I spent the day with my Nona today, got to see her frail, new post-stroke form. She seemed smaller, like a shell. Her neighbourhood (a tough collection of used auto parts and strip joints) seems scary now, and I don't want her to leave her house. We took her to her bank where all her ladies knew her. They had been worried. I watched her take 2 minutes to sign her name and I wanted to cry.
You can tell by her face that she has had a stroke, in the car she couldn't remember the words to tell me that she was having trouble remembering her words. I hated the irony.
We helped her take care of her garden, her tomatoes and beans and carrots. I looked and touched the garage my Nono built for his family to park their car. The same garage he killed himself in when my mother was only 12. In the family car where my mother found him, she thought he was sleeping.
I wanted to drag her out of that house and take her home with me. To California, where she could have an amazing garden and be safe and we could take care of her.
I don't trust my Aunt's to do a good job, and my mother doesn't either. She worries that they are all too wrapped up in their young kids or just their own lives to really give her the care she deserves. My Aunt with the smallest house and they youngest kids has been given that burden, because she is the only one in the country that treats my Nona with love.
I feel sorry for my Aunt, watching her mother revert to a child-like state, and in turn have to revert herself. Now she has another child, a child that will judge her if she catches her smoking, or comment on her parenting, or tell her she is making a bad tomato sauce.
It's a cycle. We just run through the maze, and end up right back where we started.
Helpless
Needy
Dependent
Loved..
-L
You can tell by her face that she has had a stroke, in the car she couldn't remember the words to tell me that she was having trouble remembering her words. I hated the irony.
We helped her take care of her garden, her tomatoes and beans and carrots. I looked and touched the garage my Nono built for his family to park their car. The same garage he killed himself in when my mother was only 12. In the family car where my mother found him, she thought he was sleeping.
I wanted to drag her out of that house and take her home with me. To California, where she could have an amazing garden and be safe and we could take care of her.
I don't trust my Aunt's to do a good job, and my mother doesn't either. She worries that they are all too wrapped up in their young kids or just their own lives to really give her the care she deserves. My Aunt with the smallest house and they youngest kids has been given that burden, because she is the only one in the country that treats my Nona with love.
I feel sorry for my Aunt, watching her mother revert to a child-like state, and in turn have to revert herself. Now she has another child, a child that will judge her if she catches her smoking, or comment on her parenting, or tell her she is making a bad tomato sauce.
It's a cycle. We just run through the maze, and end up right back where we started.
Helpless
Needy
Dependent
Loved..
-L
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