I live in the city that gave birth to café society and there are three-dozen more charismatic cafés within five-minutes walking distance of my home, sometimes I go to Starbucks. This is because of the comfortable armchairs.

I meet several times a week with a friend to do what we call free-writing, an exercise that involves selecting a random sentence – from a pool we’ve dreamed up or borrowed from books – and using this phrase as a prompt to write stream-of-consciousness for ten minutes. Then we read whatever we’ve written to each other, because it’s a curious experience to hear yourself say your own words out loud, even if it is just a shitty first draft.

It’s basically calisthenics for cobwebbed writing muscles, and much easier to do if you’re sitting in a roomy, crushed-velvet armchair with big fat cushions. That Starbucks was non-smoking before French law required also contributed to the origin of this embarrassing habit.

But what is it with Starbucks and their insistence on illogical cup sizes?

I know I’m not the first person to complain about this; a Google Search on “ordering at Starbucks” produces about 542,000 results, and surely it’s been a frequent topic of ire on blogs long before I started writing one. But now it’s my turn: I can never order correctly, and the whole ordeal taxes my brain and illuminates the severity of my maternal dementia. Why does it have to be so hard?

What I want to say is simply this: “I’d like a medium café-latte, please.” But when I do, the Starbuck’s employee inevitably asks, “Tall, Grande or Venti?”

I’m sorry, but I think all these words mean the same thing: big. I don’t want big, I want medium. But there is no such thing at Starbucks as a medium. In their world of white and green cups, it’s all grande.

Waiting in line I’ll repeat to myself, “grande, grande, grande,” but when the server-person turns to me with that expectant look, I can’t help it. I fumble around, and I blurt it out every time, “Medium.”

I think this is because I’m a very visual thinker, so I see the three size options on the display stand by the cash register, and there’s that one I want right in the middle, it connotes (to me) medium. I don’t think it’s a language thing. Grande, or grand – however you want to write it – is not the word for medium in French or English, or Italian for that matter.

Starbucks, I suppose, given its origins can’t help but respond to the ‘Merican need for all things over-sized and over-the-top, and they’ve named their drink-sizes accordingly. Honestly, isn’t it all a bit ridiculous?

But wait. Now, at the Starbucks on rue des Archives (and elsewhere I suppose), a little pamphlet is handed to you along with your change. I say little because it’s palm-sized, however, it contains twelve pages (count ‘em) of explanation about how to personalize your order.

If it takes twelve pages to explain to your customers how to order your product, is it possible that you’re making things a bit more complicated than they need to be?

Short-pants is reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears with her English class. She says the teacher doesn’t mean for them to perform it as a play; they’re just reading out loud together. (The teacher gets points from me on that one.) Yesterday I was listening to her recite her lines – she’s actually volunteered to read the lead role and has already memorized the damn thing – and when she got to the part about the chairs, it all made sense.

While interloping in the bears’ house, Goldilocks tries the big chair (too big), the medium chair (too hard) and the little chair (just right). It’s easy to figure out when you just say it like it is.

Why can’t Starbucks just use good old fashioned plain language to describe its beverage sizes? Although I suppose ordering a medium (moyen or moyenne?) could still be too hard. But not the chairs. They’re just right.

The front and center headache that woke me up at 6:30 am this morning is milder now, and reminds me of the fun I had last night. A couple of glasses of white with early evening oysters, something robust and red with dinner. And after a rather meandering walk home, a final flute of champagne with friends who live in the building. You can’t say I wasn’t lubricated.

I like the taste of alcohol. I like the buzz. I like to belly up to a bar, it’s a place I feel at home socializing. In my youth (mostly) I tried other vices but my preference is the legal one. I drink often in moderation and on occasion in excess. Don’t worry, sometimes I deliberately don’t drink. But the point is: I like to.

That’s why Anna Fricke’s post, Moderation and the Modern Mom, in the New York Times blog Proof (one of my favorite blogs, btw, I’m a bit surprised that I hadn’t put it in my blogroll until just now), got my attention by combining two pet subjects at once: alcohol and motherhood.

I could have written that post. Not nearly as well as she did. What I mean to say is that I could, like many women, substitute a few of my anecdotes with hers and describe the same experience. Not that stepping up on a narrow bar only to fall into a fortuitously placed barman’s arms was a brilliant idea. (But it is a good story.)

Fricke candidly chronicles an important passage in the life of a modern mother. We used to party indiscriminately – now we must discriminate. The reasons for prudence change as the children age: Concern for the health of the fetus is replaced with fear of contaminating breast milk, is replaced with the necessity to avoid the 7 am agony, when the kids come bounding into the bedroom expecting you to be as well-rested and hydrated as they are. Then there’s our own health to consider. Or the stamina that we seem to have lost. For good reasons, nobody parties like we used to.

In the end, it’s not the alcohol that Fricke misses:

It’s the immaturity. The selfishness. The wasted days frittered away recuperating from the wasted nights. It all turned around so quickly. I wasn’t prepared to be this person.

And that was one of the key points of her post. It’s not the booze; it’s the feeling of being able to be spontaneously foolish and careless. Most of us rally to the responsibility that momhood requires, and it’s not like we don’t reap the benefits of having these little loving beings in our lives. But once in a while I need to say it out loud: I never really wanted to grow up.

But oh, a rush of comments. Lots of readers, like me, empathized or identified with her and lauded her exceedingly honest reflection. Not everyone was so supportive. It’s no surprise that some people would be uncomfortable with her candor, she ‘fessed up to some embarrassing things that have to do with serious subjects: alcohol abuse and drunk driving. But I was stunned at the righteousness from people who either weren’t impressed with her ultimate self-actualization or simply didn’t get it. Some AA-ish advice was gently offered with good intention, but many comments were accusatory, acerbic and frankly, mean spirited. That she herself was making a case for not drinking (the other key point of the post) was lost on these people, who used the comment section to feel superior or project their own painful experiences on to her.

Well, like I said, alcoholism is a touchy subject, not one to be handled lightly. And motherhood is an equally hot-button topic. Everyone has an opinion about what pregnant women and nursing mothers – any mother for that matter – should feel and do. Mix the two together and I guess you have a lethal cocktail.

In (what’s left of) my mind, I have an idea about what I want this blog to be. While I’ve hung my shingle on the hook of motherhood and its resulting mindlessness, it is my hope not to be limited to that.

The paradox – that I love these children of mine, but I don’t love the train-wreck they’ve made of my life – spills over into my writing. I don’t want it to be all about them. But somehow, it ends up being all about them. Any mother can sing you this song.

Each day, groping about at my quotidian tasks, little patchworks of prose – on all manner of topics – miraculously assemble themselves in my mind and I say to myself (oddly, in the voice of Toad, from Frog & Toad), “I will write a post about that someday.” And I duly make a note of it.

Yet what has the strongest pull, what ultimately draws me to the keyboard and overrides that ever present resistance that all writers wrestle, is usually some silly (or painful) reflective anecdote about being a mom. I suppose that’s my branding, whether I like it or not, and I seem to respond naturally to the memes that have to do with mothering.

I do believe that I can (and should) occasionally veer from the core subject matter, as long as I circle around and find my way to home territory for grounding. Most of the thoughtful blogs I read do just that. I need only give myself permission.

I am a woman with a private and professional life that spans beyond the subject of coping with children. I have other things to say. And I would say them, if I could only remember what they are.

My tree is falling in the forest, and I wouldn’t mind if someone were there to hear it.

I’ve been reluctant to start blogging. For one thing, I do cherish my privacy. Blogging portends to a more public life, even if it is just a small circle of people who might happen to find me. Plus there is so much dribble out there, people piecing their opinions together in little posts, blathering on about the minutia of their lives. I didn’t see the point in blogging; I was writing a real book.

But let’s face it. My agent – though very sweet – hasn’t been much help to me in the publishing department. It’s time to take matters into my own hands. I need to express myself; I want to see my words on a page. So why not an electronic one?

Eventually, I could imagine publishing my manuscript serially on my website. I’m warming up to that. But first, I’ve decided to take the plunge and just see what happens when I start blogging. Post by post.

So consider this a gentle solicitation: if you have any interest whatsoever in what I have to write about, then please follow my blog, or even just bookmark it and take a moment once in a while to check out what I’m managing to press out into the ether.