Mom & Me Journals Histories: 1999 - 2001

    I was real quiet about it, not even thinking about it, hoping that would still the air, but it didn't work. MPS reminded my mother that Easter is coming up on Sunday. She called just as we walked in the door from Prescott. I think my mother thought Easter was already over because of that Easter candy she bought about a month ago. They rolled it out ridiculously early this year and it started neck and neck with one of her sugar seizures. She got over that quick, so I guess she thought Easter was over.

    My mother is now into watching all the movie information programs (there are lots of them, it turns out, especially on Bravo) and makes her lists of movies to watch from those. I'm surprised we haven't subscribed to any movie channels yet. So far, though, she hasn't mentioned it so neither have I. Maybe she doesn't know movie channels are available.
    Re: Daniel Day-Lewis. I know he was supposed to be dynamite in My Left Foot and in that movie about an Irish father and son (didn't it have something to do with boxing...maybe it was called The Boxer), neither of which I saw. [Although I may, before my mother dies, see every movie ever filmed, or the first few minutes, at least, at the rate we're going.] He looks as though he's made of wax, make-up and rebar rather than flesh and blood and bone; neither very warm nor very sturdy, to me, and I certainly wouldn't call what he did in The Last of the Mohicans acting. My mother, though, may have the hots for him. Except for my father I have no idea what characteristics she finds attractive although I have been wondering about that, lately.
    Up to Prescott, today, so no movies (although my mother suggested taking a few up there; I suggested that we wouldn't be up there long enough to have the time to watch a full movie; that worked). Should be a good day.

    I still can't figure out why my mother liked it. It's a complete mystery to me.
    I have observed a relationship between what many people consider inappropriate and unexpected violence perpetrated by those suffering from certain levels of dementia and circumstances in the perpetrator's life. In my two experiences with demented relatives who resorted to "inappropriate and unexpected" physical violence:

1. With my aunt I saw (although I was the only one) how she was pretty much acting on what I considered stored up anger toward her husband, my DU. All of her physical aggression was directed toward him;
2. An aunt on my dad's side wandered down the road of menopausal hysteria one summer while our family was visiting in North Carolina. When my uncle called Dad to tell him he "needed help with [my aunt]," I tagged along. Exactly as her husband described, my aunt had locked herself in the bathroom, was reportedly naked in the bathtub which was running over with water seeping out from underneath the door and yelling that my uncle had made her feel like a whore from the time he married her. At this point in their shared lives they were probably in their late fifties. I saw it, I heard it, I watched as my aunt was forcibly dressed and dragged, screaming and lashing out at her husband, into a county van and transported to the State Mental Hospital. A couple of weeks later I went along when the family picked her up. She said, "[My husband] cain't help who is is, and after I saw all those other people in there, heard their problems, I figured I could put up with him. They were lots worse off than I was." I'm sure my aunt's physical aggression, while shocking, was not totally out of character for their relationship. She obviously harbored some ill will toward him before she ever got naked in the bathtub and screamed at him. As far as she was concerned, demented or not, her problem wasn't herself, it was him.

    It has occurred to me that, in her milder state, my mother's attraction to dementedly gory movies that make a mockery of history, fiction and people and relationships might be some sort of a release. I don't know. Maybe she liked what she thought of as the love stories. It has occurred to me since I've been living with her that my mother may have had (may still have) a taste for adventurous romance and magnetic, destined attractions, and may have been disappointed with her marriage in these respects, although I think in the beginning she thought it was going to be much more exciting and much more personally comforting than it was.

     Her good ear is plugged, thank the gods. I've been wondering, since I last e'd you, if maybe her neo-interest in action/adventure movies and her willingness to look at movies that have sexual references in them (versus previously leaving the area of such movies) or are thoughtful rather than driven is because she is finally, at 83, realizing that she doesn't have to curtail her curiosity because children are around. It has always seemed odd to me that a woman who was looking for advanced adventure in the 1930s and the 1940s would only like animated Disney movies and Christian Biblical Epics from the 1950s on. Except when you factor in that all her children were born in the 1950s.

...the 1992 version. What a shameless movie! I've been thinking lately about why my mother is 'suddenly' thirsty for adventure/action/war movies. The really simple, bloody ones. I'm still thinking about it...it's a puzzle, considering that her previous relentless preference was for family oriented animated features. Considering that she was in WWII, she taught her generation how to shoot their guns, how to spot the enemy, well, that has always seemed incongruous to me. Perhaps the incongruity is finally readjusting itself.
    I expect her movie preferences will change even more. I'm looking forward to watching the development. We might be watching a lot of love stories, soon. Her comment about The Tao of Steve, which I never finished, surprised me. She has, in the past, been impatient with love stories, even the most complicated and elegant.
    My secret hope is that she will develop an interest in martial arts movies of all kinds including the old, Asian, mythical ones, the current funny ones and the nasty, predictable, stevensegal ones.
    I'd also like to stumble across several more like The Straight Story. Watching my mother watch that movie was a treat.

...stressing about my mother's money in the absence of her ability to stress about it. Yesterday I set up a new filing system and put all the paperwork away. It felt like a clean break. Mom wanted to work her way further down her movies-to-watch list last night so that's what we did. I turned in relatively early. The Tao of Steve was still playing itself out. Which my mother liked, much to my surprise, except for the excessive use of "fuck". She left me a note telling me it had a "sweet" ending, for which I am not in the mood.
    My mother's movie watching proclivities never fail to amaze me; or, rather, the changes in them. She watched The Gladiator twice...in a row. That was okay with me. I love Oliver Reed and was tickled to watch his last, hammy performance twice. The same, though, happened with The Patriot which I found disturbing. The older she gets the more I am able to watch movies I'm curious about 'in front of' her without her spoiling the viewing. She sat through Ghost Dog without complaint which she wouldn't have done a few years ago. Even I got itchy during that one regardless of how much I like Forrest Whitaker.
    Without the help of The Girls I awoke on my own a few minutes before 0400 feeling as though I had to do something! But there's nothing left to do unless I want to invent paperwork. I am so tightly wound over this thing. I am feeling especially 'bad' because I know I have the ability to understand and probably manipulate, this whole situation but I am having a hard time bringing myself to do it. I had a conversation with MA on Friday about the emotional difficulty I am having with this. He was somewhat more sympathetic than MFA and ever eager to teach me the formula for establishing a cost basis, which he was surprised I had figured out myself from last year's calculations. He is also, though, much more determined than MFA that I "...get a hold of myself..." (which I think I've done, eerily well, in fact, in the last few days), "...grab the reins. Your Mom can't do it anymore. I'll teach you anything you need to know." Although he is only two years older than me he fathers four daughters, one of which is his business partner. He treats me like one of his very capable but untutored daughters, which, I suppose, is helpful except that I think of him as my older-est sister's peer and that creates a disparity in reaction between us. I tease him, and he never expects it.
    MFA, on the other hand, really misses my mother's input and still tries to wrest it from her. He's in mourning, I think. He's also more than a little surprised that I don't hate my mother, I guess. He keeps trying to get me to "admit" that I feel she is robbing me of something. I guess he still hasn't buried his mother.
    This next week is going to be difficult. Fortunately, due to my renewed interest in needlepoint and reading (fortunate because for the last six months I've been purchasing books like crazy but haven't been able to read), standwithing it will involve the use of therapeutic distractions. I'll have to go to Prescott sometime this week, too. It's iffy whether Mom will go. I'm thinking of planning my trip mid-week to catch the incoming storm and maybe get snowed in for the night. Sometimes the possibility of snow excites her. Sometimes not.