After spending several days hanging out with my eighty-nine-year-old mother, she was quite pooped and in a deep sleep when I arrived at the nursing home the next morning. My sister, Sharon, and I checked in on her periodically. Later in the morning, Sharon announced that mom was awake, and hadn’t any idea who Sharon was. “She’s excited to get to know me better,” she smiled.
We’re getting more accustomed to our mother venturing to different parts of her consciousness, and in fact find it quite delightful at times. We have the opportunity to see her how strangers might, and it never ceases to amaze me how welcoming she is, and how down right comfortable she is in her own skin, whether or not she remembers ever seeing the people around her at a previous time.
I approached her room, wondering if, since I’d been with her all week, she’d know me. As we stood in the washroom to clean her up from the previous night’s slumber, she began to make small talk.
“Have you worked here a long time?” she asked.
I explained that I wasn’t an employee, and she commented on how nice it was of me to help her.
“I have sometime to tell you that I think you’ll get a kick out of!” She looked at me expectantly. “We’re related!”
This excited her and she responded with, “We are? Well isn’t that great!”
No other explanation was needed, no further details of how the bloodline connected us.
People are sometimes baffled by my ability to be so at peace with my mother’s current way of being. As a coach, I am very aware of the concerns and fears that accompany aging parent care. As a human being, I can relate to how sad it sometimes feels and that a well-placed cry is what’s needed to get to the next level. As a daughter and a mother, I know how crucial the connection to one another is, no matter what stage of development one is in.
What tends to hold us back, in any relationship, is not wanting to feel the pain or look at ourselves in a way that might reveal the things about ourselves we least want to see. On both counts, we do ourselves a great disservice. For starters, by continuing to push the pain away, it never has the opportunity to be processed out of our bodies. It’s true. By avoiding the pain, we end up being faced with it time and again.
