Warning! If you know my family or are triggered by abuse topics, you may not want to read this.
My mom's in Moccasin Bend Mental Hospital this week. She had an "altercation" with a fellow resident at the nursing home, who then had to go the hospital. HIPAA prevents the facility from giving us details, but within 24 hours my mother was in the back of a police car traveling the 50 miles to Moccasin Bend.
Two weeks prior, she wandered into another resident's room and began messing with his stuff. In that altercation my mother wound up with some scratches and a black eye, but he said she hit him first.
For weeks she's been refusing medicine, spitting it out, and fighting. A nurse told me "I got her to take her medication, I just had to have someone help me hold her arms and legs down, because she was hitting and kicking." She fights with staff during her showers, dressing, and toileting.
The year is 1984:
It's an ordinary evening and the TV is on. When I enter the living room my mother is on all fours across from the couch. My father's feet are resting on her back. She's the footrest. I have vague memories of her "deserving it" and "not being worthy" of being treated like a person.
The year is 1982:
My mother is playing Pong and crying. My father was "out of town for work" again. That is what we tell everyone at church. He was with his other family - although, we never called it that then. We were supposed to accept it as normal for him to spend every weekend with C. and her 2 young kids. Her upset was that he came home as if to spend the weekend with us, then picked a fight and left for Knoxville, and made it her fault.
The year is 1980:
My mother is being yelled at for falling asleep at 3am. My father was "really on a roll" talking about some amazing stuff. Her sleepiness proves that she doesn't care about what's important to him.
The year is 1978:
My mother is paraded in front of me to tell me a story about how she wronged my father in 1966, the year I was born, and again a couple of years later. It's an exercise in shaming and it won't be over until she's told it all.
The year is 1988:
It's very late. I'm visiting her and her second husband and it's Christmastime. He's drunk and he's mean. He berates her into telling me some degrading story about a wrong she committed. It feels very much like 1978, and it's so surreal that I can't now summon up any details. It felt like a sickness, very, very old. The origin, I can't know. She's sobbing, but she does as she is told.
The year is 1977:
My father is running late for work and she can't wake him up. He's perfectly healthy, but asleep. She feeds him oatmeal while he's dozing in bed, propped on one elbow. She gives him a shower while he leans against the wall, sleeping, and then she dries and dresses him. It's not the first time, or even the twentieth.
The year is 2007:
I visit her at her assisted living center and notice an unfamiliar name on the sign-in log to visit her. As I chat with my mother she shows me a gift from a bus driver at her day center. After some investigation we discover the truth: a married employee at her day center has visited her at her home, used a false name to sign in, and had sexual contact with her.
Now it's 2012. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and/or alcohol dementia in 2004.
I tell her story now because she can't.
"Nana is a bad ass", say her grandsons. I'm kinda glad. For years in her disease she was docile, good-natured, and pleasantly confused. For the last year or so it's been different.
It wouldn't be wrong to call it the natural progression of the disease. But is that truth? Who knows? What harm does it do if I reframe it? Perhaps she's fighting back. Perhaps at 63 years old, some part deep inside of her is angry - seething - and is going to be heard.
You go, Nana!
