Mom & Me Two Archive

    A couple of weeks ago we ran out of instant decaf coffee, which is what Mom drinks. Typically, I buy the mega-size of decaf instant coffee crystals that Costco sells. At some point before we emptied our last jar, Costco decided to no longer offer any brand of instant decaf. A little less than a month ago, because we were entertaining company who drink only decaf, I bought a bag of premium decaf coffee beans (a Costco house brand packaged by Starbucks) in order to serve our visitors tasty decaf coffee. When Mom's instant ran out I decided to use the decaf beans to make Mom's coffee. Those of you who know my mother know that what my mother calls coffee is little more than water colored with a few instant decaf crystals to look like, well, sort of like coffee, depending on how many times throughout a day she's watered down the dregs of her last cup and reheated it. Toward the end of the day it looks more like dishwater. I was very careful to make sure that I continued to make coffee as weak as that which Mom prefers to drink, using an amount of freshly ground coffee beans that, for the normal person, would be considered equal to the amount that might accidentally spill out of the grinder when filling a coffee filter.
    At the same time Mom's celebrated daily bowel movements became daily fecal accidents. I've established a protocol for taking care of fecal accidents so that clean up disrupts whatever routine we've established for the day by only about a half hour. One accident over a period of a couple of weeks doesn't shift me into "Why is this happening?" gear. But when she was experiencing accident after accident day after day, my concern and my strategy for figuring out why this was happening became tightly focused. I plundered her food intake; her liquid intake; her medicine intake; her movement quotient; changed this and that; added lots of binding foods, primarily solid and semi-solid dairy, all of which Mom loves, to her diet. The only action I didn't take was to give her OTC stuff on the order of Imodium AD. Her overall health and energy level remained good and slowly improving. Nothing I did, though, seemed to solve the problem.
    Finally, late last week on a serendipitous hunch I decided to pay the exorbitant cost for a tiny jar of instant decaf at the "regular" grocery to see if it might be the decaf beans that were causing the problem. The day we switched back to instant decaf was the day her fecal accidents stopped and her daily, normal, easily anticipated bowel movements continued. I mention this because, apparently, it isn't the caffeine in coffee that stimulates the bowels. It's something else, maybe to acids or oils, whatever remains in a decaf coffee bean but is eliminated during the process of turning coffee into instant decaf coffee.
    Since Mom drinks coffee for the idea rather than for the flavor she noticed no difference during the switches but did notice that she's stopped having bowel accidents. I explained everything to her and her comment was, "Please don't serve me 'good' coffee, again."
    In the little time I have left before I rouse her and we spend part of the day looking for a variety of plant foods for our roses and fruit trees, let me see how many of the "reminders" I left for myself in the last posting I can cover.

1. Regarding my mother's last PT appointment: She got a workout, so much so that over the weekend her back bothered her more than usual and she "slept it off". At the end of the session the PT mentioned that Mom is a "piece of cake" with which to work, unlike many of her other clients. I couldn't help but ask what it is that 'makes' someone hard to work with.
       "Many people aren't good at being intimate with themselves," she replied. She went on to explain that in order to receive maximum benefit from physical therapy a person needs to be able to sense and communicate what is going on inside themselves on a physical level: To be able, for instance, to pinpoint sources of pain and pleasure; to be able to instinctively follow a twinge to its source, etc. They must also be able to communicate their personal physical perceptions to the therapist, either verbally or in some other manner. My mother is quite good at all of this, including communicating non-verbally to the therapist what her body is experiencing through her body movements and reactions. According to the therapist she has a highly developed and useful sense of her physical self. "Your mother is amazing," she said.
       I have always thought my mother's physical sense was exactly the opposite. I should have known better. Reviewing what I know of my mother, I understand that the therapist is right. My lifelong sense that my mother is not a particularly physically focused being has been in error. She is very aware of her body, its state at any particular time and is capable of communicating this to others if she considers it necessary. Otherwise, this information is for my mother, alone. I think most of the time she doesn't because as long as she senses that she is okay she considers her sense of her physicality a private matter. She will divulge what she knows to health professionals and to me when I'm doing the "doctoring". I've learned without realizing it that when I need her physical feedback I must approach her as a healer would; a formalized approach. I didn't realize I was doing this until the PT explained her perception of my mother's awareness of her physicality to me.
       I have always known that my sisters and I are very aware of our bodies and use this awareness on ourselves daily. I've never thought much about it but I have I assumed we got this from my father's side of the family. My evidence has been that it was my father who talked about how to use one's body to successfully negotiate tasks. My most striking piece of evidence, which I consciously recall every time I'm behind the wheel, is that when my father taught me to drive he highlighted driving by "the seat of [my] pants": Feeling what the car is doing through every part of me that is in direct contact with the car including hands, feet an, most especially my ass. His driving philosophy was that one does not drive a car, one "corrects" it. The only way one can do this quickly and successfully is to rely on one's body to read the car. This technique develops into a habit that works much more quickly than thinking on the level of which we are typically conscious about what the car is doing. Although it is this technique that causes anyone's driving skills to become automatic, if one is aware of one's sources of information from the very beginning one allows these cues to develop more quickly and one's ability to be an aware driver soars above the average.
       Now that I think about it though, I realize that my mother also taught us physical sense, mostly through silent example. She has always been able to instantaneously physically relax. My mother has always trusted her body to be able to do whatever she needs it to do. Her personal record of lack of injury or chronic illness is a tribute to her ability to "know" physically who she is and what she needs to do to maintain her preferred level of functioning. While it is true that at this point in her life she is more likely to overestimate her abilities based on past experience (the kink that caused her to injure her back), her physical awareness, her ability to "be intimate with [herself]" is still standing her in excellent stead. Without realizing it I've counted on her sense of her physical self to guide me in figuring out what she needs to help her heal and what isn't going to work for her.
       As well, continuing historical rumination, I realize that, for instance, our family's habit of long evening walks throughout my childhood, which became famous in our neighborhood because, as our neighbors reported to us, on our extended, every-three-year off-island vacations our family dog would take these walks alone every evening, contributed to the development of this nascent inherited ability.
       My sisters and I are very lucky to have been produced by biological parents who, despite any other problems they may have, were and are always able to factor in their physical sense of themselves with a high degree of accuracy. We also, of course, are able to ignore this information if it's troublesome and we don't want to deal with it at a particular time but we are always aware of what we're ignoring. I think this is also what causes all of us to be more than a little circumspect about the abilities of any individual professional healer to help us correct a physical problem.
       In final support of this familial ability, yesterday at my acupuncture appointment (last week, this week and next week the recipient of treatment has been, is and will be me) the acupuncturist was surprised that in a week I had been able to "clear" a couple of issues with debilitating physical manifestations that typically take more than one session for a client to clear. When she expressed her surprise I said, "I really worked on it, gave it a lot of thought." I did, but I wasn't aware of how much work I'd been doing through the previous week until she mentioned the results. When we began work on a few other issues in order to "rocket" me into "the next phase of [my] life" she mentioned, "I love working with you on this level." I responded that I loved working with her, too, because I've found, throughout my life, that non-alternative physicians are very hard for me to work with simply because they don't address my ability to heal on the same level that I address it within myself. Her type of healing help works for me. Courtesy of Mom's PT, I now know why.

    Time to wake up The Mom and start our collaborative day.
    Later.