Curlers II

So I did it! I rolled Mom's hair today. After washing it at the beautician sink in the Wellstone House laundry room, I combed her dripping wet locks and wrapped small sections around one roller after another, just as I had done in my very realistic dream last night. It is impossible for me to figure out when I last put rollers in my or anyone else's hair! But it was fun. It was satisfying. It was gratifying. For Mom and for me.


As I left, Mom took her word search book and pencil and settled into a comfy living room chair where a couple ladies were watching Ellen on TV. "How long should I leave these in my hair, I wonder?" I suggested she take them out when her hair felt dry.



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Location:Gile Rd,Nottingham,United States

Curlers

For some reason, Mom has a hankering to put her hair up in curlers. I'm suspicious that seeing her housemate Harriet waltzing around Wellstone House all day with her hair in curlers has sparked memories of her younger days when she used them.



Since she mentioned it to me several times, I stopped at Walmart yesterday and bought her this Goody package of 36 rollers in various sizes. I remember my own days in the late 1960s of wearing rollers to bed! Big plastic rollers in my shoulder-length hair that forced me to toss and turn to find a comfortable enough position to fall asleep. Mom didn't wear them to bed though. She usually plugged the portable hair dryer into a long extension cord, slipped the cap over her head full of rollers and retreated for half an hour at the kitchen table with her pack of cigarettes, cup of coffee and Women's Day magazine.

She would eventually emerge from the bathroom decked out in blue eye shadow, red lipstick and her short chestnut brown hair bobbed around her beautiful face. During those days, Mom worked as a home health aid and loved spending her day with her client.

I'm not terribly optimistic she will remember how to roll her hair. If she can't find someone to help her, I will put those curlers in her hair when I visit tomorrow.


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Location:Gile Rd,Nottingham,United States

Visit

Sunday afternoon I pick Mom up after church and bring her to the house to hang out for a few hours. It gives her a change of scenery. She sits in the rocking chair, sips hot tea, and has very little to talk about.

She is still talking about George. "I doubt I'll ever see him again, do you think?"

"Probably not, Mom. I'm so sorry."

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Location:Gile Rd,Nottingham,United States

George

Mom called me the other day to tell me she had received a nice handwritten card from someone at my church. She had used the prayer request card at our Christmas Eve service to ask for prayers for her son, George, who she hasn't seen is nearly 10 years. I didn't tell her that it was the ministry that John and I co-lead that was responsible; that I saw her request had been targeted to receive an handwritten card and that I had disclosed it was from my mother and that it would be nice if someone sent her a card. Sharing the details of my life with her has never been part of our dance. She wouldn't get it anyway.

When I stopped by later that day after she called, she showed me the card. It had clearly brightened her day and, once again, brother George became the topic of conversation. "I don't know if he's even still alive. Maybe I'll call Joyce and see if she'll tell me if he is at least all right. Probably she won't. She told me one time that she wasn't allowed to speak of Georgie to me and so I shouldn't even ask questions about him."

All I could do was take a deep breath and let my anger toward my oldest sibling go.

Gazing into my mother's eyes, I sensed her depth of despair over her firstborn's absence from her life for more than 30 years. And now, she had a new worry: what if Georgie has died? She wouldn't know. Neither would I.

My spiritual director, Sarah, has broached the subject of reconciliation with brother George. It's odd because he and I never had words, nor any kind of misunderstanding. He was mad at Mom & Dad and turned his back on all of his siblings. But, he did stay in touch with Aunt Joyce, my dad's sister.

"He'll always, always be MY son," Mom said as she vigorously rocked back and forth in her platform rocker. "I told Joyce that once, you know. I said, 'he's still my son, no matter what.'"

Brother George deeply challenges my core values because I continue to harbor angry unforgiveness toward him on behalf of my mother. She never deserved his desertion from our family. She is not an evil person. She may have had poor judgment and said unkind things in the heat of a moment, but nothing deserves this total rejection of his parents and his whole family. He robbed his children of family who would have loved them; robbed my children of knowing their aunt and uncle and cousins. The saddest piece of all is I can't even imagine how I could forgive him for abandoning us; for not being here now to help me with our mother. He lives 20 minutes away. I just shake my head in hopeless disbelief.




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Location:Gile Rd,Nottingham,United States

Moving

The inevitable happened. The Wellstone House kindly gave me a couple week's notice, but Mom was moved to a double room on December 31st. I arrived at 2:30, moments before a scheduled fire drill. Those old people clearly were used to the incessant blaring as they made their way to the exits within the required 3 minutes. After that was over, Mom plunked herself into her rocking chair. "I don't like the idea of this at all."

"I know, Mom. Me either. But it is what it is."

Amy, the director, started with the contents of Mom's closet. Then we asked Mom to get up so we could move her rocking chair. She parked herself in the folding chair in front of the computer-less computer table that was soon being removed from the premises since there would be no room for it now. She muttered something to Amy about feeling abandoned and how much she'd rather be in her own apartment again.

"Mom, I wonder if you'd like to go sit in your new room. We have your rocking chair ready for you and you can tell me where you want things." She was agreeable. I ignored her obvious unhappiness, stuffed down my sorrow as I got hot and sweaty carting all of her stuff from her old room, down the hall to her new room; the contents of her bureau, including a drawer full of half-used balls of yarn, her book case full of crochet and quilling books, poetry, Nicholas Sparks' novels, and word search magazines. I filled up a laundry basket with all her various baskets, bags and boxes of yarn; some brand new skeins, as well as half-used skeins rolled into balls, down to little balls of scraps in all different shades and colors that she refuses to part with.

I moved on to her large rubbermaid container and the contents on top and inside; all of her artwork. Sheet after sheet of watercolor paintings, photographs she had glued onto roughly cut pieces of watercolor paper stock and bordered with little curly cues of quilling strips. Pictures from magazines she saved to "put on canvas."

As I emptied the contents of her medicine cabinet, it struck me she would no longer have her own private half bath so I had to prepare a small container of the essential items to keep in the shared bathroom across the hall from her room.

The whole process took two hours. I drove home with a heavy heart and the computer table, rubbermaid container, and a basket full of various things she no longer used that just took up space she no longer had. I thought of how little one really needs when reduced to the bare essentials of life in assisted living. My mind's eye scanned the book shelves in Mom's apartment over our garage still stuffed with her collection of Christian devotionals by Max Lucado, Charles Stanley and Joyce Meyer. Her complete set of the Left Behind series. Her country music CDs; her santa collection; her Artist magazines and Bob Ross painting books. Her kitchen cupboards full of 60-year old gadgets and knives and spatulas.

One day, I will have to deal with it all. I wonder who will have to deal with all my stuff some day?

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