Just how bad I am

The Oak Leaf Trail

I woke up this morning chafing at this Mom Enterprise. The irritation and time it costs me, the precious little payback, the way I'm not getting anything done remotely related to my "goals," such as they are. I am, obviously, selfish, and always have been. But I need to cut back. She could do without the Wednesday visits, I think. With her memory so spotty, when I show up on Wednesday she sometimes seems surprised to see me; to her a weekday is a weekday is a weekday. Saturday and Sunday, she knows, I think, as there's so little to do, unless I provide it -- which is to say, church.

We did that today, went to church. She was not in tip-top form. She mistook the elevator door for the women's room, and was generally scattered. She used to kind of dress up for church, but today she was in a T-shirt, a purple shirt over it, and one of her innumerable pairs of three-quarter length pants, which are really awful. I am not going to fuss about her clothes -- I'm not going to start dressing her -- but among the casual elegance of the church people, she looked a little bag-ladyish. We sat in the pew and sang and listened and I found her place in the program at every juncture, and then, when it's finally over, she spies the quarterback.

"I'm going to go talk to him," she said.

"Mom, don't bother him. You have nothing to say to each other."

But she pushed right by me and bulled her way over to present herself.

He is a serious man, imperious, with little sense of humor, and not much of what you'd call the milk of human kindness. He intimidates me, for god's sake. He once tried to call Julie at work, reached a colleague of Julie's, and threw a fit when she couldn't come directly to the phone. "Why, I am [Name] [Name]!"

But he greeted Mom kindly, asked how she was doing. She answered somehow, and at this point I arrived at her elbow. I steered the conversation to his recent trip to Cuba, on a church mission, and he was interested in talking about this -- the strange distribution of wealth, the crushing poverty -- "you wouldn't want to live there" -- and how it's different from other Caribbean islands, "although I've only been to a few."''

A few.

We talk for maybe 3 or 4 minutes, and I step back and try to steer Mom away, and she pulls her arm free, steps even closer to him and says, "What about your wife?"

He looks a little startled, says, "She went, too. In fact, I gotta find her now." He starts to move off, and finally I get Mom detached.

And then coffee hour. She is like flypaper, moving through the crowd, plucking at shoulders as they pass, introducing herself, saying, "This is my son Jon" and "I'm M___ O___" and asking their names. Every week I get a kind of acid flashback to Zion when I was a kid -- church was bad enough, but then there was her gabbing gabbing gabbing at the coffee hour, really completely insensitive to the fact that her four children were HUNGRY and CRABBY and had BEEN THERE TOO LONG.

Gad.

I'm sure I'll regret this outburst.

But I feel better now.

Julie and I are going away next week, and it's just about time.

Maybe, in the future, I'll take Mom to the service in the chapel at her place.

I did, by the way, bring her a Mother's Day plant and a card.

My wife, of course, bought the plant.

*

Later:

Mom called.

"Where are you?" she asked.

"I'm home."

"Where am I then?"

"You're in your room, aren't you?"

"Where am I supposed to be?" she said. "I feel kind of lost. I don't understand where I'm supposed to be."

My heart breaks.