I Wasn't Raised to Let You Die Alone

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Somewhere, sometime, when I wasn’t busy talking, I realized the value of silence, of being quiet with someone, of communicating even if they can’t or don’t want to respond, of holding hands & combing hair as a love language.

I’d like to tell you those are values I learned from my mother growing up, but honestly, I’m not sure she should get the credit. I probably grew into them from years of caring for my mother, feeling the need to protect her from my father, to protect my father from the world.

How did I, the only child, become the protector in the family? I’m going to save family roles for another time, they’re a subject for another post entirely. And more than a few therapy sessions.

Just this morning, my mother ran her fingers through the mess of curls on the top of my head and said, “Oy!” That’s what love looks like here sometimes—despair over what I look like—but it beats some of the things she’s said over the years “in the name of love and honesty,” like this one that came up pretty regularly

Is that what you wanted to look like?

She thought she was being honest.
Yeah, okay, but is it though? honest? if no one asked your opinion in the first place?

It drove her crazy that I wouldn’t let her brush or comb my hair since I gained any degree of agency. It’s a wild and kinky Jew-fro, I remember crying as a child when she combed my hair out, and that’s before she’d lost the judgement necessary to be gentle, to know how much force she’s using on anything. Now, when she finger-combs my hair and encounters a knot, she tugs and tugs and No, I've almost got it….

There are always knots; I once had a two inch dreadlock at the base of my skull I was unaware of.

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The small intimacies

When I stroke her short white and still strawberry blonde hair, she turns her head this way and that, stretching like a cat, exposing the different areas of her head that want attention and love. She’d told me of brushing her grandmother’s hair—Rebecca—who died when my mother was five and it was still one of her best memories.

When I wipe my mommy’s mouth, she points to an invisible drop of food she imagines I’ve missed. She loves being cared for. I imagine most folks do, but growing up during the Depression, raised by a single mother working in the sweat shops, in a small Bronx apartment that housed my grandmother, my mother, her brother, grandfather & grandmother and a revolving door of aunts, uncles plus the occasional border—there was one bathroom—I don’t imagine anyone received much individual attention and care.

Neither did I¹ and there were just three of us in more house than we needed, really, but we needed that space to get away from each other, to breathe.

I’m surprisingly comfortable with my role as the attention giver, it’s a change from the attention seeker I was for the first half two-thirds of my life. We both need to be needed, the difference between us is that Mom also craves and can accept love and tenderness—while I may desire it, but at the same time, recoil from it.

There is no doubt she needs me, and I’ve discovered a gentleness, the depths of which I didn’t know I was capable of. Caring for someone this deeply frightens me. It’s too large, too much, it has its own sphere of gravity. It’s a vulnerability, a chink in my armor.

I leave my armor at the door when I’m with her. It’s the only way. Her language skills and understanding have eroded. It’s like communicating with an animal, in the best way. The way I feel the hearts and thoughts of dogs and other small furries. Direct heart-to-heart is the only way now. I intuit feelings and needs she can’t express. Read constantly changing signs. You can’t do that all armored up. At least I can’t.

I feel unprotected: a turtle without a shell,² an unfurled hedgehog/pangolin/ armadillo, my soft and tenders exposed.

Art by Tzenor https://www.deviantart.com/tzenor/art/Hedgehog-pangolin-armadillo-Colors-360779183 - destined to one day be a tattoo for me

Down to basically one meal a day³, I lift her out of her wheelchair and put her in bed pretty easily, when she’s not hanging on to the wheelchair so I have to drag that as well. Most of my life she was 5’9”. Today, I can hold her in my lap like a child, my little 90-pound 5’4” Mommy, and she snuggles into me, fitting her head under my chin. Or seated on the mattress side by side, she cuddles into the crook of my armpit, and we rock back and forth, shoulder butting each other, rubbing foreheads in our version of a Vulcan mind meld, and babble or sing or play.

She wants me to stay, even as she’s falling asleep. I do. I unfolded the ottoman that turns into a bed and napped there while she slept today. It’s healing me, softening my sharp edges, being able to do this for her, provide something neither of us got and we both needed as children.

Lot of folks with dementia, old age, or illness are left to fend for themselves, they wind up in state-run nursing homes and you can’t survive well or long there.

That’s not the way I was raised.

When I was a runaway, an unmanageable teen, my parents were urged to take out a PINS petition and surrender me to state care. It would have been less work, less wear and tear for them, but they refused to let me go. When my maternal grandmother was dying, my uncle took her in. And we took in my father’s mother when she’d outlived her second husband. It’s what you do. It’s what we do.

That’s how I was raised.

And yes, I’m aware the bubbe too many fingers, but if it doesn’t bother her, it shouldn’t bother you, so, shut up you and let the bubbe sleep.

If you like this, click and ❤️. A small action that means the world to me.

1. She loved me, of course, but there was a lot of pressure from my father to leave me alone, to toughen me up, for her to spend time with him, rather than with me.

2. A misconception, turtles shells are not a separate part of them.

3. Is this a new phase, a new level, or just a temporary glitch?

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