“No. I don’t want to move them,” she replies, referring to the stuffed teddy bears sitting in her chair. “Their mother died a week—more like two weeks—ago.” She says this with obvious distress.

I’m not sure how to react to such comments. Most of what Mom says still makes sense, even if only to people who know her very well and can provide the missing context. She frequently forgets vocabulary or what she wants to say and handles it well. Usually she just laughs at herself. Her positive attitude and trust that people have her best interests at heart continually amazes me.

Mom is well liked, but surprised by that fact. I told her that women at the pharmacy had asked how she was doing and said they missed her. Mom’s response was to worry that perhaps she acted too proud. “What do you have to feel so proud about, Mom?” “My clothes are nicer and I fit in them better.” It’s the truth. She has a fine 89-year-old figure.

The things that do bother my mother always amuse me. A few years ago she was very put out because the bagger at the grocery store insisted on carrying her bags to her apartment down the street. Mom does not consider herself to be frail. She still does her “fast walk” every morning (or thinks she does) and thinks she’s in good shape. She’s one of the few residents who doesn’t use a walker. And considering how her body pretty much ignores the pneumonia virus, I have to agree.

You should never call my mother elderly. Medical records all label her as a “frail  and elderly woman.” This is not OK with her and she has told her primary care physician this. She will never be elderly. In her mind the elderly are centenarians drooling in their wheelchairs. She’s too vibrant to be elderly.

She’s also very tired of hearing “good job” when she’s at doctor’s appointments or swallowing her pills. It makes her feel like she’s a dog hearing “good dog.”

She is sometimes worried about what others think about her. She’s a little concerned that the staff at her home are tired of waking her up all the time. All the other residents sleep in their chairs but she feels like she should be up and doing something. For Christmas she asked for a sweatshirt with a kitten on it so she’d look more like the other women at the home. But she’s no longer concerned about having everything she wears clean and pressed. And she’s given up on lipstick. But she still puts perfume in her hair.

There have been several times when she has insisted that the jeans she has on aren’t hers. She doesn’t remember buying them so thinks they are either mine or my sister’s. She’s a size 4 petite and my sister and I are both quite a bit larger. Twice now she’s given a pair back to staff who have just washed them. They give them to me and I put them back in her closet.

I’ve heard that it’s fairly common for someone with dementia to think someone has broken in and put new clothes in their drawers. She just thinks people have left their toothbrushes in her bathroom. I think I’d feel violated if someone left their toothbrush in my bathroom and I’d immediately throw it away. Not Mom. It doesn’t seem to bother her at all. She just wonders where her own toothbrush is. My niece just labeled her brushes so we’ll see if that helps.

My sister told me that during her last visit with Mom, she told Mom the same story three times and Mom laughed each time. I love that. Mom’s a much better audience than she used to be.

Update 8/16/2010: I visited Mom today and got the clue I needed to understand Mom’s comment about the teddy bears’ mother dying. It was a resident who had hundreds of Beanie Babies and bears in her room who died. I understand why Mom thought of her when she saw her own stuffed bears.

Songs

“Come Home Soon” by SHeDaisy is getting temporarily deleted from my iPod—too much emotional longing. “Another Sleepless Night” by Anne Murray is also getting dumped, but for a slightly different reason—too much sexual longing. (It might be back on about 2 days before he returns.) I will also have to purge all the country songs about waiting for your trucker or cowboy to come home.

Certain blogs and podcasts

While taking my daily walk  and listening to Stuff Mom Never Told You the hosts spoke about 10 Reasons Why Long-distance Relationships Just Don’t Work. As if there aren’t enough reasons why our relationship might struggle, I’ll need to worry about these new ten while we’re spending another year apart?

This one I decided to just tackle head on.

10. Communication breakdown

I am not worried about that one. HabMoo would implode if he couldn’t talk to me. At least that’s what I like to think. I figure he could easily find a hundred other women he’s attracted to and could have a good relationship with, but even if left me for another woman he’d probably call me every day to tell me how it was going. And I think the military does what it can to promote family communication with soldiers, sailors, and marines. I don’t anticipate being unable to communicate for long periods.

9. A murky future

It is hard to imagine me being 60 and him being 43, but I can still easily imagine us a dozen years from now living and working in Minnesota and talking walks with camera and binoculars. I know he wants to make the National Guard his career and he’ll always be some rank of sergeant. Who knows what I’ll do with my life in ten years, but it’ll probably be a surprise to me. In some ways he is my stability.

8. The monogamy challenge or ZIP code rule

I think we have a shared understanding of this rule. If either of us were jealous, worrying types there’s no way we could have made it to marriage. He was deployed with his ex-girlfriend; I had my old boyfriend come help me fix my A/C. Neither was a problem.

7.  Trust

If I didn’t trust him with my heart, we wouldn’t be together. It’s not that I don’t think he’ll ever hurt me, but it won’t be intentional. He’ll always consider my heart. He’ll care for it and worry about it. I know that when he’s not feeling close to me, he’ll let me know and we’ll talk about how to fix that. And when I tell him he’s irritating me, I trust that he knows that it’s a temporary thing and not a fatal issue. We’ve always been able to communicate honestly.

6. Cost of keeping in touch

The Army and the Post Office help with that a bit. We’re both tight wads, but we’re willing to pay for staying connected.

5. Time commitment

Writing letters takes more time and effort than does a chat while we’re eating supper. When he returned from Iraq last time I really missed getting letters and e-mails. I loved knowing that he had spent time thinking just about me as he wrote. I had his focused attention. Honestly, I prefer the unfocused attention of his hand on my thigh as we watch a movie, but there’s a special electric excitement that comes with opening the mailbox and discovering a letter from him. I expect far more e-mails and Facebook messages, but those letters will be the things I pack away in my nightstand.

4 through 2. Blah, blah, blah … not issues at all.

1.  Life goes on

This is where my fear kicks in. There’s no way I can share the experience of serving in a forward operating base or wherever he’ll be assigned. I need the independence of separate lives and separate friends, but all relationships are strengthened through shared experience. He’ll probably come home with a new set of friends I won’t really know. I’ll know their names and some of their habits, but I won’t know them as civilians. I’ll have to learn their first names. They’ll share jokes that I’ll need carefully explained. He’ll invite them over and I’ll feel like an outsider. But I’ll also get new insights into his personality and what his experience was like.

I guess I better exercise and walk to the my Arabic music. I can’t get overly sentimental about lyrics I can’t even understand. “Habibi, habibi, habibi.” (I think that means “darling.”)

After the winter’s training, three weeks sounded like nothing. He went off with friends to a cabin for the weekend before he left and neither of us really thought much about it. We’ve commented during nightly phone calls about how we’re doing just fine. But now it’s day 14 and we’re missing each other. Two weeks is what we can accept. Additional days are too many.

At two weeks I’m beginning to establish a new routine. By the end of week three I’ll have parts of it down and when he comes home he’ll mess it up. That’s a pretty minor conflict, but it’s an element of stress and there are more. When he returns we’ll both assume the other knows thoughts we’ve had in the previous days because we would have shared them it we’d been together. The refrigerator and cabinets will be rather empty because I quickly get out of the habit of stocking food for him. He will need to catch up on sleep when he returns and I’ll be used to staying up until I can’t keep my eyes open. The cats have been allowed to stay out all night and will make us pay for HabMoo insisting that they come in.

There are lots of small issues like these that slightly stress the marriage. Add to that the mental preparations we’re both making for his upcoming deployment and we could have a real issue. Not an easily defined one, however. I fully suspect that we’ll love the first couple of days he’s home and then things will feel slightly off. It’s important not to take those feeling too seriously, but to acknowledge them, nevertheless. I guess it’s good that we have experience hearing the other say “you’re kind of bugging me right now” and knowing that it’s a temporary state.

We need to come up with a few more homecoming routines to make transitions more comfortable. It seems almost silly to think that three weeks ‘f separation during which time we communicate nightly by phone and are both in the same state should need a ritual, but I think it does. I’m sure we’ll go out for sushi. We had our first sushi together when he was at some southern base waiting to go to Iraq in 2004. So we do have that ritual, but I think we need another. We need a project to complete together. Maybe we’ll tackle the last of the house painting I began in 2001 or just start over at the beginning. Or maybe we’ll just go hang out at Best Buy and Half-Price Books.

Illustration by Eloise Wilkin

It Was

When he came to tuck me in
And pat me on the head
He tried to guess (he always does)
Who was in my bed.

“Is it Sally?” he guessed first,
“Or her sister Joan?
It’s such a wriggling little girl
It couldn’t be my own.

“It can’t be Mary Ann,” he said,
“Or Deborah because
All their eyes are much too blue—
My goodness me, I think it’s you!”
And he was right. It was.

Dorothy Aldis

Illustration by Rosemary Buehrig

Miss T.

It’s a very odd thing—
As odd as can be—
That whatever Miss T. eats
Turns into Miss T.
Porridge and apples,
Mince, muffins and mutton,
Jam, junket, jumbles—
Not a rap, not a button
It matters; the moment
They’re out of her plate,
Though shared by Miss Butcher
And sour Mr. Bate;
Tiny and cheerful,
And neat as can be,
Whatever Miss T. eats
Turns into Miss T.

Walter de la Mare

As a child I wondered how poor cheerful Miss T. got stuck at a table with Miss Butcher and Mr. Bate and why they served her buttons. Was Miss T an orphan or was she eating with the servants? It was only as an adult that I wondered about junket and jumbles. Junket is a dessert made with sweetened milk and rennet and maybe some spices or rose water; jumbles are some sort of dense cookie.

I was fascinated by the illustrations for “The Raggedy Man” created by someone with the initials of J.S. I longed for such Wunks creatures to live under one of our pumps, but preferably not the one just outside the back door. I’ve always remember one of the other creatures mentioned in the poem as Squiggleme Squeezes, but they are actually Squidgicum-Squees.

This poem isn’t as well know as some of her others.

Alice’s Supper

Far down in the meadow the wheat grows green,
And the reapers are whetting their sickles so keen;
And this is the song that I hear them sing,
While cheery and loud their voices ring:
” ‘Tis the finest wheat that ever did grow!
And it is for Alice’s supper, ho! ho!

…

Downstairs in the kitchen the fire doth glow,
And Maggie kneading the soft white dough,
And this is the song that she’s singing today,
While merry and busy she’s working away:
” ‘Tis the finest dough by near or by far,
And it is for Alic’s supper, ha! ha!”
…

Laura E. Richards

My sister taught me how to sing the following poem. I have sung it to my husband, too. Apparently it has greater appeal to the young.

Antonio

Antonio, Antonio,
Was tired of living alonio.
He thought he would woo
Miss Lissamy Lu,
Miss Lissamy Lucy Molonio.

…

“On, nonio, Antonio!
You’re far too bleak and bonio!
And all that I wish,
You singular fish,
Is that you will quickly begonio.”

Antonio, Antonio,
He uttered a dismal moanio;
Then he ran off and hid
(Or I’m told that he did)
In the Antecatarctical Zonio.

Laura E. Richards

I’ve always wanted to insult someone by calling them a singular fish, but have never had the confidence to do so. I just don’t know if them are fightin’ words or not.

I apologize for not quoting the poems in their entireties, but I’m assuming that the Richard family still holds the copyrights. I also wish I could tell you who did the illustrations, but they weren’t recognized by the publisher.