getting better

i wasn't sure how long the surreal not-sure-who-i-was episode was going to last. the long walk at the lake was quite therapeutic, but i'm still scratching the bug bites. i went to the gym today, during the day, when all the mommies and retirees were there. i felt somewhat like an interloper, but i pretended that i was supposed to be there, i do pay, after all, to use the facility, and i enjoyed myself. the mommies weren't very friendly but the retirees were quite kind.

am going over to my mother's tomorrow to decipher some correspondence she has received from the Social Security Administration. i find it wryly humorous that i am better equipped to help her now with government-ese. guess it's a good thing.

but that brings up something totally unrelated to dhs; or, maybe not...my mother used to be so sharp. she was really smart. she could figure out how to find out anything, and get people to give her information they weren't supposed to share. she doesn't even know what her social security gross income is; she has difficulty differentiating from gross and net, and i know she used to know the difference.

so, how much of a role has stress played in the deterioration of her mind? granted, she has abused alcohol and prescription drugs for almost as many years as i've been alive, the role of which should not be underestimated, but she has also lived an extraordinarily emotionally stressful life. she has never understood boundaries; she frequently went beyond where hers should have been to the extreme discomfort of my father, and they fought about her behavior often. actually, he would just get angry and quit talking, and she would scream, drink, and throw things. then he died in a plane crash. then she went over the edge for an extended period.

she wound up working as a private investigator for my grandfather, we all did. she became an excellent investigator; nobody ever said she was stupid, just dysfunctional. and she worked on some major cases, one of them one of the most important cases in the history of this country. but the stress was too great, and she wound up a basket case by 1997, when i started doing a lot of work for her. by 2000 i was doing almost all the field work and writing the reports, and she billed the attorneys and took half the income.

so, long story still impossibly long, she never dealt, psychologically, with the reason my father nearly left her several times, before he died, and she never dealt with his death; she has repeated the same impossibly stupid mistakes over and over, and now has almost no quality of life; she is trapped, as a mere 70-year-old, in the body of an 85-year-old, and not a well one, at that.

i don't want to wind up like that. i don't want to be all alone, because i've always insisted that people come to me and never gone to them; i don't want to be isolated because i've never been involved in any sort of community; i don't want to be trapped in a space all by myself because i've made people around me so miserable for so many years that nobody wants to be around me. i want my daughter to not mind talking to me occasionally. i don't want her to dread talking to me on the phone, and even more the sporadic guilt-driven visits.

my mother gave herself up to her work. she renounced family and friends and community to be available for her work at any hour of any day. she would take a phone call at 9:00 p.m., with guests sitting at the dining table, from an attorney, even if he or she just wanted to shoot the breeze; she would talk for hours, completely ignoring the people there to visit her. i have lived in the same town as my mother for many, many years; i have lived in this house for 12 years; i can count the number of times my mother has been inside my house on the fingers of one hand.

dhs wanted everything i had. it wanted my muscle, bone, flesh and sinew; my brain and my heart and my soul. i tried to give it what it needed, what it demanded, but there wasn't enough left for me, for my own life. i felt i was being consumed by a voracious beast that had no knowledge of or interest in the damage it inflicted with its demands. as long as i was in the belly of the beast, i could *mostly* function; i say mostly because, towards the end, that even became an almost impossible chore for me; but when i left the beast, when it was finally sated for the day, or the week, and i was disgorged and allowed to crawl home, i found it increasingly more difficult to willingly return. it was painful, mentally and, eventually, physically. the last day i tried i found i could not push myself further; i had lost my flail; i could not drive myself another step. i knew i had to see a doctor, not so much to heal the physical as to verify the existence of the problem. i am so thankful for my doctor. he helped me acknowledge what i knew in my subconscious but did not want to face. he helped me admit i could not do the job any longer. and he helped me find a way out.

thank God.