MOM aka Love Journey Part 1

Everyone keeps saying Happy New Year and asking me how my holidays were. I would like to say AMAZING! A BLAST! FABULOUS!

But it isn’t true. For us, the 2019 holidays were back-breaking heart-breaking work.

If you know me, you know how much I love the holidays. The world finally joins me in my love of sparkle and twinkle lights. I can wear my elf costume without being taken away by the men in white coats, and I can indulge my love of christmas carols and shopping with no one but Scrooge telling me to stop. But this holiday was different.

The first part of our holiday we spent caring for my Mom, moving her from one Memory Care place to another. The second part was visiting my father’s grave on Christmas Eve, and the third part was an afternoon caring for a dear friend in Las Vegas, a fellow belly dancer in her last days of breast cancer.

This part is about my Mom. (Parts two and three coming soon.)

I love to lie next to my Mom as she falls asleep, watching her favorite movie, Cinderella, with her, because the prince reminds her so much of my father (said with tears in her eyes). Without fail, my Mom claps in delight at the laughing baby in the opening scenes, and cries when the beautiful mother dies. In the movie, the mother tells the daughter five words to live by, “Have courage and be kind.” My Mom cries every single time she sees that scene, and I have to agree, those are wise words.

When I learned my Mom would need to move homes, I arranged for the kids and I to fly out to Utah and help my sister, who lives nearby and ends up doing everything. I always tell my teenagers that when someone needs our help, we can’t assume or hope someone else will do it. We roll up our sleeves, pull up our sparkle bootstraps and do what needs to be done, bravely and kindly. At first I said, “This is a work trip. We are here to care for Grandma.” It was emotionally intense and so draining it kind of felt like dragging a bull with broken legs up a mountain. So I decided to change the story, to shift our perspective, and I told the kids, this is no longer a work trip, it is a love trip. And immediately, the heaviness lifted, and it felt like we were blowing bubbles and galloping up a mountain on dappled gray fairy tale horses with long flowing manes.

My Mom wept when we walked into her home, she was so happy to see us.

I told the kids we need to spread love and light and sparkles, because that is what we do. Honestly, in my heart of hearts, with all the trauma and loss of the last two years: my father, my husband, my best friend, I really don’t know what “we do”. I don’t know what to tell my children. I want to show them how to cope with loss, how to hold your head high in the face of any pain, but I don’t have any answers and I am struggling myself.

All the years I belly danced in LA and around the world, and worked with terminally ill children, I called myself the “high priestess of sacred moments”, because I felt so honored to be part of people’s most important moments and transitions: baby showers, Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, weddings, birthdays, and even death beds. I was there for it all, all those moments of love and joy and sadness.

Here I am, thirty years later, still stepping in to participate in sacred moments, to dance, sing, do makeovers or get on my knees in my tutu to scrub the floor. (Like Cinderella! We have more in common than one would guess.)

Once I arrived in Utah, I donned my “gay apparel”, aka sparkle boots and twirled over to my Mom’s Memory Care, my heart simultaneously soaring and breaking as soon as I stepped through the door.

Is that even possible? For a heart to soar and break at the same time? I’m here to tell you yes, it is very possible.

Memory Care is a locked area of an elderly care center, designed to cater to the needs of people with Dementia and Alzheimer’s. The residents wander in a haze, carrying baby dolls and stuffed cats in their arms. This particular Memory Care is beautiful, sunny and clean, with an aromatherapy room, sun rooms, and a fairy garden for the residents to visit, but still, the wanderers roam the halls in circles.

I put on my own “armor” to go to Memory Care, which consists of a fluffy tutu under a retro style dress, flowers in my hair, sparkling boots and glitter makeup. The kids and I showed up, leading my Mom to a sunny room where we could do one of her favorite things: play beauty shop.

My Mom always loved to have her makeup and nails done, and nothing came between her and her weekly trip to the hairdresser. NOTHING. No blizzard was too daunting, no child was too sick, no flu was too overpowering–nothing stopped her from doing her hair. When I packed up my car to move to LA, my family walked out to the driveway to say goodbye as I drove away, but not my Mom. She was getting her hair done.

When I was little, I used to stand in my Mom’s closet and stare at the white Styrofoam heads that held all her “Sunday wigs”, bouffant wigs in shades of brown and red. Every Sunday she would put on her “Sunday wig” with dangling earrings, a mini skirt and gogo boots. She would pile all six of us kids into our orange VW Bus and take us to church, the crystals in her cat-eye sunglasses glittering when they caught the sunlight. My little sister and I would be wearing matching Raggedy Ann dresses made by my Mom in her “sewing room”, each of us wearing our own pair of gogo boots, even as toddlers. And yes, I was left behind occasionally.  My Mom loved to tell me how she’d get home and the car would unload, and she’d say, “Where’s Marci?” When there was no answer, she’d drive back to the church and find me sitting on the curb by myself. I assume I was sitting there in my tiny gogo boots. (I’d like to think I was wearing sparkling cateye sunglasses too.)

My Mom was gorgeous and glamorous for all of my childhood and my adulthood, and perhaps a little forgetful, although with six kids to keep in line, who can blame her?

I wish I had a photo of my Mom’s wigs in her closet. I don’t, but I do have a photo of my own costume/wig closet, probably created subconsciously in her honor, maybe a little more eclectic and colorful than hers…

My Mom was born and raised in San Diego by her Idaho potato farmer father and beautiful Mexican mother. Grandma Lupe worked, always wore diamonds and furs with manicured red nails and glittering shoes, all while raising eight children. I love to look at photos of my Mom as a young girl and imagine her running on the beach in La Jolla, with her big brown eyes and thick lashes. Like my grandmother, my Mom had the reputation of being the “prettiest girl in San Diego.”

She was raised in a bilingual home, speaking fluent spanish, and met my father at a USO dance when they were both twenty and he was stationed near her home. The Navy newsletter printed a hilarious article about the two of them falling in love, writing that Thad Johnson had found a “hot tamale” in my Mom. They fell in love, had six children, and were barely apart for more than sixty years, so when he died two years ago, her mind started to scramble until she no longer recognizes him in photos. I guess it makes sense that when something is too much for the brain to handle, it checks out. Merciful, maybe? But heartbreaking.

Even now, when she’s rubbing her fingers together and my sister asks her what she’s doing, and she snickers and says, “writing a letter” as if it’s obvious; or she drops a tissue and says, “Oops I dropped my watch”, she still loves to look beautiful.

She clutches her purse to her chest. It’s full of cloth napkins filled with cookie crumbs that she’s swiped from her dinner table. She happily follows us to a room full of windows and Annabelle curls her hair with the Magic Wand curling iron, telling her how pretty she looks. Henry sits next to her telling her funny stories while I tell her to close her eyes so I can apply mascara and eye shadow in mermaid shell pink. I know her big brown eyes and long thick lashes as well as I know my own–well my lashes aren’t long and thick, and it seems little unfair that at 81 years old, her lashes still look so incredible. Before her brain scrambled I would say, “Mom! How are your lashes so thick and long?” She’d shrug and say, “My lashes have always been like this. I don’t know why yours are so sparse, Marci.” Thanks Mom. I pull out a soft brush and she tilts her chin sideways for the peach blush, and smacks her lips together to rub in the rose lipstick. She holds out her wrist for perfume, her favorite scent: Pink Sugar, and smiles, turning her head from one side to the other when I show her a mirror. 

The morning of her big move, my sister and I got up early to meet my nephews at my Mom’s storage unit. We opened the door and I was assailed by all the things she loved. Her wardrobe boxes are filled with her colorful clothes and bright sparkling jewelry. My Mom loved to shop and never passed up a sale. She would brag for a week about the gorgeous black dress she found on the sale rack for $3. I can’t bear to leave anything in the unit, so I put all her clothes in my sister’s car, my sister shaking her head muttering, “I knew you wouldn’t be able to leave anything in there.” We haul her favorite white couches to her new room, (or I should say my nephews haul the couches while I get out of the way). She loved those couches, they were her “fancy” couches, and she didn’t like anyone to sit on them except for “company”, and I’m pretty sure she inspected the “company” to make sure they were clean enough to sit on her couches.

My brothers show up, filling trucks with her bed and television and books. My sister, Maria, and I lifted and carried her belongings. My brothers carried in her furniture and put it together.

They looked around at all the photos in boxes and her tv on the floor and said, “We’ll come back in the next couple of weeks and hang all this.”

“Um, no,” I replied. “Let’s do it now. We can’t leave her half moved in.”

They murmured something about taking out the trash and disappeared, and I borrowed a hammer and nails from my sister and she and I hung everything. I’m a single mom, I do everything at my house—I fix our internet when it’s down, repair our laptops and televisions when they are on the fritz, drag in our christmas trees and set them up myself. There is no one else to help me hang artwork, to take out the trash cans or pull something off a high shelf—I do it all and I do it now. I learned the ‘do it now” method from Kim. When she came to my house, and I said in passing, “That remote needs batteries” or “I need to figure out how to work that thermostat”, Kim would say, “Let’s do it now.” And she would drop everything, go get whatever we needed and get it done. It was marvelous. I’m usually the queen procrastinator, so I this new method was like magic to me.

So when my Mom’s lamp wasn’t working, I started unscrewing the lightbulb while talking to my niece and my Mom. The bulb jumped out of it’s socket and leaped around my hands before finally shattering on my Mom’s nightstand. Oops. Well-done Marci. My niece grabbed a broom and helped me clean up the shards. I took a bulb from a different lamp and it did the same juggling routine with me–what is it with me and light bulbs? But this time I caught it before it smashed to pieces. Everyone stared at me and my dangerous juggling acts, but I just laughed and carried on. This is why my little sister has always called me Inspector Clouseau. Things tend to jump out of my hands, fly across rooms, and bounce around before crashing to the floor. I always considered this unusual chaos a lesson in zen–don’t get attached to material possessions. (And I can tell you, I was thrilled when I watched I Love Lucy, and saw Lucy’s endless chaotic antics, especially in her kitchen. It was comforting to know there was someone else out there like me, even if she was just a character, and a physical comedian, which actually seems like a viable career for me right now as I think about my next move.)

It felt strange and wonderful to have my family there to help me hang my Mom’s photos and set up her tv, and feeling that support helped me understand how much my sister, Maria, needed my support. She lives near my Mom and she and her family do the heavy lifting of visiting her every day and handling anything she needs. It helps to have someone next to you in a when your heart feels so heavy, even if they are just making you laugh or bringing you cappuccinos in between accidentally throwing things across the room.

My Mom shuffles into her new place with her hair full of flowers and sits down among the other residents, looking like a child lost in the woods. Annabelle, my 15-year-old daughter, sits next to her, chatting away with her and all the people around her. The organizer introduces my Mom, “Why don’t we welcome Marla with a song.” She turns on “You are My Sunshine”, and all the elderly people start to sing, remembering the lyrics even though their minds are gone too. It was one of my Dad’s favorite songs, one we sang to him over and over in his last days, and we sang it at his funeral. Tears spring to my eyes, and I scurry behind a wall, trying to control my sobs so I don’t disturb everyone.

How did it come to this? My Dad is gone, the world is gray without him. My Mom is in the care of strangers. It kills me that I am not able to care for her myself. I HATE that she is in a place full of strangers, not her family. I want to take care of her, but in our care, my Mom broke her knee, her neck, then her hip by passing out unexpectedly, all within a few months.  She is lost without my Dad and we finally decided she’s better off in a place where she’s not breaking her bones. But really? None of this seems right.

But here’s the thing I learned on our love trip—something I know but sometimes forget and learn all over again: there are no strangers.

Every elderly person in that place is my Mom, a soul that needs love and someone to hold their crooked gnarled hands, to look deeply in their eyes with a tenderness that goes beyond memories, beyond knowing or not knowing their pasts. The other residents don’t look familiar to me, I share no past with them, but I can still understand that they are “love” and I am “love” and I will treat them the way I hope people treat my Mom when we aren’t there.

And during this time of Winter Solstice, when the dark night is so long it feels it might never end, it seems we must make our own light. For me, I feel “lit” when I am spreading love, light, and sparkles with courage and kindness.

I came across this poem by Jeff Foster the other day and it resonated with me for some reason.

“You do not heal ‘from’ trauma.
You simply come to know yourself
as Life Itself.
And you turn towards the wounded place.
And you flush it with attention, 
which is Love…

You do not heal ‘from’ trauma.
You find healing ‘in’ the trauma.
You find yourself at trauma’s sacred core.
The One who is always present.
The One who can bear 
even the most intense feeling states.
And survive.

The Indestructible One.
The Infinite One. 
The Powerful One.
You.” 

(Jeff Foster )

I don’t feel indestructible–in fact I feel pretty destroyed. I don’t feel powerful either, but I definitely feel infinite.