So You’re Moving Closer

The tricks of the trade; proximity, familiarity makes atoms attach-detach and move on. I was in anatomy class when this theory came up in the learning section on chemistry. Then I also remembered proximity and familiarity from psychology classes, denoting communication and exchanges between the parties.
This theory also works for dating and most all other human relationships that work, since chemistry, is the basis of human life on this planet. Yet, maybe the hydrogen atom speeded up before spinning off to link up with some other group of attracting molecules.
Still, what part of moving near the parent do you find attractive? Especially when the parents didn’t care about you that much when you were young child and vulnerable like Cammy was. Now, as a little molecule that has attracted another atom to you (like marriage, partnership or out-of-wedlock children), what part of moving near the parent do you find attractive?
It took two visits; each of them five plus days, by Cammy to my house while plotting her relocation. That’s an awful lot of words to express in numerous on-going conversations about her feelings on her duty to serve her mother.
Soldiers have to rationalize to others their personal feelings of duty and service to their country. I was watching Cammy attempt to fit the uniform of a soldier. Duty - must order itself, from specific web address, only to ship out courage.
Although this daughter knew little of all of the great facets courage it would take in the future. She expensed directions to higher power and demanded divine intervention to make the end happen fast.
Cammy wished for:
• No lingering,
• No long discussion because they would end in hardheaded arguments.
Helpless acts of surrender wouldn’t come easy to Cammy’s mother. That character flaw didn’t exist in the gene pool of mother or daughter. Both parties had intolerant temperaments. One thrived on driving drama hard and fast only to make the other drive away from drama.
Cammy’s mom had some bad, bad habits in her day. Not sure exactly her day had ended yet in her mind, it just tilted a tad. A maturing body was not going to stop her alone. So she physically tore down walls, put up walls, built rooms, added bathrooms and was now tearing out her den and kitchen including the floors.
For company, Cammy’s mom had the plumber, Zack who did everything. The licensed handyman extraordinaire, electrician, and carpenter-tile layer who cohabitated with his own girlfriend with their child in his own home. Cammy’s mom paid his wages out her inherited trust fund.
Then another Mexican handyman extraordinaire who was all hot air and another love of Cammy’s mom being the Mexican handyman who took over eighteen years of their most unpurposeful relationship to beat on her, breaking a few bones, dousing her with paint on the front porch a few times and who knows what else went unreported to the cops.
Now, all that is the work the plumber had come to fix nearly thirty years later. In addition, by the checkbook, buy the checkbook - to the tune in his pocket for labor and materials of more than fifty-thousand dollars. That was just for the rental unit. Now he was working in the main house. Ever so slowly he worked first on the water heater, then on front bathroom, then on second bathroom, now on floors in the den into the kitchen. All without receipts for the work completed, just a check from the big checkbook.
This got Cammy going toward her former and now her current mother’s home to live nearby. The speed of the plow, the prod, that hydrogen atom spinning off to be closer and closer to her mother, since her Brother didn’t do the job of moving their momma into a box apartment in So-Cal down the street from him.
As an adult married woman, Cammy understood the underlying principles of this endless act of spinning insanity her mother’s life, called excitement. Cammy felt her life was like a bowl of popcorn in the bright lights. You can pick with your eyes the shape of which one you want. Not so easy getting those perfectly rounded, brain-shaped pieces that melt into your mouth without picking it first with your eyes.
You can spin like an atom towards the perfect goal with all your hope and desires, but sometimes, most times it’s more like knocking two pieces together that bends and cracks apart with a little pressure when you are picking the right one for the dream. And, then it goes spinning way from your fingertips in all directions to collide out there with the unexpected. Still, you knowingly know - you’re moving closer.

Siblings as Sons

Cammy and I each have a brother. Oh, what brothers they are too. In the food chain they are each moms favorite. The mom gleans, smiles, perks up, and nearly parades the food and comforts of home for their sons. We daughters on the other hand, sit back and watch this fountain of youth bubble. We daughters don’t’ achieve that treatment, moreover, more than often we are closer to dirt than the ground once our brothers come around.
Yet ask that brother to help you with mom, her infirmities, insanities and suddenly our brothers, our male siblings are dumber than dirt – if they have been trained well by their girlfriends or wives. How they can pull it off? With the look – the deer in the headlights stare, the incapable incapacitated dullard dunce with the “I dunno know” rapier displayed. Therefore, easy to shoot dead between the eyes, it’s sinful.
The Brother will either take the mom and decide it’s best if she’s just down the street from him, living in an apartment sized box, with no civil concerns about what she will do with her time. The Brother will extract the mother from her life, her sewing machine, her garden, her automobile, her familiar driving neighborhood, her doctors, her surviving friends and basic life to leave her down the street in other state, a strange city but it is close to him. Yes, just down the street from his life and his friends and leave it all up to his wife to take care of HIS mother.
When the wife disagrees with her husband’s (the Brother) plans watch out! Hell hath no furry like a woman stuck with another woman. When the wife is forced into hand maiden services such as driving, shopping and more because her mother-in-law, truly doesn’t know this new location where she will be living. See the wife rationalize why the mother-in-law would be put out by her son (the Brother) to live out her life where she currently is. Oh, yes but they will visit often.
Why does only another woman recognize this? Like the daughter or female friends of the family? Or are the Brothers or sons just afraid to speak up on their idea of calling “a park job” – that of planting their mothers where it’s close but not comfortable or familiar to relive their guilt.
Brothers will show up on the home turf for traumas and tragedies but not for the day-to-day duties. It’s pretty much a fact. In addition, if the Brother is doing it, odds are his own wife is doing more.
Ask the brother to give up his job to move? Nope. Ask the daughter to relocate, oh especially if she is single or childless. It is her duty and we are crucified if we don’t. The Christmas gifts no longer come from the siblings, if the single, the childless female sibling, and we do not attend to the duties as THEE caregiver for the parent.
Ask only the youngest daughter of the tribe – because it is in the genetic pool that only the baby should tend the elder. Moreover, it will not be the baby boy; it will only be the baby girl.
Big Brother is off the hook – for both of us. We girls do have that added chromosome, right?

Peers – Jumping the Girdle

When the best friend of thirty plus years decides to move back, friends have to get one thing very clear with each other. Not privacy, not sharing clothes, not fighting, not ignoring each other tastes but a much practiced fact - that we are not kids ratting around and nineteen years old anymore. The physicality of watching each other age is different from the practice of actively sharing in each others aging process. In as much as we both have one parent to look out for, we have each other to look out for too.
Much like bra burning of 1966, the act of jumping the out of the girdle was a major effort to tackle, even in these times. Now to know the back support it might give each of us house daughters and sons in the garden. It makes us thankful to wear the girdles with or out stays, known as the back brace. Moreover, for this effort of care giving we would need an excellent model of bracing our backs.
Maturity is not a clever game. It does sneak up on the caregiver and it seems never the parent. At first you compare, then feel good about being better at life skills than the parent is. Then when standing, walking or picking something up next to a member of your own peer group, you begin to notice the difference that age as affected each of the two best friends. Our aching backs.
The lean is not as limber, the lumber is not as quick, and the mind is made up faster because the sense of taste and style has been defined separately. Although, within the relationship of friends, navigating the history of home - we each must give adequate room for allowing changing to be accepted by the other in different frames of time. It may take more than one parent with more than one experience to know how much room is required.
Cammy was visiting the Adobe Disneyland to look for her new house when Gina, my mother took a slide. Not an exactly fall, just a slide down when her slipper got stuck and didn’t move with the foot, leg and hip and the body turn down on Gina. Who had slid, gently twisted, and slowly dropped to the carpeted floor next to the stove.
After a phone call next door to my house, Cammy and I wandered over to view mom, who had crawled over to the living room telephone to ring me up for assistance.
I could only look at my friend who knew all her efforts to move closer to her own mother could culminate into a situation like this. Cammy was not prepared for the appearance of this type of event. A parent falling to the ground.
Looking at Cammy, I said, “Do you know how to lift someone?”
Ah! Would the stays in that girdle would really be a support for her. Gina hadn’t been on the floor from a fall, in three years, and probably wouldn’t have been for a few more years, since she overtly practiced, ‘the slow and careful movements’ and let everyone know it. Yet, Cammy’s mom would not accept that notion of slowing down at 75 or 77.
We got Gina up and on the chair with ease. Still, Cammy’s head inside was turning to her own mother, also her own senior years. Such is this life, of the house daughter or son, to have to jump the broom and marry. Jump the generations of time passing and find the logic in a girdle and its support.
New friends your life, don’t seem to understand this thinking like your own old, old, and older friends.

Same Old Dirt

There's a piece of dirt, up on a hill surrounded by high mountain desert named Santa Fe. It’s where no one, thirty two years ago wanted to live until Conde Nast found this city in mid-to-late 1990's. Now there's endless suburbs of high-end homes instead of ranches.
Our moms and dads worked here, and retired here. Their distant daughters and sons have made it - ‘the time’ to move back home.
This is coming home to Cammy, home already to me.
More big-box stores moved in, the dirt roads are now paved, and lit at night. Stars down the street instead of in the sky, so it goes. Such a difference a few decades can make along with great press coverage. The Adobe Disneyland for seasonal living of the well heeled had arrived to show the natives how to live.
Cammy's husband Dougie made the decision in the fall, that it's time to move from the southern California beach city to the land of dust just down the street from Cammy's mom. They both are now telecommuting for work.
It's been up to Cammy to figure out the physical move from the beach life of her wonderful So-Cal existence to the land of high desert dust on a mountain two days drive from So-Cal and just left of Texas. Cammy has her emotional baggage; her mom has her emotional baggage. Now the turf war of privacy and secrets begins.
Dougie thought he had her mom wired for sound and power. Yet, that mom shorted out emotionally to screw Dougie's plan to have an office outside the home, the mom’s guesthouse. From the start it was a short-term arrangement, yet that fact that not just anyone, but her son-in-law could see her life and secrets was reason enough to ream her daughter Cammy for having the idea. The verbal agreement to rent a backyard studio for her son-in-law’s telecommuting work would come to an abrupt and sudden halt bringing back every old argument, every old torment of the daughter-mother hostilities.
Still, between the deeply forgotten past and here-to-be soon present, the mind places tricks on the emotional responses to situations. A partial reversion to the young wild child daughter in temperament, health, and some impatient habits return without warning when in contact with her mom. Even though, the Adobe Disneyland forgot her, she remembers the old her, along with the mother-person of her past.
Wait until her mom gets the address. Waiting to deliver to the mom, the privacy, work-at-home, visiting time rules for when the distance down the street from the mom is not enough.
Done, Cammy rented a home with plenty of bedrooms for everyone's home office and rooms for living besides. Hoping that down the street would be far enough away from the mom.
Although they took their time, nearly two months before informing Cammy’s mother of the exact location of their rental, their privacy disappeared at once in the Adobe Disneyland. Deleting away the twenty-five years elsewhere it took to evolve to who and where she is today.