Tag: letting go

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Family Update

Mom passed almost a month ago

Mom at her happiest – At my daughter’s wedding – October 19, 2019

I’ve been grappling with what to say about that ever since

I haven’t said a lot about Mom and our relationship before my abrupt return to her house or about the things I came to surprisingly appreciate about that, in hindsight, especially since Mom’s passing on January 25 of this year.  For the story of how life for both of us had been for the last year, you can refer to the following posts.

What happened to Mom? Where’d she go?
OMG!! WILL 2021 NEVER END?

I have written this addition about her and me to help me close that relationship and to strengthen me to see it through to the real end.  Right now that would include disposing of the last real assets she owned, especially this house where we had lived together and which I thought I had already left behind. I am paraphrasing a lot of my recent thoughts and emotions, some that were included in the funeral service given by the Rabbi who had only known Mom for 4 years, supplemented by others who had known her better than I had for most of the last 17 years (since my dad’s death and my move to TN), and some that I wrote myself, looking back over what I knew of her life.

Family was very important, even if she was no relation other than having met even just one member of nearly any family.  She had rediscovered some local blood relatives recently and I had hoped to get more info out of her about some of those she grew up around before marriage and children.  On the other hand, I got tired of hearing the same stories over and over about some of them!  I did find out that at one time she had wanted to be a shorthand teacher and was immodestly and I thought sometimes too extremely proud of the story she told about one of her first jobs with what she still referred to as the North American Credit Union. 

Dad was the love of her life and vice versa.  She was his biggest supporter, as she tried to be for me as I was growing up, especially in nudging both of us to join in a whole range of social activities.  He took on her family, caring for them as they aged.  She did that for him too, and for a whole bunch of other people I never knew but heard about, whether I wanted to or not.  I don’t know how Mom and Dad managed to work together in the insurance business for 20+ years without killing each other, and we all knew if something bothered Mom, no matter how long ago it had happened, she would bring it up at least once later, often not even related to whatever the subject under discussion was at the time.

After their early retirement, Mom and Dad took a whole lot of trips, and it was during this period that I first lost track of them, and Mom continued to expand her social circle even after she became a widow. Sometimes, when going through Mom’s mail, I might encounter a strange sender’s name and address. She could still usually recall where she had met them and sometimes even more personal information about these people who to her were always and forever her friends.  Obviously that sentiment was very much reciprocated. One of the first signs of Mom’s Alzheimer’s, that bothered her the most for a very long time, was that she couldn’t balance her check book.  When I took over that duty, I didn’t tell her that I couldn’t always balance it either and as long as I came close that was good enough for me. 

Mom did her best to take care of everyone she loved, to whatever degree she loved them at the time, offering her advice whether requested or not.  She always thought she knew best and we all learned to try not to argue with her if we didn’t agree because she would never let it go otherwise. She also had no problem telling someone a little white lie if she was afraid of losing face or looking bad in their eyes or sometimes of hurting their feelings. Sometimes I would remind her of what she sometimes told me “Lies walk the streets” and if anyone she knew had one, “J. Edgar Brook” would often discover it. 

Dad had started calling her that, a play on the longtime and first director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover.  Hoover was infamous for digging into the personal lives of people under investigation. Mom did that, too, so we were lucky she didn’t know how to use the internet better. I was touched when the the rabbi told us she called Mom “The Informer”.  Her explanation for that nickname was because Mom took it upon herself to let the rabbi know if any temple members, or even just any of her mostly Jewish friends and acquaintances, needed spiritual support.  Rabbi Lewis got a special kick from Mom’s closure to these messages and conversations, where she asked the rabbi to make sure the person of interest didn’t know how the rabbi knew they were having a spiritual or personal issue for which they might appreciate her help.

Due to Covid, Mom had little to no opportunity to get much of the regular attention she had received from her friends and their families for all those years she had lived alone. In its place she had settled for what she got from a visiting nurse and especially from the physical therapist, though she didn’t like it when I started referring to him as her boyfriend. I was proud that I’d done what I could to protect both her health and mine, in the face of her hunger to maintain constant in-depth contact with her friends, some of whom were merely acquaintances in my book, and who also might show up unexpectedly on her doorstep, vaccinated or masked or not.

I had missed Mom since she stopped being herself, especially since she and I had finally, I felt, figured out a way to live with each other under her roof. I had Mom so hooked the “political news” programs I regularly watched on CNN and MSNBC that she started watching those networks even when I wasn’t in the room!  She even admitted to learning a few things from historical series we watched together on PBS occasionally.  She watched Jeopardy for me and I watched Wheel of Fortune for her.  We both watched 20/20 (though she forgot that’s what it was called) and 60 Minutes (though she forgot what day and time it came on.)  She couldn’t stand the “reality” shows I watched on Bravo and E!  I think they offended her old-fashioned sense of morality. We both missed watching live sports, too. Like many who have had or at least tried to maintain a relationship with an Alzheimer’s patient, it was hard for me to get to a level of comfort with Mom as she was after her fall. Over those last months, while Mom was physically still with us, her mind and sense of reality had been gradually fading away.  She is now with her mom (even at the end Mom still called her “Bubbie”), my dad, and various other assorted friends and relatives I had never met but she remembered, while still “mentally” preparing and planning to take care of her home and the people she loved.

Categories
divorce Places of My Life Update

How many times have I left my Comfort Zone since I Started Over?

So many times that it would be hard to limit it to just the last time

This limitation was proposed/imposed by Bloganuary

So first off, everything on my About page was out of my comfort zone because I was doing all of it for the very first time!

I’ll start with the obvious. Mom has been under somebody else’s roof and care since the beginning of June. The never-ending divorce finally did get there, officially and hopefully forever, as of about the end of November. Both of these events really marked the end of a lot of my personal responsibilities and stressors. As a result, I have been both able and forced to figure out what I want to do with all my free time and space. My choices, for good or ill, have been limited by the biggest ongoing personal and global responsibility and stressor for all of us this year – COVID.

http://clipart-library.com/divorce-cliparts.html
Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com

I don’t know where or when I will hopefully land at least semi-permanently somewhere soon, so there’s not much point in buying stuff that isn’t perishable or to think about living anywhere but here, though I did get an offer to purchase this old house!  Where would I go and what would I want to take with me?  I don’t have to make those decisions yet but if travel gets safer and easier again, I am already thinking about and starting to plan a “snow bird’s” tour of places I at least would like to visit and might even consider living in to keep away from cold Kalamazoo winters! 

Photo by Julia Volk on Pexels.com
Photo by Jack Bulmer on Pexels.com

I have friends who live in different places and have already been warned that I might be coming their way.  So far I’m already thinking about St. Louis, Albuquerque and Tucson for sure.  Other possibilities include Boston, Florida, North and South Carolina and the DC area. If any readers here might like to join me, or can think of other places to add to my list, you are more than welcome.

Categories
divorce Family Update

My New Life started in 2021

My New Life (In Old Books) or Is It My Old Life in New Books?

I can hardly believe that I am now nearly three years into my second retirement. Finally, after all that time, close to eight years in total, I feel ready, comfortable secure enough to do what I imagine many other people do at this time of year:  look back at where I’ve been and what I’ve accomplished and also try to look ahead to what might enhance the value of this time, its quality and purpose, along with, best case, its joy and happiness or, at minimum, its feeling of satisfaction.

One of my more annoying and detrimental personal habits, which I have lately come to recognize in my early senior citizenship, is that I have often been a slow learner, perhaps more correctly, a late bloomer.  Maybe that’s a trait that comes from being a true Taurean.  As an old fart, looking back now, I might have advised my younger self to set goals, to have dreams and aspirations, or to at least have some type of design or plan for my life.  Alas, over most of the prior half century, I have been more often driven by the philosophy of the late, great John Lennon, who advised us all, just before his own untimely death, that “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.”  Here and now though, with the luxury of having a lot of free time on my hands, I can start applying my hard-earned and slow in coming self-knowledge to a new and probably more achievable design for the remainder of my life.

Unpublished Draft Post written in 2017 or 2018

I wrote all of that way back in 2017 or 2018.  Back then much of what I was reading and trying to implement for myself, my life and my future had to do with goal-setting and plans and efforts of that ilk.  Given the turn of events in my life in general and in the world in particular it’s clear that anybody who thinks they can live their life on that basis is at least pretty delusional and possibly even insane!  About (Created May 2021, Updated September 2021)

When I started this new blog, which apparently and coincidentally seems to have really happened at the beginning of the year, I said on the very first post

Over the last few years I have written some vignettes for a series of memoir classes. Out of the process of figuring out what I want to leave behind for my daughters to learn about me, why I am the way I am today and why I raised them the way I did, I discovered that many of my memories are tied to the places in which they occurred, be they real or imagined.

While that is still true, I guess I could also add that, given the thoughts I started this post with, besides teaching my daughters all about me I may also need to teach me about me through my blogs more than through a memoir alone.  I want to belabor both these points at this time and in this post.

First, the bit about the past informing the present for both them and me.  Much as I have tried not to rehash my marriage and my divorce and everything that went before each of those events, I can honestly say (and my daughters and my friends will attest to this sad fact) that I have not been able to stop myself from doing that over the past year.  It is my hope, though, that whatever I have to say about that here will, best case, be the last time it is a subject of any posts this year or the main subject of my thoughts and feelings at any time going forward.

Again, looking back over the past couple of years and, yes, even farther back than that and indeed even wider than that in the present, I can see that I am not the first or only one to realize that it makes no sense to put the effort into developing goals or planning life around what one may expect or anticipate and continue to try to convince oneself that these goals are (1) achievable or (2) really what one would want to achieve if possible.

To get some perspective on this dreaded looking back exercise, I of course went to the written history of the thing.  As a sort of old school old fart correspondent, this consisted mainly of emails and texts written and received.  I had already reviewed a lot of what I had received but after finally getting back to doing this catch-up exercise on my sent emails I can see that the marriage probably entered its final death throes in 2019.  Reading between the lines of what I wrote, especially to my spouse, I think I see where our mutual resentment started to build as I got more and more involved in more and more activities outside the home that made me happy. 

At the same time, it looks like he was getting more and more morose and out of sorts.  I base this guess on what was a clear and mainly continuing pattern of his atypical, at least for an adult male who could be considered by some to be in the prime of his life, sleeping and active periods.  Like a stubborn baby or an average really old person, he slept during the day and worked on his hobby at night. 

Throughout that pre-pandemic year we became more and more like “ships passing in the night” with those passages most often occurring in the late morning or early evening.  In the evenings we at least both tried to indulge one of our fewer and fewer common interests by watching TV programs, sports and movies together.  But in the mornings when he came up from his mancave to my woman cave in our split-level home, he would usually find me in front of the computer, often just playing games.  This latter exercise had been going for some time before and when this part of our macabre marriage death dance started, I would get up, come around my desk, sit in my rocker-recliner and we would try to have a conversation, a check-in about how and what each other was doing.  I think we both noticed that I made this effort less and less, until his attempts to do this started declining, too.  Maybe the patterns and comforts of our lives had moved so far away from each other that they and we were beyond reconnecting.

Another probable point of resentment, I’m guessing, is that I did not participate as actively as he wanted or expected me to in his (unrealistic) dream of making a business out of his hobby. That was where his time and our money went while a lot of my time and our money went into reading and traveling and socializing.  I know I’d expected him to enjoy those last activities with me.  Over time, though, his enjoyment of and interest in doing either had ebbed so low that I had begun to know better than to even ask him to join me because I knew what his answer would be.

There were other stressors that year that in retrospect could have brought us closer together but in the end seem to have had the opposite effect.  That was the year that Daughter #1 got married and Daughter #2 started medical school.  Both of these momentous events turned into wedge issues that drove us farther apart from each other. 

Here I can add that another longtime festering wound in our relationship was how differently he treated our children.  Again, these differences and disparities became more and more glaring over the years, though I can’t really pinpoint how far back they began and of course I don’t really know the reasons why.  My guess is that he took for granted or accepted or expected #1 to be totally like me and therefore “perfect” while he presumed #2 would be totally like him, an imperfect and stubborn addict who would always be “less than” in the eyes of everyone that mattered, including himself and possibly, in his mind, even me.  I surely had reached that point by the end of that year. There is no better indicator of this disparity, and how it finally blew our marriage apart for good, than summarizing his participation in the life of Daughter #1 and his withdrawal from participation in the life of Daughter #2 over the last six months of 2019.

And just to be complete and to add to my disappointment, I’ll have to throw in the monkey wrench that entered our relationship at about the same time.  That was the necessity for someone to devote more time and effort to taking care of my mom.  I’d expected my husband, who’d said and even written over and over, over all the years, how much he loved and appreciated “Mom” to do just that.  He’d also warned me, based on the similar trajectory he’d endured with his mom, that I’d have to figure out what to do with her sooner rather than later by this time.  

It also just dawned on me that he’d handled most of that without the help of his one remaining brother just as I found myself in the same situation vis-à-vis my one and only sister.  Wouldn’t you think that shared experience would have made a better and possibly even average person more sympathetic and helpful to one’s most beloved spouse rather than drive said simpatico away? Oh wait, in fact and reality it seems to reinforce what he finally told me, after I told him I didn’t think I could continue to live this way. 

In a nutshell, that was that we should have separated fifteen years earlier, based on his presumption that I would not move two thousand miles away from home (and Mom) when his job relocated.  I did it because I didn’t want to break up OUR family.  I can see now, as I should have seen before, that he just didn’t care about that.  It also clarifies what he first told me and repeated in those six months.  “You are number one for me.  I am number five for you.”  That first part was a lie though possibly the last part had been true for quite a long time.  I’d always said he knew me better than I knew myself.