Mom & Me Two Archive

...makes the most interesting and amusing connections now that she is a fair distance into the mental creativity to which we often refer as mental decline. The most interesting and amusing and useful are the connections her mind forges when she wants a cigarette but can't get past the "want" phase prior to acting on the desire.
    Since I'm trying, right now, to keep her on oxygen as much as possible without warping her into directionless frustration I try to pick up on the signs that at a particular time she critically needs nicotine or needs to revel in her generational identity connected to cigarettes. Now that I've removed all means of ignition from her immediate vicinity her mind has focused on containers and their contents. I discovered this a few nights ago. Late in the evening she began rummaging through the items on the coffee table next to her rocking chair. Since this doesn't always mean she's looking for cigarettes I waited for a few more clues about her destination. She picked up a box of band aids, opened it, took out a band aid and scrutinized it.
    "Did you cut yourself?" I asked.
    "No."
    "Do you need a band aid?"
    She looked at me as though I'd lost my mind. "I must," she said.
    I decided to leave her to her own devices. She held the band aid between her index and middle finger of her right hand, just as she does cigarettes. It was then that I understood what she was looking for but decided to see what she was going to do with the band aid since she had no way of lighting it. After some seconds she removed the protective paper from the band aid, ripped off the flaps protecting the adhesive and fastened the band aid meticulously to the top of the TV table that holds her immediately necessary items. She sat back, examined her work, determined that one band aid didn't satisfy whatever craving she was misinterpreting, reached for the box, took out another and proceeded to fasten that one to the top of the table exactly parallel to the first.
    At this point I decided to stop her confusion. "Why are you doing that, Mom?"
    Again, I received her, "What's the matter with you, isn't you're brain functioning?" look. "Because I want to," she stated, just this side of defiant.
    "Mom, I think maybe you want a cigarette."
    She looked at the band aids stuck to the top of the table, considered the third she was holding between her index and middle fingers, looked at me and said, "What makes you say that?"
    "Well," I explained, "what you're doing right now may be fun, but it doesn't make an awful lot of sense and you usually like to make sense."
    "I suppose you're right," she said.
    I took her off the oxygen, turned the fan on her to disperse oxygen build up and handed her an ashtray, three cigarettes (three usually satisfies her) and a lighter I retrieved from a high cupboard in the kitchen. "Here, Mom, I think this will preserve our supply of band aids."
    "I suppose you're right," she repeated.
    Some time later, after cigarettes and a lively discussion between us about something she was watching on Animal Planet, she noticed the band aids on her TV table top. "Did you see these?" she asked.
    "Yes, Mom," I said. "You put them there."
    "Why did I do that?"
    "Well, although I can't read your mind I think you put them there because you wanted cigarettes, you were looking for them and the band aid box was the closest container to you so you 'did something' with the contents of the container."
    Once again, I got that look that told me sure was sure I'd lost my mind. "You think so," she said.
    "I could be wrong," I conceded.
    "We may never know," she said.
    Last night in the middle of an interview with Barbra Streisand we were watching on Inside the Actor's Studio she repeated her rummaging behavior. This time I understood the signal but wanted to see to what container she was going to turn her focus and what she was going to do with the contents. She found her sunglasses case, picked it up, studied it for an opening, unzipped it, examined the contents, removed her sunglasses and switched her "indoor" glasses with her tinted ones. She settled back in the chair, satisfied for the moment. When she began to rummage again I went into action.
    The room had only minimal light, as she prefers to watch TV in the evening with as little peripheral light as necessary. "Mom," I asked, "are your eyes bothering you?"
    "A little," she said. "I can't see the TV very well."
    "I think that might be because you put your sunglasses on. I was wondering if you put them on because your eyes were bothering you."
    "I must have."
    Although I was almost sure that the problem was that she had wanted a cigarette and was again focusing on the step where one finds the container and does something with the contents, just in case I was wrong I decided I'd better make sure that the problem wasn't really her eyes. I suggested that we try an "experiment". "Why don't we switch your glasses back and forth right now, so we can decide whether you're having a problem with your eyes?"
    "Good idea."
    She performed the switch a couple of times and concluded, "I can see better with these glasses," indicating her "indoor" pair.
    "You know what, Mom," I said, "I think you want a cigarette."
    "What makes you say that?"
    I explained how, now that she no longer has firebug materials at her disposal (and added, thank god she didn't so she couldn't accidentally set the house on fire) she is apparently focusing on the container aspect of cigarette packs when she's wanting one but is too distracted to determine the object of her desire.
    "That doesn't make much sense," she said.
    "Actually, it does. I think that at certain times your desire for cigarettes is so deep tha, when they aren't handy you manage the desire by following the path toward satisfaction rather than focusing on the end product that will satisfy that desire."
    "You certainly do a lot of thinking, don't you." She did not say this in a complementary manner.
    I laughed. "That's the world's complaint about me, Mom! May I remind you, since you made me and people's intellectual capabilities come to them through their mother's gene pool, it's your fault!"
    She laughed. "Well, may I please have a cigarette?"
    "Sure," I said, and performed the usual ritual surrounding her smoking.
    During the next commercial I, once again, apologized to her for the indignity with which I've found it necessary to saddle her of having to ration her cigarettes. "Mom, I know you'd like to smoke whenever you want and I know it offends you that I'm rationing your cigarettes but I'm in a difficult position here. I know you're not going to quit smoking. I'm not asking you to. But you need more oxygen right now than you were getting before. I don't know that this will continue for the rest of your life but I do know that the oxygen is as important to you physically as the cigarettes are to you emotionally so I'm trying to strike a compromise."
    "I know," she said.
    "It's not easy," I said.
    "I know, it's not easy on me."
    "Do you think there's another way we could handle this?"
    "You could let me smoke whenever I want."
    "You'd be smoking all the time, then, Mom, and we'd probably end up right back where we were before the blood transfusion."
    "What blood transfusion?" she asked, startled.
    I muted the TV and recited her recent history for her, as I find myself doing every couple of days.
    "I don't think I needed the blood transfusion," she said, when I was through.
    "I know," I said. "You told me that in the hospital. And, you know, I try to follow your wishes when it comes to medical treatments. This time, though, I had to agree with the doctors because I know how long you want to live and I'm bound to honor that above everything else. Do you trust me to do what's right by you medically?"
    "Oh, yes," she said. "I know you're doing right by me. If you weren't here I'd have doctors crawling all over me."
    She's right about that. "Well then, trust me on this issue. Right now, you need more oxygen than you were previously getting."
    "I know," she said. "I just wish I could smoke while I was on oxygen."
    "So do I," I said, "believe me, so do I. Then, I wouldn't have to monitor you so closely. One day, Champa, [reference to Little Buddha, which we watch enough so that she knows the reference] this may be possible, but not now."
    "I've been meaning to talk to you about that," she said, grinning.
    "And I've been meaning to talk to the medical-scientific establishment about that," I said.
    We both chuckled and turned our attention back to the program.
    Time to get Mom up. We've got the oxygen guy coming this afternoon. I'm using this as an excuse to readjust her waking up time.
    Later.