My Story Is All I Have To Offer

I’ve heard that in 12-step recovery meetings over and over.

Tell your story, tell your truth, it’s all you have.

All I have is my experience, strength, and hope.
On caregiving, forgetting & remembering.
On figuring out what’s true, what’s not, and what next right thing people are talking about when they tell you: Just do the next right thing.

I came to Substack to write about life as a caregiver to a parent with dementia;
to write through trying not to lose my mind as she loses hers;
writing through the excavation of my own memories as hers slip away.

I came to see if there was a book, but…

I don’t think of myself as a book writer. I’m more of a sober, yet still alcoholic, Erma Bombeck—your weekly syndicated columnist finding humor in chaos and family if Erma had escaped the suburbs, skirted the commitment of kids, ran from the intimacy of a long-term relationship, been drunk and sober, wild and responsible, only to wake up one morning and find herself inextricably attached to the long-term care of a Benjamin Buttoning mother, who was less becoming someone else than she was un-becoming herself.

Yeah baby, that’s just the kind of Erma I am.

The Infinite Monkey Theorem says:

Given enough time, a hypothetical monkey typing at random will almost surely produce all of Shakespeare’s plays.

Wikipedia says:

The probability of a monkey exactly typing a complete work such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet is so tiny that the chance of it occurring during a period of time even a hundred thousand orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe is extremely low, but not actually zero.

Not. Actually. Zero.
I haven’t had a drink in over thirty years.
Longshots are what this particular monkey does best. Welcome to my monkey brain.

Okay, you know I’m not Erma Bombeck, so Who am I?

I’m a sixty-something, single, childless, sober writer who’s spent years writing about sex, drugs, and drunkenness. I got sober at thirty-three after picking up a long-haired sober biker cop in a bar, because life is all lifey and keep your eyes open because you never know what your angels will look like.

I write what I remember.
And what I don’t.
What I’ve kept, let slip away, ran from.
What I still run from.

I have an AA in Theater- which means I can be a waitress.
I have a BA in English - which qualifies me to…well, nothing I wasn’t already doing before I got the degree.
I have an MFA in Creative Writing - which makes me officially certified to use multi-syllabic hyphenated words like multi-syllabic and hyphenated to tell a story.

This is pretty much the only thing I’m qualified to do because I was a shit waitress. This, and caring for Ma.

I’ve been Mom’s caregiver for almost twelve years. When she moved in with me, we expected a year, two at the most. Since 2018, we’ve been sharing my not-particularly-large one-bedroom apartment along with, at one point, five cats.

No one prepared me for living with someone who would tell me regularly she only has two weeks to live.

It changed me in ways I couldn’t have predicted.

I’m no longer working, or teaching because, face it, what with chasing Mom as she rolls down the hill to full blown dementia, I’m fucking exhausted all the time. Plus,

Multi-syllabic words take a lot of focus to use correctly so you will not find a superfluity of sesquipedalian discourse here.

I have the degree, that’s gonna have to be enough for you.